(Transcript) Ep 3: Muslim Cool
Ep 3: Muslim Cool
Rep – Episode 3
Noor:
3, 2, 1. The year is 2007 and I've just turned 14. An artist named Lupe Fiasco just dropped his second album, The Cool. I'm living in a small to town in Southern Maryland where I take the bus to school. My best friend, Hannah, and I are the first to get picked up and on our bus ride, we listen to a lot of music. She puts me onto Lupe's hit, Superstar.
[singing]
Noor:
And I feel this in my bones. I rush home and look into all of his music. And during my deep dive, I come across a song from his previous album called Hurt Me Soul. He opens the song with...
Lupe Fiasco:
Astagfirullah.
Noor:
“Astagfirullah,” a Muslim phrase for seeking forgiveness from God. And right then, for the first time in my life, a piece of pop culture makes me feel cool for being Muslim.
Noor:
Later that year, my family moves out of our very small town of La Plata to Prince George's County, Maryland. I experience culture shock. I didn't grow up around Muslim kids outside of my family, but Prince George's County is full of them. I attend a private Islamic school in College Park where I meet my first Muslim friend, Khadija.
Khadija:
I remember when I first met you that we came from very, very different worlds, me coming from like PG County, Maryland, going to Islamic school and being really exposed to only Islam and blackness. And I remember you coming from La Plata and how different that was from my upbringing.
Noor:
I remember you making fun of my country accent.
Khadija:
You did have a little bit of an accent, even the way that your mouth moved was very different. Yeah. I just imagined your life is like a book that I had read. I remember us sending each other music a lot of the time.
Noor:
For a lot of Muslim American kids, music is how we connect with each other. And specifically, older hip hop often becomes an entry point for pride and further exploration of our faith. But I didn't fully understand the context of why until I went on the journey of this next chapter.
Noor:
At Your Service and iHeart Media present Rep. Chapter Three: Muslim Cool.
Noor:
While I was trying to figure out the theme music for Rep, I reached out to the rapper, Brother Ali. And while he wasn't able to write and record a track for the show, he highly recommended I speak with another artist.
Brother Ali:
It's Maimouna Youssef, Mumu Fresh, who is really highly respected regarded artist, singer. She's also from DMV area.
Noor:
One morning in LA, I woke up feeling overwhelmed. I've been listening to a lot of new music during this process and I felt compelled to check Mumu Fresh's NPR, Tiny Desk.
Mumu Fresh:
(singing).
Noor:
Her opening song was so moving. I couldn't even listen to the rest of the performance for days. I sent her DM on Instagram. Here's the short version. Maimouna, my body shook in reaction to your performance. I meditated to Ink Pata and had major breakthroughs about the new investigative series I'm working on. It would be such a pleasure and a privilege to collaborate. She responded in kind. Here's the short version.
Maimouna Youssef:
Wow, that fills my heart up. That is the greatest gift that art can give us. So before I went on stage that day at the Tiny Desk, I went to the back and laid on the floor with my face down in submission. And I asked Allah to use me completely as a vessel for vibrational change on the planet to help me heal someone as I heal myself. So yes. Whenever you're ready, call me.
Noor:
And now I'd like to introduce you to our first storyteller, Maimouna Youssef, also known as Mumu Fresh.
Maimouna Youssef:
Long before I realized that singing for the world was something people did for a living, I just would sing to myself in the living room at the piano or at my grandmother's house. So the song that is on my heart, just a cleansing frequency is...
Maimouna Youssef:
(singing)
Maimouna Youssef:
Holy high name, we pray, knowing it is done in all languages. We thank you knowing that it's already done. I mean, may the way be open.
Maimouna Youssef:
Okay. What are we talking about today?
Maimouna Youssef:
When people ask me, how did I learn to sing? I learned to sing sitting in my grandmother's living room when she would be at the piano singing songs like Never Walk Alone Again. They were songs of faith and gratitude for the triumphant journey for all that she had struggled through, all that she had seen growing up as a shared cropper in Mississippi as a chalk talk girl with no rights her land anymore. I would sit in my mother's kitchen and cook Three Sisters Soup and fried bread and cornbread. And we would sing together songs like The Old Ship of Zion, Get on Board, freedom songs. We would sing traditional songs in Lakota and Tuscarora. And sometimes we would just moan. It wouldn't have words at all, just...
Maimouna Youssef:
(singing)
Maimouna Youssef:
And someone else would join in and you didn't have to know the song. It was being created in the moment.
Noor:
To be able to create a song in the moment is a different level of communication, a communication of souls. For Maimouna and her family...
