Hip-Hop for Allah

Muslim MCs struggle to balance their faith with their music.

by Zach Mortice

When West Philadelphia-raised rapper Tone Trump goes as far afield as Miami, his chains and tattoos get him recognized, but his long beard, grown in the Islamic tradition, is key. It's what triggers the catcalls. "Phiiiiillllly!"

DEF TONE: West Philly rapper Tone Trump, pictured outside the Al-Aqsa Academy at Germantown and Jefferson, toes the theologically correct and Quran-based party line that extremists distort the religion   Photo By: Michael T. Regan   (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

And when he moved into his 10-bedroom home and office in Bryn Mawr last spring, the local cops took an interest in the 24-year-old rapper instantly. On the second day he was moving in, Trump said they told him the traffic of people moving in and out looked like drug activity. He says they're parked outside the house all day, every day. (This, even though Lower Merion Police Sgt. John Stillwagon says they've never heard of him.)

Back in the neighborhood at 52nd and Market, it's different. Men with beards longer than Trump's and women covered head to toe in burqas greet him in Arabic: "As-salaam alaikum, akhi."

He's black, a rapper and a Muslim. "That's three strikes right there," says Trump, who was born Abdul Sallam. It's just as hard to separate these three identities and peoples' reactions to them as it is to comprehend the diversity of voices that exists in the broad cultural stew of "Islamic rap," a relatively underexposed subgenre. There are British jihadi rappers who call themselves Sheikh Terra and the Soul Salah Crew and give shout-outs "to the OBL." There are teetotaling rappers who embrace Islam's stringent rules for personal behavior (no drugs, no alcohol) and comply with the religion's disdain for music and creative energy used outside of worship by rapping about being polite and praying.

And then there's Trump, who weds well-worn hip-hop territory (his 'hood: West Philly; his chains: diamond-encrusted; his sneakers: Gucci) with flourishes of Islamic jargon. (Listen to Tone Trump. Link takes you off this site.)

The voices of these Muslim artists join an already crowded chorus of shrieks and bellows, all trying to answer the question: "What will the relationship between Islam and the West be?" Some say Islam is a monolithic bogeyman that's come to kill us all. Some say it's a religion of peace distorted by madmen. For Trump, it's a source of personal strength, something he uses to get through the day.

There's nothing especially new about rappers being Muslim, in Philly or elsewhere, but only recently has everything a Muslim rapper says on a record been held up as proof or a refutation of Islam's universal ill will toward the West.

When a British member of Parliament heard Sheikh Terra's song "Dirty Kuffar" (Arabic for nonbeliever), he referred it to police to see if it was prosecutable. And when the British Muslim group Fun-Da-Mental was set to release an album with lyrics sympathetic to jihadi violence, two record executives at his label threatened to resign and frontman Aki Nawaz risked prosecution under Britain's new "glorification of terrorism" laws. The message is clear: When Islam and rap music come together, free speech begins to recede.

But is Trump's Islam a religion of violence? Sure. He toes the theologically correct and Quran-based party line that violent extremists distort the religion, but what about the Dickies-and-thermals wearing, trigger-happy hoods who populate his records? Now, when hip-hop and Islam go into a room together, the cross-pollination of stereotypes is part of a national debate that will determine how this country will relate to 1.3 billion Muslims worldwide. Or, as Jedi Mind Tricks rapper and Muslim Vinnie Paz asks:

Does every Muslim in the world come equipped with a bomb?

Does every rap video have a chick in a thong?

The number of hearts and minds that Trump's words can influence is growing, too. Islam is the fastest-growing religion around the world and in the United States. Not even evangelism, with its made-for-TV shiny-faced preachers and "God wants you to have a huge-ass car!" sloganeering, has outpaced it. And hip-hop is the fastest-growing segment of the music industry.

Whatever happens on the streets of Philadelphia will speak volumes as to how these two worldwide cultures interact.

Perhaps the most overtly Islamic-sounding rapper in hip-hop today is a white Italian-American from South Philadelphia who converted to Islam over a decade ago. Paz (birth name: Vincenzo Luvineri) constructs landscapes steeped in Afro-Asiatic mysticism where cyborgs created by Islamic scientists pilot UFOs through ancient Egypt, hell-bent on reviving long-dead pharaohs. It's surreal, but not as surreal as what goes on at Jedi Mind Trick's shows.

