Rebel Music

December 16, 2013
In dense and turgid academic prose, political scientist Aidi explores the ways that Muslim youth culture across the globe has embraced various forms of music, from hip-hop to jazz, as a means of protesting, proclaiming identity, and building community. At the same time, he observes, nation-states from Saudi Arabia and Iran to France and the U.S. monitor musical tastes among youth, especially in fringe urban areas, to calculate the power this music might have for undermining and challenging the status quo. Through interviews with many musicians, Aidi reveals the power of music to challenge religious and political categories. For example, in Philadelphia, Luqman Abdul Haqq, who as Kenny Gamble wrote some of the 1970s most-recognized hits of the Philly R&B sound, has ruffled Muslim feathers by building a center for R&B in his Philly neighborhood, asserting that faith, music, and economic uplift go together. In Pakistan, the rock band Junoon, led by Salman Ahmad, combines the poetry of Rumi with the rhythms of Led Zeppelin in their protest music, but they also drew the ire of orthodox Pakistani Sufi mullahs with a narrow interpretation of Rumi. While Aidi’s study explores uncovered territory in music and politics, its labyrinthine structure turn this into a tuneless composition on what is a compelling and timely subject.

January 1, 2014
A multilayered story of the mobilization of Muslim youth through music rather than militancy. As Muslim youth across the world are beleaguered by the crackdown on terrorism, the economic recession and the rise of the far right, they are either turning to a more conservative form of Islam or tapping into the rich inspiration of the "Black Atlantic." In this intriguing study, Aidi (School of International and Public Affairs/Columbia Univ.; co-editor: Black Routes to Islam, 2009) demonstrates the immense and widespread appeal to transnational, disgruntled Muslims of black music such as hip-hop, drawing its roots from Muslim influences since the 1970s--e.g., in the form of the Nation of Islam. Indeed, there are many layers to this story, and Aidi has to wear both the scholar's cap, to trace first the Muslim diaspora from Spain circa 1492, which brought Muslims across the Atlantic to Brazil and elsewhere, where they then mixed with black Africans, as personified in the mythology of the "enchanted mooress" and the mulata; and the journalist's hat, as he recounts concerts he attended from Copenhagen to Tunis. The author carefully delineates between the converts to Salafism, the Saudi-driven puritanical form of Islam aiming for a "superior moral order," and the Western-backed assimilationist advocates of Sufism (Gnawa in Morocco, Gulen in Turkey), which tolerates trance and even dance for its mystical reach into the divine, as practiced by most of the American converts. The latter form has been embraced by the U.S. State Department, no less, in promoting American values of diversity and tolerance abroad and as a "counter-narrative" to the rigid views of Salafism. Aidi shows how the Western "soundtrack of struggle" inspires the world in surprising ways. Moving from jazz to the late Moroccan pop star Salim Halali, Aidi's wide-ranging, dense work persuades by its passionate accretion of detail.

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Starred review from February 1, 2014
Hip-hop is the lingua franca of worldwide youth culture. It all started in the Bronx, and for thousands of young Muslims around the world today, the New York borough remains sacred ground. In this bracing, fascinating, and utterly timely exploration of music, race, and cultural identity, Aidi examines young European and American Muslims and their search for what he calls a nonracist utopia. Specifically, Aidi is concerned with how the so-called American dream exists in Europe's Muslim ghettos, how young European and American Muslims are drawing on African American history (especially the U.S. civil rights movement) for inspiration, and how American diplomacy is using race and diversity to court Muslims around the world. Aidi touches on many issues in this ambitious and far-reaching book, including the rise of the Far Right; the spread of the war on terror; the mind-boggling cultural fusion going on today (Arabic country music in Alabama, punk rockers in Pakistan); and the power of music to effect social change. Sufi rock, Islam and jazz, Gnawa music, Andalusi musicit's all covered here. This book will be especially appealing to young people who want to better understand the Muslim perspective on war, prejudice, and national identity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

October 1, 2013

Since 9/11, young Muslims worldwide have worked to forge a distinctively racial, radicalized identity in the face of the West's War Against Terror, resisting American efforts in particular to subsume Muslims within the larger white culture. As documented by Aidi, a lecturer at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, the Muslim youth movement is shaped by urban culture, political activism, and, interestingly, music from hip-hop and jazz to Gnawa, Andalusian, and Judeo-Arabic. At the same time, he argues, Western governments use music in an effort to defuse Muslim consciousness. The consequences of a Muslim youth culture, religious or secular, are far-reaching, and there's big in-house excitement.

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