Maimouna Youssef:
Music was life. It's how we communicate with each other. It's how we love on each other. When we sing [halahs 00:08:35], traditional songs.
Maimouna Youssef:
(singing).
Maimouna Youssef:
It's a joyful noise. It's not always lyrics, but it's a expression is a space in the heart that is unleashed and let free. It runs wild.
Maimouna Youssef:
(singing)
Noor:
The freedom was limited though by the laws and convention of the day, what we refer to as the race codes of Jim Crow.
Maimouna Youssef:
My family, like most families, left the South during the great migration to get away from the Ku Klux Klan. There were a lot of stories that were so horrendous, you'd never speak about them again. But they were present in the music. It was there in the moan. You could hear it in the tone and the texture and the weeping.
Noor:
The song is what allowed spirits to transcend the ugly, racist realities they had to exist in and often beneath.
Maimouna Youssef:
Jay-Z has a song that says, "I can't see it pouring down my eyes, so I got to make the song cry." And that's my generation. But it's the same thing where I would never see my grandmother cry, but when she would moan in song, it was sad and it was beautiful and it was peaceful. It was pure.
Maimouna Youssef:
Being Indian was illegal in America, in most places in America, outside the res. And so imagine being illegal, being a crime until the '70s. I am because she was and she is. She still is. She transitioned, but she still is because energy never dies. And so I can never speak about my own journey without paying homage to the matriarchs in my family that fought so hard to survive so that I could be here to have this conversation with you.
Noor:
Maimouna inspired my own breakthroughs because her music and poetry are her own breakthroughs. Her knowledge of self extends beyond just her and gives context to her history and the way she shows up in the world.
Maimouna Youssef:
I have a poem that says, I am the daughter of freedom fighters and farmers and bootleggers and number runners, copper color like clay swag, cooler than Indian summers.
Noor:
That poem is in my favorite song of yours.
Maimouna Youssef:
It is. [inaudible 00:11:06] I told you that I had been waiting for that piece to come. I knew I wanted a piece to explain who I was because it was always so hard for me to explain it to people. I had been on tour working with a tour manager for years. And one time we took a trip, just he and I, to meet up with the band. And he said, "I never asked you about yourself. Who are you really?" And after about an hour, he says, "Wow, I never knew you. You are a whole different person than I thought you were." I said, "Well, you never asked."
Noor:
To me, Maimouna is a perfect example of the story of America.
Maimouna Youssef:
Black, Muslim, Mississippi Choctaw and Creek, but raised in Baltimore so my vernacular is from the streets. We move carefully.
Noor:
Black, Muslim, Choctaw and Creek, people who have been deeply misunderstood and misrepresented in the United States. Their stories are too often left out of our history books, which means we lack a proper context to know and understand all of us who make up this country. We are a nation of united stories.
Su'ad Abdul Khabeer:
My name is Su'ad Abdul Khabeer. I guess Dr. Su'ad is cool.
Noor:
Dr. Su'ad has a whole framework of thought and aesthetics called Muslim Cool. Her work speaks to the intersections of race, religion, and hip hop in the US.
Su'ad Abdul Khabeer:
I grew up, I'm from hip hop generation. So the idea of Muslims doing hip hop was very common to me.
Noor:
When is Muslim Cool born?
Su'ad Abdul Khabeer:
Muslim Cool is something that is a contemporary iteration of a longer history. And I think fundamental to Muslim Cool and the way that I think about it is this idea of the loop. And I take the loop from hip hop sampling techniques and this idea of black Islam. And by that, I mean the ways in which black people have practiced Islam in the Americas and particularly in North America really shape black communities, really shape the people who began hip hop.
Su'ad Abdul Khabeer:
And then because of that, in hip hop music and culture, you find all these references to relationships to sort of black Muslims. And that then becomes a resource for 21st century young Muslims of a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds to sort of find their own knowledge of self because knowledge of self is basically the argument or they argue what black Islam gave hip hop. So they discover their own knowledge of self as Muslims through blackness and Islam. So it creates this loop. And the loop is important also because the loop in hiphop is both this idea of a sampling technique where you take a short piece of music, you loop it to create new music. But also because of the cipher, which is also really important in hip hop. And the cipher is a circle.
Noor:
In a cipher, people physically make up the circle. The gathering usually includes rappers, beat boxers and/or break dancers. The group freestyles a musical moment, each person in the circle adding to the performance of the last.