In cities and college towns across the nation, Paz's thick, round frame dominates the stage as he leads an audience of mostly white, middle-class college kids with gelled hair and hipster T-shirts as they gruesomely rant about the almighty supremacy of Allah. The pope is strangled with a rosary. "Pagan" Christians are converted to Islam.

I'm the one who put the nail in the cross

I'm the one who told the world about an alien corpse ...

You just a heathen and you lie like the church do

I can't believe that Allah hasn't cursed you.

Despite Paz's over-the-top terrorist-chic verbal acrobatics, JMT's audience indicates that the things he says will always be just words, but the distance between violence under the auspices of Islam and the mere thought of it is a lot farther apart in college-town USA where JMT performs than it is in the Middle East.

When I asked Paz about taking the hajj (a spiritual journey to Mecca all Muslims are encouraged to make), he said he hasn't gone yet but thought he would soon. JMT has been picking up fans in the Middle East and Paz says he'd like to do some shows there. Some fans are from Lebanon, and Paz says a few claim they're involved with Hezbollah. Paz says they've even signed his MySpace page (though none are currently posted) and sent him e-mails. Some messages, he said, stated that they listen to JMT while fighting Israeli forces.

Paz says he doesn't condone or condemn either side of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict in Lebanon, but he's awed by the support.

"It's very humbling to think that people that are putting their bodies on the line and are willing to die for their cause are listening to my shit," he says. Paz's interactions with these fans confirm hip-hop's knack for reaching out to the disaffected of all stripes, in this case young Middle Eastern Muslims. This is exactly what Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter warned us about. Paz isn't concerned that he could be perceived as having incited violence and intolerance; he just says words into a microphone. "Under what religion did we go to war?" he says. "Bush said God told him to go to war."

The second time I met with Tone Trump, he greeted me with a handshake and a few words of encouragement as I stepped off the No. 10 trolley several blocks from the former site of Nation of Islam's Temple No. 12, near Trump's mother's house. "Rollin' up in the hood with no security! I'm impressed!" he said in a tone that suggested he was joking. But the ambulance sirens that kept interrupting our conversation didn't.

Photo By: Michael T. Regan   (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Lancaster Avenue is Philadelphia's Muslim Main Street, the heart of the Islamic community for the city's 100,000-plus Muslims. Several of Philadelphia's oldest and most prominent mosques line the street.

Here, the majority of the Muslim population draws its roots from Nation of Islam (NOI). Temple No. 12 was at 42nd Street and Lancaster Avenue, in what is now the top floor of an abandoned hardware store. An early post of Malcolm X, it is also the place where the modern incarnation of African-American Islam was born, where Wallace D. Muhammad, NOI leader Elijah Muhammad's son, began introducing legitimately Quranic-based teachings into the racist stew of Islam, Christianity and bogus black supremacy that the NOI was passing off as true Islam.

Frequently out of favor with his dad, Wallace formally broke with his father's theology in 1977 and began dismantling the NOI. In 1981, Louis Farrakhan reformed the NOI along Elijah's sectarian lines, but the Philadelphia Muslim community seems to have steadfastly cast its lot with W.D. Muhammad.

NOI members have never been strangers to having their religion politicized, but one advantage for them is that the current discourse on Islam and terrorism is far from color-blind; terrorists look like Arabs, end of story. As threatening as they may have been with their a-spaceship-will-come-from-the-heavens-to-kill-all-the-white-people fables, your average formerly NOI-affiliated Black Muslim isn't the first person people shamefully glance at on an airplane. Most of the time, anyway.

Still, the beard can be a giveaway. Trump says he's had people on trains ask him point-blank if he's terrorist. As he warns in one song:

Watch what you say in the verse

Them feds kick down doors.

He's working on a documentary about American anti-Muslim prejudice. It's tough to separate, but he probably spends more time dealing with the PR problems of his profession and race than of his religion, which — in a way — he prefers.

"Now you're not just attacking my color, you're attacking my faith, which is totally different," he says.

Thankfully, the music industry is a haven of religious and cultural tolerance.

Kenny Gamble, the founder of Philadelphia International Records and inventor of Philly soul, converted to Islam in 1975, in the midst of perfecting the Motown model for marketing black music to the masses. His sophisticated arrangements and lush string treatments made him a music mogul, every sweet note haram ("forbidden"), according to conservative interpretations of Islamic law.

