Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States

10th Anniversary Edition

Explores the complexity of identities formed at the crossroads of Islam and hip hop

Now appearing in a 10th anniversary edition, Su'ad Abdul Khabeer's groundbreaking study of race, religion and popular culture in the 21st century United States introduced a new concept, "Muslim Cool," as a way of being an American Muslim--displayed in ideas, dress, social activism in the 'hood, and in complex relationships to state power. Constructed through hip hop and the performance of Blackness, Muslim Cool engages with the Black American experience to challenge racist norms in the U.S. as well as dominant ethnic and religious structures within American Muslim communities.

Drawing on over two years of ethnographic research, Abdul Khabeer illuminates the ways in which young and multiethnic US Muslims draw on Blackness to construct their identities as Muslims. Theirs is a form of critical Muslim self-making that builds on interconnections and intersections, rather than divisions between "Black" and "Muslim." By countering the notion that Blackness and the Muslim experience are fundamentally different, Muslim Cool poses a critical challenge to dominant ideas that Muslims are "foreign" to the United States, and importantly, it puts Blackness at the center of the study of American Islam.

Now featuring a new preface for the book's 10th anniversary which offers insights into what has changed and what has stayed the same since the book was first published, Muslim Cool demonstrates that connections to Blackness made through hip hop are critical and contested--critical because they push back against the pervasive phenomenon of anti-Blackness and contested because questions of race, class, gender, and nationality continue to complicate self-making in the United States.