Su'ad Abdul Khabeer:
It's not a closure. It's a place where things can generate. It's a place where things develop. And so this is why the loop is really important. All that kind of came to me in terms of my work because of I did the work. So I define Muslim Cool as a way of being in the world, as a way of thinking that is forged at the intersection of blackness, Islam and hip hop.
Noor:
Dr. Su'ad's concept of Muslim Cool explains why so many American Muslims explore their own knowledge of self through hip hop as a shared language. But what are the roots of this intersection? Zaheer Ali, the oral historian who guided us through the practice of story listening, takes us there.
Noor:
Can you speak to the role in relationship of blues, jazz, hip hop, and the spread of Islam in America?
Zaheer Ali:
Sylviane Diouf, who wrote this book called Servants of Allah, she has done a lot on the impact of enslaved Muslims on American culture: on food, on practices of charity and also music. And she's juxtaposed the style of Arabic recitation with the working field songs. And it's one of the origins of the blues.
Zaheer Ali:
For people who've ever heard Arabic recitation, there are a lot of elongated vowels, and the sounds often originate deep in the throat, and there's a sustain, a holding of the note.
Zaheer Ali:
There's a "mmm," there's an elongation of the sound. And then, you juxtapose that to what were work songs that developed during slavery. And after slavery, that vocal style that then found its way into the blues, in the moans and the way vowels are held, and the breathing, the sound originating from deep inside the body. That is not a coincidence.
Zaheer Ali:
Moving forward, in the 20th century, there were a number of jazz artists who were attracted to Islam. For many Black Christians, they looked over and saw white Christians burning crosses. They saw white Christians participating in racist practices. And so, the message of universality of brotherhood and sisterhood of Christianity just didn't seem to penetrate white supremacy in America.
Zaheer Ali:
Dizzy Gillespie, famous jazz artist, talked about members of his band who were Muslim. And when they toured in the South, the ones who were Muslim were not subject to Jim Crow. They were seen as no longer Black American. It's very similar to the system of apartheid in South Africa, where if you were African-American and traveled to South Africa, you weren't subject to apartheid.
Zaheer Ali:
And so, the segregation in America was an apartheid system that was designed to target specifically African-American or Black Americans. Because there are these cases of African dignitaries who are not subject to Jim Crow because they're not American.
Zaheer Ali:
When these jazz artists and others became Muslim, and took on Arabic names, and sometimes began dressing differently, they exited the racial caste system of America, right? Because there was no place in the racial caste system for a person who might have looked Black American, but was now named Ahmed Jamal. What it does is it exposes the logic of racism, that it was a form of domesticating people.
Zaheer Ali:
And if you were Muslim, you were not domesticated. Right? And so, that's why you have, out of the tradition of African-American Islam, such a space for the kinds of voices that emerge, like a Malcolm X, like a Muhammad Ali. Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad used to say "the so-called American Negro," right?
Noor:
Yeah.
Zaheer Ali:
Like, "That's what you made. That's what you called. But that's not who we are." And so, the revival of Islam in the African-American community in the 20th century very much coincides or facilitates a kind of self-determination that we are going to define who we are, that we are going to say who we are. We're not going to use your story. We are not part of that story. We're writing our own.
Su'ad Abdul Khabeer:
Okay, storytelling. Storytelling probably began for me when I was about five or six years old. We, as a family, would go to the Islamic Center every Sunday without fail. And there was a family, and their last name was [Kareem 00:20:35], and there was a son who was about my age who was also my boyfriend, and they were moving to Africa for a whole year.
Su'ad Abdul Khabeer:
And I was absolutely mortified because my sister Gamilah and I at home would watch the Tarzan movies on Saturdays. And to me, Africa was a very scary place. I remember going to my mother saying, "Mommy, mommy, the Kareems, they're going to Africa." And she said, "Isn't that wonderful?" And I was like, "No." It was frightening.
Su'ad Abdul Khabeer:
So, it was around that time that [Sheik Ahmed Tawfik 00:21:20] started coming to our house, and he would teach us Arabic. He would teach us about the significant contributions that women made to the world, the significant contributions that Africa and the diaspora, as we learned to be first-world nations, made to the world, and the significant contributions that Islam made to the world.
Su'ad Abdul Khabeer:
And so, my mother wanted to make sure that our foundation was solid, and that our identity was intact, and that we did not rely on others to determine our self worth. Today, I have to say, I'm super, super grateful for her. She was inspired by her husband Malcolm X.
Noor:
Meet Ilyasah Shabazz, an author, educator, and the daughter of Betty Shabazz and Malcolm X.
Noor:
You have so much tenderness for the child version of yourself. But also, it's interesting to know, even growing up in a Shabazz household, and being surrounded by so much pride and love for who you are, as a child you are still susceptible media representations.