Gamble told his son Isadeen that how he made his money didn't matter as much as what he did with it. Now a respected elder statesman, Gamble has taken to revitalizing neighborhoods in South Philadelphia [Cover, "Taking a Gamble," Deborah Bolling, March 6, 2003]. But Isadeen, a rapper and producer (Isa means Jesus in Arabic, deen means religion), isn't so sure.

"Money burns up quick in the hellfire," he says. "Allah said so."

The legacy of Isadeen's father looms over him. He records at Philadelphia International Records at Broad and Spruce streets, lounges on the black leather couches and gazes up at the dozens of gold records by Teddy Pendergrass, the O'Jays and Patti LaBelle. It's a legacy Isadeen has been running from for much of his life.

He grew up in mansions in Bryn Mawr and Ardmore, driving Mercedes-Benzes and enjoying his birthright as musical royalty. When he realized people around him didn't care about Isadeen, they just wanted to hang with Kenny Gamble's son, he rejected it all. He got high and drank constantly. He sought out the life of the types of neighborhoods his dad is trying to reform. Nearly homeless, he rented a room from a crackhead called Ike.

The conflict between Isadeen's faith and his career seems to be a physical presence around the 27-year-old. He feels like his way of life stands in contempt of Allah. He feels guilty for falling off his deen. His scattershot logic and furtive glances give him away as a perpetually blunted indie rapper with a brain full of nervous, jagged energy and Oliver Stone-style shadow government intellectual posturing. His music and personal medication habits confirm this observation.

"I'm caught up in the hellfire with everybody else. You can see what I got in my pocket right here," he says, producing a thick Ziploc bag full of pot. "I'm strivin'. I love weed. I'm just tryin' to clear my head."

And purify his soul.

"I've been fasting for the last couple of weeks, just to make myself stronger. I'm trying to make up for different Ramadans I've missed. I know all about Islam, but right now, I'm confused. One of my friends just died. He was a rapper. His name was Castro the Mic Dictator. He was a Muslim and he had a Christian burial. It's gonna take a minute for the angels to find his soul."

(Though the reason was unclear, a few months after our first conversation, a representative for Philly International Records said Isadeen would be "completely unavailable" for the next three months.)

Unlike Isadeen, who was born into Islam and was left to sort out how to make his religion work with his lifestyle, Paz came to Allah on his own in what seems like a fairly typical search for post-adolescent identity. He admits his initial attraction to Islam was a bit superficial. Why was he attracted? Probably for some of the same reasons he gets other brainy, indie backpacker kids to come to his shows: "People are attracted to the X factors," Paz says. "They're attracted to the unknown, they're drawn in [with questions like] 'Why do they think like that?'"

On JMT's 1997 debut, a fresh-voiced Paz roamed the cosmos seeking the secret of African mystics and of his soul. The music video for "I Who Have Nothing" makes Paz look absolutely foolish, wearing a Middle Eastern-style ghutra headdress and clutching a forty, strutting on a rooftop with Philadelphia's gray skyline in the background. It does, however, give a clear picture of a spiritual misfit's awkward search for identity.

By 2000's Violent by Design, Paz's voice had hardened into a midrange roar. He became a master of manipulating images of violence and death, equal parts George Romero splatter-house grind and Edgar Allan Poe ambient creepiness. He uses "left wing" to describe his lyrics, but when allusions to Mussolini and comparisons to "kings that reign with a fist" keep popping up, the music ends up in a political blind spot where extreme right and extreme left meet and join hands in violence.

But Paz says his recorded persona's words are just hyperbolic metaphor. For all his pro-Islamist flag-waving, Paz sounds more like a Unitarian youth minister than a fiery fundamentalist when he talks about religion. Literally interpreting the Quran and worrying about Islam's image of the afterlife — that's not what concerns Paz.

"Those aren't really things I dwell on," he says. "I dwell on the overall message and overall concept of peace and treating people with respect and love. My bottom line is, whatever gets you through the day is probably best for you."

Paz's justification for his anti-Christian lyrics is an extension of an argument center-left authors have been making for years: Evangelical conservatives have so hijacked the concept of Jesus and Christianity that the person Paz is "putting nails in" is an empty figurehead of right-wing politics, one that Paz wants to crush with one of hip-hop's favorite dialects: violence.

"If I have to jam this down your throat and say it in a crazy way to make you think and make you pick up a book and read about Mumia Abu-Jamal or read about the war, then I've done my job," he says. "Some people, you have to hit them in the head and lure them in and trick them. After all, isn't that the ultimate Jedi Mind Trick?"

