He’s Muslim, he’s cool, and he’s not taking the rap
Maryam Ismail
Last Updated: June 27. 2009 8:35PM UAE / June 27. 2009 4:35PM GMT
If you are Muslim in America today, even after Barack Obama’s Cairo speech (and I’m still out on the balcony on that one: it was so full of deadpan comments that I had to withhold my applause), times are tough. I hope he is being honest and trying to make everything better with his new beginning. I also hope he was watching TV in the White House last Tuesday night to see the real deal of what it means to be a Muslim in the US.
The documentary New Muslim Cool examined, in part, how Muslims are faring in the new post-9/11 America – caught between the images of al Qa’eda and the peace and promise of Islam, straddling the blurred line that appears when Americans become Muslims and find themselves treated as strangers in their own land when they aren’t strangers and they aren’t going anywhere.
The documentary focused on Hamza (born Jason) Perez, a Puerto Rican-American rapper who pulled himself out of drug dealing and street life 12 years ago and converted to Islam. His ascent to goodness mirrors that of one of American’s most famous Muslims, Malcolm X, whose disreputable life landed him in jail and the road to salvation in Islam. Hamza is lucky: 40 years ago, being a Muslim in America was even more scary than it is now. When Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam for orthodox Islam, he was assassinated. When Jason Perez became Hamza, his mother breathed a sigh of relief. Islam saved his life.
Jason was a gangster, out on the corner, selling drugs, under constant threat. After becoming Muslim, he and his brother Suliman formed the Muslim hip-hop group M-Team. This, according to Hamza, was a way of creating a New Muslim culture; one that embraces the good that America has and leaves behind that which has no benefit to him as a Muslim. “I think Muslims in America need to grab on to traditional Islam and use wisdom on how to package it in the US,” he says.
Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, who wrote, directed and produced New Muslim Cool, helped Hamza to package Islam in a new form. Her focus on Hamza’s venture into the world of hip-hop fits in with the new US agenda to show Islam through the arts. It’s a kind of baby-aspirin approach to address the ignorance about who Muslims are and how they live their lives. “We are just humans, not aliens. Not curry-eating aliens,” Hamza laughs at how many non-Muslim Americans perceive their fellow citizens.
But despite all the efforts, the predictable still happens. Hamza is more fortunate than the many who, after accepting Islam, suddenly find themselves alone without family or friends to support them. First, his family accepted his conversion, and then he had a load of new Muslim friends. With his brother and a group of 50 others who had all embraced Islam, Hamza left Massachusetts for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to create a new Muslim community. It is at this point in the documentary that we see how being a Muslim in America is not so cool. He and his group are informed by the local drug dealers that the FBI has set up a surveillance camera to watch them, and federal agents raid their mosque. Here we go again.
The US government’s efforts to identify potential terrorists have created an exodus of American Muslims (like me) as far away from our homeland as we can get, just to be free from the daily drama, suspicion and bizarre behaviour of Homeland Security.
On my last trip home I found my former Muslim community in New Jersey devastated: most of them gone, Muslim-owned businesses gone, the mosque empty. I also found something curious. There were spies. Some were ludicrous Muslim impersonators, some just former followers who spent most of their spare time around the mosque – asking questions, offering children chocolate and people lifts. There were also the mystery shoppers in the few Muslim-owned businesses that remained. One woman used to come in on Saturdays or Sundays dressed in T-shirt and shorts, rambling on about how she loved to wear a hijab to work. I guess she took a break on weekends. It was both funny and weird.
I thought the smoke had cleared and people were starting to understand more about Muslims, and in some ways this is true. But it doesn’t mean everywhere is safe. It all reminds me of the book by W E B Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, in which he observes: “Between me and the other world there is always a question – unasked by some through feelings of delicacy, by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All nevertheless flutter around it. They approach me in a half hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately and then instead of saying it directly, ‘How does it feel to be a problem?’, they say, ‘I know an excellent coloured man in my town’.”
These days it’s not coloured, it’s Muslim. Hamza Perez just lets these comments slide by. On his Facebook page he is the portrait of suave: debonair in his coffee brown fedora with his collar turned up, confidently describing how he “takes the good of American culture without compromising Islam”. Hamza Perez – rapper, Puerto Rican, American, the New Muslim Cool.
Maryam Ismail is a sociologist who divides her time between the UAE and the US
http://www.thenation al.ae/article/200906 28/OPINION/706279900 /1080