Su'ad Abdul Khabeer:
That's right. It just goes to underscore systemic racism, and the necessity for parents, adults, to ensure that our children are being properly nurtured. I think that in order for people to love others, you have to know what it is to be loved.
Noor:
There's an Indigenous philosophy called the seventh generation principle, that the decisions we make today should work for the seven generations that come after us. It reminds me of the power of our matriarchs, what the women who came before us did for us.
Su'ad Abdul Khabeer:
I was born in Baltimore, but truly I was born in my mother's house, and I grew up in my mother's house, because my mother is a sovereign nation unto herself. She's a country and we are her citizens.
Su'ad Abdul Khabeer:
My grandmother had a dream to name my mother Nata'aska, and she didn't know what that name meant. Later on, my mother would learn that it was a Hopi name for Kachina. That is a warrior, and guards of villages scares children if they do the wrong thing, or it keeps out predators, and my mom is absolutely that person. It set her on a certain path, because imagine growing up in Mississippi and in Chicago in the '40s, and you don't have a Christian name. Not only do not have a Christian name, you have a name they've never heard of before. And just how it's awakened something in her, this authority that, yes, I'm different, and I have to lean into that as opposed to running from it.
Noor:
One of the first questions I ask people when I meet them is, what is the story behind your name? I believe our names are our companions. One of the world's most iconic names is a reclaimed name, Malcolm X. Formally Malcolm Little, later known as Malik el-Shabazz. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley. What was your experience when you first read the book as a teen, like so many other American Muslim teenagers do?
Su'ad Abdul Khabeer:
Wow. First of all, we have the books. I'll say, this book in particular was a very big, hardcover, probably one of the original books. And in it was a photograph of my father, and it was his mugshot. And I used to think that this was the person who killed daddy. And so, we were like "Bad, bad," and we turned the pages.
Su'ad Abdul Khabeer:
But we didn't know about daddy the icon. We just knew about our father, his values. We had his butterfly collection that was in glass and mahogany wood. We would read our father's poetry to my mother. So, we knew about daddy, the compassionate, loving man who had a great sense of humor. He had these really big shoes, and big coat and so forth, and briefcase, and lots of books and papers.
Noor:
Ilyasah was two years old when her father was assassinated. She spent her life exploring and expanding the legacy of Malcolm X, as both the icon and the man she called daddy.
Su'ad Abdul Khabeer:
And I went to college when I was 16, and my mother didn't teach us about the icon, because teaching us about the icon meant you had to introduce racism, hatred, all of these harsh things that she shielded us. Right? And so, when I went to college, I learned about the icon, Malcolm X.
Su'ad Abdul Khabeer:
I took this course, The Life and Times of Malcolm X, and my professor was George Roberts. And I just remember reading it and feeling so emotional, and emotionally connected to the book. It was like my Quran. It was like my Bible.
Su'ad Abdul Khabeer:
When I went to college, there were people that would literally chase me on campus and ask me, am I Malcolm X's daughter. And what I discovered is that most people, let alone my peers, were misinformed about who Malcolm X was. They thought that he was this fire-breathing person, everything that he wasn't, right?
Su'ad Abdul Khabeer:
And so here I was, love, peace, joy balance, and it wasn't who they thought their hero was, that I should be more animated, that I should just be something that I wasn't. And it was difficult for me. And as I got older, I remember calling my older sister, Attallah, and of course her saying, "You don't have to pass a test to be Malcolm X's daughter. You already are."
Brother Ali:
I read the autobiography of Malcolm X because KRS-One told me I should read it when I was 13 years old. And I'm reading it, and I'm like, "Whatever Malcolm is, that's what I wish I could be. But I don't know if I'm allowed to be that or not."
Noor:
Meet Brother Ali, the artist who put me on to Maimouna Youssef, Mumu Fresh. He's an emcee on his own journey with race and identity.
Brother Ali:
I think I first identified as an albino. That was the first time that I ever understood that I had an identity that was separate and different from other people's.
Brother Ali:
And that was the first frame that I ever had of myself. Of, there's all these people, and this is what I am, was me having albinism. And it mostly was a lot of questions. Why do you look different? Because we don't have pigment, melanin, in our skin, hair, eyes. It also affects the way that you see.
Brother Ali:
But the first time that I ever noticed... And it was immediate when I was around other little kids, so when I started going to school, I realized you're different, and it's because you have albinism. You're an albino.
