The Message

The roots of the relationship between Islam and hip-hop extend back to the very beginnings of hip-hop music. According to Adisa Banjoko, author of Lyrical Swords Volumes I and II, books on hip-hop culture, it arose “on the tails of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Malcolm X and the black power movement. It was the black people’s response to what was going on.” Around that time, he explains, two Afro-centric religious movements heavily influenced by Islam — the Nation of Islam and the Five Percent Nation of Islam — were both founded. “Islam was claimed by the black power movement, and the two ideas began to merge,” Banjoko says. In time, this variant of Islam came to permeate some mainstream rap music, with artists like the Wu-Tang Clan and Busta Rhymes citing Islamic references in their lyrics.

But the Islamic hip-hop that has been emerging now, embodied by artists such as Miss Undastood, is much different from those early, essential hip-hop influences. It is orthodox Sunni rather than Nation of Islam, which is a small, cult-like offshoot considered controversial by mainstream religious bodies. Artists like Miss Undastood have been using hip-hop to make mainstream Islam more accessible and more acceptable. Levell notes that while he used to listen to rap of both the secular and the Islamic varieties, lately he has been exclusively listening to Muslim artists because he feels it’s some of the only hip-hop with an actually positive and intelligent message. When his five-year-old daughter gets older, he says, he’ll want her listening to artists like Miss Undastood as well.

Miss Undastood says one of the reasons she first started to write Islamic rap was because when she started really looking into her faith, the Islamic music that was out there was so bad. “So much Muslim music has no flow or it mixes Islam with outside influence,” she says. “And some of it is corny. Like [the group] Allah’s Army. I played it one time and never played it again.”

Even today, artists are still afraid to discuss issues in the same context that Miss Undastood does, and she suggests that in the past a lot of Muslim artists have decided to go the way of Christian rock and play up the cheese factor rather than concentrating on creating quality and spiritually conscious music.

“I would say, ‘This is what Muslim youth have to listen to?’” Miss Undastood recalls of that time. ” Maybe I subconsciously knew I needed to step up and change it. But its hard to control your thought process, what happened to inspire me I don’t even completely understand.” Her opinions speak loudly behind her low, calm sounding voice.

For now the audience for Islamic hip-hop has stayed relatively confined to listeners of Islamic faith. Until recently, it was primarily popular in Europe. But more and more people in the U.S. and around the world are buying Islamic rap records every day, according to the artists who produce the musi. New Islamic labels and artists are popping on internet radio stations like Islam FM and Islam in America AM. Broadcasters such as the BBC, which is preparing to shoot a documentary on Miss Undastood, present the genre to non-Muslim audiences with increasing frequency.

Miss Undastood says that although most of her fans are Muslim, she expects that soon people from all over the world are going to be hearing what she has to say. And controversy or not–she plans on saying it loudly.