Trump was born into a Muslim family and his mother (generally overworked) and father (generally absent) converted to Islam with the NOI though they are no longer affiliated with the group. At age 9, Trump got his first taste of the streets. He started out as a lookout at the infamous drug corner of 49th and Hoopes. His first payday was $50; he changed the two 20s and a 10 into 50 ones and bought pretzels for everybody in his class. He started selling, but he says he quit the streets when he was 18, after the birth of his oldest son.

"I'm proud to say I was never good at that stuff," he says. "It was never my calling."

Photo By: Michael T. Regan   (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Trump's mix tapes and growing local popularity made hip-hop a more lucrative career choice. A big break came this summer when one of his songs was chosen for the soundtrack to Close to Death, a documentary on urban gun violence by a pair of Philadelphia-based producers. The only unsigned artist on the soundtrack, he says it helped put him on the radar of a few major labels (Def Jam, G-Unit) and he hopes to be signed soon.

Trump became an underground hit by cultivating the same "thug striving to be righteous" model that Freeway, Philadelphia's first Muslim rapper export, first put on the street. "I'm not even supposed to be doing my music," he says. "I feel responsible because I do know right from wrong and I'm still doin' wrong. A lot of brothers are lost, and I'm lost to a certain extent, but I do know right from wrong."

As with Freeway, Muslim allusions in Trump's music often seem like afterthoughts. His music is littered with gunshots, drug-biz lingo and streetwise bravado, all of which play very well with the labels he's negotiating with.

"I have one rap where I talk about tuckin' in my gun, but within that rap, I say I'm fresh from juma, which is prayer," he says.

On "West Philly Freestyle," Trump introduces listeners to his block:

Y'all don't wanna drive, if ya do get a hack man

We all tryin' to deen, growin' beards like it's Pakistan.

Some conservative critics would like to see hip-hop and Islam disappear from the cultural landscape. Writing for the National Center for Public Policy Research, Jeffrey Hicks published a piece called "How Hip-Hop Destroys the Potential of Black Youth," which traced hip-hop's influence on the young, black and Arab rioters that ransacked France in the fall of 2005. A French minister of Parliament, Francois Grosdidier, petitioned to ban seven rappers' music.

Such critics may see little difference between the French riots, the Islamic jihad they see on the evening news and Trump's "big beards, big guns" tagline, but the things Philadelphia Muslim rappers are talking about are far removed from the self-denial that extreme fundamentalists are supposed to practice.

Like most rappers, Trump and crew have a distinctly American-capitalist ethos: Grind hard, party hard, make money, buy a big house and a nice car — anyone can do it.

If the coupling of urban gangsterisms and Islamic jargon seems awkward, it's probably because it's relatively untested. Islam and hip-hop have had a history together, but not in the commercial mainstream.

Previously, Muslim hip-hop artists were mostly confined to the vague catchall of "socially conscious rap," more likely to talk about black nationalism and black helicopter anti-government conspiracies along the lines of Malcolm X's Nation of Islam than to narrate the struggle between street life and spiritual life.

Artists like Public Enemy, X-Clan and Lakim Shabazz and, later, Philadelphia's own Roots have all incorporated Muslim rhetoric into their songs, and informed much of what's developed into hip-hop's established underground (Wu-Tang Clan, Mos Def). To these rappers, Islam is a Pan-African means to a revolution, but Trump seems to display his faith as another piece of jewelry, a bling-encrusted badge that separates him from the 5,000 other Philly rappers waiting in line for a record contract, albeit a badge he's particularly proud of.

"If I come across too preachy, I'm losin' 'em all," he says, motioning toward the throng of humanity crowded beneath the decaying El platform at 52nd and Market. Paz may have a crew in Lebanon, but these are Trump's people. They pick their way through payday loan shops and dollar stores ("Panties $1.00," "Pepper Spray $5.99"). Gypsy cab drivers scan the crowds for people who look like they're in a hurry and old men sit along the sidewalk in no hurry at all.

Trump is thinking about all of them, and about his obligation to spread the word of Islam through his music in the world outside of West Philadelphia.

"I feel like I pretty much represent everything about Philly," he explains. "I really feel that the survival of the community rests on me. I'm preparing to go on tour. If I'm talking to kids in Arizona and I get a chance to talk to a girl about Islam, great. If I take the time with her to do other things, I'm going to be punished. My good deeds will totally outweigh my bad deeds."

(z_mortice@citypaper.net)