Noor:
Brother Ali's take on whiteness is nuanced. He tells me the label of white doesn't allow people to connect with who they really are, where they really come from. Which is why, when I ask him about his family, he says-
Brother Ali:
My family is European American. My mother's adopted.
Brother Ali:
My family is European-American. My mother's adopted, and so we didn't know much about where she came from. It's been a bit of a challenge for me to bring my body online with my nonphysical self because I was raised and taught and loved and fought and everything in between. All of the most important people in my life were black until I started doing underground hip hop music as a career. That's when a bunch of white people came in my life. But before then, there just weren't many white people in my life that were major players in my life.
Brother Ali:
I think I'm still learning how to understand my nonphysical self and my physical self, and I'm very hyper-aware of the reality of race in every moment. It's really physical for me, and it's the lens through which I view everything.
Brother Ali:
I know that there's a certain responsibility that a person has, especially being in a white body, but my own relationship with that is under development and it always has been.
Noor:
Music, specifically hip hop, created a space for Ali to know himself. His name has been pivotal for his ongoing evolution as a person.
Noor:
What has been the journey that you've had with your name?
Brother Ali:
That's a great question. I didn't like my name when I was growing up. It was Jason. I did not like that name because every time I heard that name, there was either pain around it or there was stress around it. I just really had this feeling in my family and in the white world that I'm just a problem for these people that needs to be solved. So being able to take on the name Ali, I was offered that name when I was 15 when I became a Muslim, it was really something that I really welcomed.
Brother Ali:
I think I didn't realize when I was that age that I was subconsciously, but also consciously ... I didn't have the language for it, but I was avoiding names. There are certain Muslim-Arabic names that have become part of the black American lexicon of names. So like Ahmaud Arbery, his name is [Ahmed 00:32:19]. You know what I mean? So Ahmaud, Jamal, Rahim, Hakim, there are certain names that have become black names even if people aren't Muslim. So when I was offered the name Ali, one of the things that I loved about it was ... I loved the connection to Muhammad Ali, but in terms of that being a first name, the only person I was aware of was Ali Shaheed Muhammad. I didn't know a lot of black people whose first name was Ali.
Brother Ali:
(singing)
Noor:
What is your America story?
Brother Ali:
I always felt like America stole me from myself. I've always felt like that's what America does is it steals people from themselves, and it replaces themselves with a myth.
Brother Ali:
I like it so far, man. Yeah. Come on. Let's go.
Brother Ali:
(singing)
Noor:
If you sat with the story you tell about yourself, can you cite the sources of each of those narratives? How many of them are ones you've sat with, thought about, and decided yeah, this feels true for me?
Noor:
One of my favorite verses in the Koran is, "We made you into nations and tribes so you may know one another." I believe in order to know one another, we must know ourselves first.
Maimouna Youssef:
Sitting with self, it's being self-referring. It's honoring your connection to God, honoring the truth, which is that separation is an illusion. We're all connected. I got to a point where, as I became an adult, where I would ask my mother for advice, and she wouldn't tell me any more. She would tell me to get quiet. She would say, "It's already inside of you. Just get quiet. Stop asking me. You can't hear it because you're too loud." I would say, "That's so frustrating, mommy. I don't have a lot of time. Just tell me the answer."
Noor:
I feel this, the eagerness and urgency for answers, but looking outside of one's self to find them. But the answer is always inside of you because the answer is always you.
Maimouna Youssef:
That's really at the foundation of everything my mother and grandmother ever taught me is that you'll never lose your way because you're always connected to the way. You are the way. You're connected to the source.
Maimouna Youssef:
My grandmother was so adamant about remembering. "Remember who you are. Remember who you are. Don't get lost." She would always just say, "I don't want you guys to just live in the world like you're of the world. We're earth people. We're plant people. We are spirit people. We're water people. Stay close to the elements, and don't forget who you are."
Noor:
There is a deep sustainability in the traditions [Maymuna 00:35:47] speaks to. I guess that's why they call it knowing your roots.
Noor:
Knowledge of self went mainstream with '90s hip hop. Just like a good loop, it's being rediscovered now by younger generations.
Noor:
So Dr. Su'ad Abdul Khabeer has this concept that she calls Muslim cool, which she describes as the intersection between Islam, hip hop, and blackness. What role do you feel Muslim cool played in your musical journey?
Maimouna Youssef:
I think that Islam had a impact on hip hop in general, especially in the '90s because most of them were Muslim. If they weren't Muslim, like maybe they didn't take the [foreign language 00:36:32]. They were socialized Islamic-ly. If they weren't Muslim, they grew up around Muslims, or one of their parents was Muslim, or they were Five-Percenters, or they were part of the Moorish Science Temple. Some portion of Islam had impacted them in some kind of way, and it made it into their raps.
