Muslim Cool - Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States (Broché)

This groundbreaking study of race, religion, and popular culture in the twenty-first century United States focuses on a new concept, "Muslim Cool." Muslim Cool is a way of being a U.S. Muslim - displayed in ideas, dress, social activism in the 'hood, and relationships to state power. Constructed through hip hop and the performance of Blackness, Muslim Cool allows Black and non-Black young Muslims to engage with the Black American experience and challenge both racist norms in the U.S.
and ethnic and religious structures within their own communities. Drawing on more than two years of ethnographic research, Sued Abdul Khabeer illuminates how young and multiethnic U.S. Muslims draw on Blackness to construct their identities as Muslims. This form of self-making builds on interconnections and intersections rather than divisions between "Black" and "Muslim." Countering the notion that Blackness and the Muslim experience are fundamentally different, Muslim Cool challenges the idea that Muslims are "foreign" and puts Blackness at the center of the study of American Islam.
It also demonstrates that connections to Blackness made through hip hop are critical and contested - critical because they resist anti-Blackness and contested because race, class, gender, and nationality continue to complicate self-making in the United States.