Maimouna Youssef:
A group that influenced me a lot was the Wu-Tang Clan. A lot of them were Muslim or they were Five-Percenters. They would kick in the knowledge that they learned from the temples, and they were proud to be intelligent. They were proud that you had to get a dictionary to understand their rap verses, a totally different mindset from rappers today.
Noor:
What is your reflection on why it is so important for us to know who we come from?
Su'ad Abdul Khabeer:
Well, I guess in a way we can come a little bit full circle back to Muslim cool, in a sense. It's really about knowledge itself. When I say that black Muslim impact on hip hop is that it gave hip hop knowledge itself, I'm talking about this concept that is articulated by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad in his book Message to the Blackman. When he talks about knowledge of self, he's talking about this idea that you have to know your past, and you have to excavate your past because in the schools that you go to, in the media that you get, it's going to be absent or it's going to be distorted. Once you do that, it'll give you a better sensibility and a better way to understand and interpret what you're actually going through in this very moment.
Noor:
I'm still thinking about what Dr. Su'ad said about excavating our own pasts because in school or media, it might be absent or distorted. So there's something I need to ask my high school friend, Khadija.
Noor:
Something that I can't shake is that I don't ever remember learning about Malcolm X in Islamic school. Do you ever remember that?
Khadija:
No, I think I learned a lot of black Islam, black Muslim experience, after leaving our school. I remember so much being raised in and taught that you're Muslim first, you're Muslim first, and that kind of erasure of culture. I think after I left is when I started to get exposed to a lot more of the black Muslim experience, which is so big and has such a long history of what it is like to be Muslim in America.
Khadija:
I read the Malcolm X autobiography in college, so definitely we didn't get exposed to it when we were in Islamic school as teens. I wonder how much of that has to do with Sunni Muslims uncomfortability with the Nation as a part of the Muslim experience.
Noor:
This is the context that is missing from so many non-black American Muslim communities today.
Maimouna Youssef:
I didn't grow up in Nation, but because my mother came through the Nation and I have a lot of other family members that do, I grew up politicized. It's important, and sometimes when you're not taught Islam that way, it's still wonderful. That's not a part of the religion, the things you learn in the Nation. It was a very important lesson for black Americans in decolonizing themselves. I don't know how those hundreds of thousands of black Americans would've truly accepted Islam without decolonizing themselves first. They had to unlearn that self-hatred.
Noor:
There is too often horizontal hostility in our communities and a questioning of the teachings of the Nation of Islam. But as Maymuna says, the Nation taught the importance to decolonize minds and unlearn self-hatred, two lessons that were and are needed.
Maimouna Youssef:
When I grew up in Islam, I grew up learning Arabic, praying five times a day, fasting during Ramadan. But I still had knowledge itself because I was around people who were politicized. And I grew up singing. So that was also a big issue in the Sunni [foreign language 00:41:30] was that, "Why is this little girl singing these gospel songs?" Because in our tradition, we honor God through honoring the earth. We pay homage. If we were to use a tree for shelter or for a sweat lodge or something, we're going to pray not to the tree, but over the tree. We're going to ask it because we don't believe in separation. The Lakota, they say, "[foreign language 00:41:53]. All my relations." So I'm going to speak to my relative and say, "Do I have your permission to exchange your life for this need, for my need?" So I'm connected. I'm related to everything. That is honor and respect. That's not idol worship.
Maimouna Youssef:
But people who believe in separation will say, "What are you doing? Are you worshiping that tree? Are you worshiping that rock? Are you worshiping the water?" No, but I have respect for this thing that is a life force of its own. This thing is living. It's just a different way of thinking, and that's how we also honor God is through honoring God's creation. So I had to find my own relationship with Islam because I couldn't agree with my teacher.
Noor:
Misrepresentation doesn't only happen in media; it can also happen in trusted spaces we hope to learn and grow in. For many of us, when we reflect on our religious instruction, we come away with a need to find a more authentic sense of community and more intentional collective action. For me, that's going on this journey of rep. For Maimouna, it's starting a record label.
Noor:
What is your relationship with media representation?
Maimouna Youssef:
Well, it's not reflective. I'm not upset about it necessarily. I just feel like, okay, that's the lane that I have to fill. There's a void there. I just want to see there be more space to where we can tell our own stories. I don't want to tell someone else, "Hey, you should do a better job telling my story." I don't. I don't want you to tell it at all. I just want you move over a little bit so I can tell my own story. I have a song to [inaudible 00:43:34]. I don't need you to teach me to swim or to float. I just need you to stop shooting holes in my boat. That's all.
Maimouna Youssef:
Artists should be able to express themselves in a panoramic view, and so that's the meaning behind Panoramic Records. I love helping artists find their way, understand business, flesh out their creative ideas, just allow them to dream as big as they want to dream. I work with a lot of young people, and when I first teach them how to write, they're always writing someone else's story. I'm saying to myself, "Why don't you tell me what you did today? What's your story?" "Well, no one wants to hear that." "Yeah, but you're talking about a car and these women. You can't drive. You don't have any girls, but I'm sure there are things about your story that are important. Who told you that your story wasn't valuable and wasn't important? It's valuable. Your story's important. We don't need the same warmed-over lie that no one's even living."
Noor:
Ever since my conversation with [Ilyasah 00:44:43], I've been thinking so much about how Malcolm was someone who not only told his story once. He did so over and over again. He quite literally evolved out loud. That's what he modeled for us. So I wonder what Ilyasah thinks that means for all of us today.
Noor:
I wonder what Ilyasah thinks that means for all of us today.
Noor:
Hi.
Ilyasah:
Salam alaikum. How are you?
Noor:
Walaikum salam. How are you?
Ilyasah:
Good, good. So you want me to just get right to it?
Noor:
Actually, yes.
Noor:
When we look at Malcolm X, he retains his place in history in spite of all of the inaccurate portrayals. My mother safeguarded the legacy of her husband for the benefit of future generations. I would think that Muslims would want to reclaim his legacy. It's an opportunity for us to participate in the narrative of who we are, of what Islam is. We can't sit back and wait for someone else to write the story of Islam, of Muslims.
Noor:
Ilyasah's message is timeless. It mirrors what her father said during a speech he gave in December of 1964 at the Audubon Ballroom two months before he would be assassinated in the exact same place.
Ilyasah:
This is the type of philosophy that we want to express amongst our people. We don't need to give them a program, not yet. First, give them something to think about. If we give them something to think about and have them thinking in a way that they should be thinking, they'll see through all this camouflage that's occurring right now. It's just a show, the result of a script written by someone else. The people will take that script and tear it up and write one for themselves. You can believe that when you write the script for yourself, you're always doing something different than you'd be doing if you followed someone else's script.
Noor:
It's so true. And he made it sound simple, but it never feels like that. However, my friend, Maimouna, has done it just like Malcolm would. She reps herself and has ever since she was a young girl. Her mother taught her the value of repping herself wherever she is.
Maimouna Youssef:
My mom was very much like, "Challenge all of your teachers. Don't take their word for it. Do research on your own." I had one teacher in 11th grade. Boy, we used to debate all the time. She actually ended up quitting teaching and opened an antique shop. She told my mother to tell me thank you. She said that she realized that she should have never been a history teacher because she doesn't know anything about history.
Maimouna Youssef:
We had a class one time and she wanted us to ... A class full of Black students, she wanted us to write an essay about how hurt do we think the South was having to lose all of their slaves?
Noor:
What?
Maimouna Youssef:
Yeah. "I want you to write an essay to just kind of look into the lives of the South as their homes were being burnt by the Union soldiers and their slaves were being ripped away from them. Now they didn't have any help to raise their children or to plow their fields. Just think about how traumatizing that was for the Southern white families." I just sat there in class, and I looked her. I raised my hand. I said, "Absolutely not, no. Actually, no one in this class will be writing that story."
Noor:
You said that?
Maimouna Youssef:
Yes. I said it is absolutely unconscionable for you to ask the descendants of enslaved Africans to empathize with those who enslaved hem.
Noor:
Maimouna ended up teaching her schoolteacher. That is the power of knowledge of self.
Noor:
When we're kids, a lot of us think our parents and teachers have all the answers, all the truths. We look for guidance from authority in our lives. It wasn't until I got older that I realized, oh, they were all flawed adult human beings just trying to figure it out, too. In this instance, that person was her teacher.
Maimouna Youssef:
My mother, she got the principal to give me a day off every month for racism recuperation.
Noor:
Wait, what? When I heard Maimouna say the words, "A day off every month for racism recuperation," I had to know more. I had never heard of a parent asking for anything like that and to do this in the South?
Maimouna Youssef:
Oh yeah. So she came into the school with all of her full regalia, clinking all down the halls, all her jewelry clinking together. She came to speak to the principal because I was a straight A student, but he wanted to fail me because I had missed four days of school. My mom didn't want me to go to school on my moon. So when we're bleeding, we are supposed to be cared for. Maybe you sit in a moon lodge. But you don't do extraneous work. So it was a time for relaxation. I wouldn't wash dishes or cook or anything. I would be taken care of.
Maimouna Youssef:
But I said, "But, Mommy, I can't take off every time I have a cycle. They're going to kick me out of school." She said, "But you have to recover from their racism." "I do. But how am I going to graduate and recover from their racism? I got to choose."
Noor:
Oh my gosh.
Maimouna Youssef:
So she goes in to talk to the principal. She said, "I see that you all are trying to fail my daughter while she is recovering from racism, and I'm not going to have it. She needs time to recover." So he says, "What? Well, why does she have to recover from racism?" "Oh, let me tell you." So she goes in a whole long history lesson of the psychological impact and the damage of racism and how everything that you teach in the school is racist. Your curriculum is racist.
Maimouna Youssef:
You still hang the Confederate flag. There's no pictures of Native Americans or Africans in here. You don't honor our traditions and our ceremonies. You outlawed our language, and she goes on and on. By the time she's done, he says, "Oh my God, you're right. She does need recovery from my racism." And he gave me a day or two each month for racism recuperation. He did. I told my best friend and she said, "What? You got racism ... I want racism recuperation." I said, "You got to tell your mother to come up here."
Maimouna Youssef:
She has the history to back it up. Most Americans don't know their own history. He was mortified at the end of her speech.
Noor:
Malcolm once said ...
Malcolm X:
The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.
Noor:
Maimouna's mother demanded that her daughter not be disrespected, that her education not be neglected, and that her full health and wellbeing be protected. She taught her daughter the value of standing up for herself and backed by knowledge of self. Now Maimouna makes music and teaches young emcees and artists those same lessons her mother and grandmother taught her, be yourself and be responsible to others yet to come. It's the philosophy of the seven generations in practice.
Maimouna Youssef:
I mean I love what you're doing about stories. I love that. I love storytelling. Story is just the griot. It's such an important part of most cultures is the storytelling. That's how we commune with each other. Even if it's a tall tale, you know it's not true, but it's so enjoyable to sit around and listen. That's how we know our ancestors. I think it is important for us to tell those stories because one day we'll be ancestors and someone will tell these stories about us.
Noor:
One day we'll be ancestors and someone will tell stories about us. It wasn't until Maimouna said it like this that I really ever processed that truth. Our ancestors have been calling on us and continue to do so.
Noor:
Here's Malcolm during a speech he gave at Oxford University a couple months before he passed.
Malcolm X:
And in my opinion, the young generation of whites, Blacks, browns-
Ilyasah:
White, blacks, browns.
Malcolm X:
... whatever else there is ...
Su'ad Abdul Khabeer:
You're living at a time of extremism, a time of revolution ...
Malcolm X:
... a time when there's got to be a change. People in power have misused it, and now there has to be a change and a better world has to be built.
Ilyasah:
And the only way it's going to be built is with extreme methods and I, for one, will join in anyone-
Malcolm X:
And I, for one, will join in anyone, I don't care what color you are ...
Ilyasah:
As long as you want to change this miserable condition ...
Malcolm X:
That exists on this Earth. Thank you.
Ilyasah:
God bless you.
Noor:
We are the younger generations Malcolm is calling on. His daughter, Ilyasah, is that generation. Maimouna, Brother Ali, Dr. Suad, Zaheer, you, me, his message stands true. What if we reframe the miserable conditions as a test, and the answer key to the test is our own self-knowledge? Writing this outro was challenging because I realized this isn't an outro for me. It's an intro.
Noor:
When I think of my 14-year-old self, half my lifetime ago, listening to Lupe Fiasco for the first time, I realized my world didn't change because I found a Muslim in pop culture. It was because, in his art, he fearlessly knew who he was and he told us. I didn't know most of these stories surrounding Muslim Cool until I did this work. I wonder what it would have been like for my younger self to have had this education.
Noor:
I suppose the building and expanding of our stories is part of the regenerative loop Dr. Suad taught us about, the consistent work of knowledge of self. Sampling each other's stories, building on top of them and alongside of them continues the navigation of our bigger test. There's this line in Maimouna's song that I kept going back to where she says, "We are spiritual beings having a human experience and nothing else is ever true."
Noor:
This is why we create art and tell stories, to make sense of the knowings we collect along the way. Once we do it for ourselves, we naturally begin to build with others, shoulder to shoulder in a circle. That's what Muslim Cool taught me.
I'm Noor Tagouri. This is Rep. As always at your service.