Jihadist Rap, From London to the Islamic State

One of the key suspects Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, has identified as the possible masked Islamic State (IS) killer of US journalist James Foley is the British-Egyptian man Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, better known as the London rapper L.Jinny. The likelihood that a London-born and bred musician somehow transformed himself into a gruesome jihadist executioner with a relish for self-promotion has drawn attention to the world of Muslim rap, a genre as global as Islamic extremism itself. 

The 23-year-old Bary, who had a number of singles played on BBC Radio 1 in 2012, developed radical notions about Islam through his association with the radical preacher Anjem Choudary and left to join then ISIS in Syria in 2013. He gained notoriety earlier this year after he posted a picture on Twitter, which has since been deactivated, of himself holding the decapitated head of a man with the caption, “Chillin’ with my homie or what’s left of him.” 

As a rapper Bary enjoyed a relatively successful music career, and his lyrics mainly dealt with the poverty, violence and drug use he had faced in his British life; his songs dealt with his Muslim faith only tangentially, referring to Allah on a regular basis. He also made reference to his fears of being deported back to Egypt: “Now they want to send my family back to Egypt. Already feeling sea sick.”

Muslim rap, often also referred to as Muslim hip-hop, is a global genre that incorporates the music of young Muslims from North America to Europe, primarily the second-generation children of Muslim immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa and South East Asia, but also African-Americans. Muslim rappers mainly use English or French, and their lyrics knit together a wide range of political and social attitudes towards Islam, their homeland of origin, and their fragile identities as foreigners in Western countries. Muslim rappers often invoke Islam and Palestine as a way to vent their sense of dislocation as a young generation ill at ease in the West and distressed by conflicts in the Muslim world. 

Those scouring Bary’s rap lyrics for clues to his future as a jihadist in Syria, however, will find little that might have foretold his journey. Jihadist rap, as a sub-genre of Muslim rap, is so fringe and limited as to be virtually non-existent. 

“It’s crucial people realise that the rap scene [Bary] was in is really small and that most artists have no desire to express extremist views through their music,” says Peter Mandaville, a professor of Islamic Studies at George Mason University who works on global Islam. Mandaville says that the number of musicians who do specifically Islamic rap within the Muslim hip-hop is quite small.  

At the heart of the British Muslim hip-hop scene, he says, is the group Mecca2Medina, which emerged in 1997 as one of the first such groups in Britain.  “They, for instance, want to use their music to empower disenfranchised Muslim youths,” says Mandaville. But in the 2000s the Muslim hip-hop scene expanded, especially with the rise of French rappers, who have had more mainstream success in the world of French music than their British counterparts.  

But while London is a hub of a rapidly growing British Muslim hip-hop scene, Mandaville says, the genre’s social imprint is still fairly light. “Even if they’re devout Muslims, they’re primarily listening to mainstream stuff and not Islamic rap.”

Some of the world’s most successful Muslim rappers include the likes of T-Pain, Lupe Fiasco, Busta Rhymes and Ice Cube, all of whom are multi-millionaires. 

“Hip-Hop is a powerful tool for self-expression and given a lot of youth grow up with it in Britain today, it’s a good way for young people to express themselves creatively,” says a spokesperson who didn’t want to be named at the Muslim Youth Helpline, a charity based in London. 
    
Rap falls under the larger hip-hop culture, which comprises rapping, DJing, break-dancing and graffiti. Historically rap and hip-hop, with their origins in blues music that arose from the African-American experience, have dealt with social injustice, a capacity that has resonated with young people in places as far-flung as China, providing a musical outlet for a wide manner of cultural and political frustrations.    . 
    
“Rap is traditionally the voice of the oppressed and given beliefs come into anyone’s music, if a believing Muslim happens to be a rapper it will come out in their lyrics,” says Wissam Khodur, a rapper of Syrian-Lebanese origin known as “E-Slam” based in Dubai. “Muslim rappers tend to be very spiritual and unfortunately there are bad seeds in every community taking extremist views. But these are rejected by the majority of Muslim rappers.”

Khodur says Muslim rap has developed and redefined itself in recent years, particularly since the 9/11 attacks.  “This is because Muslims living in the West feel generally targeted and oppressed, while their fellow Muslims are under the yoke of occupation and wars led by Western countries.” 

The few British jihadist rappers that have attracted attention for their music include names such as rapper Aki Nawaz, the frontman for Fun-Da-Mental, who released an album in 2006 called “All Is War”, and which was interpreted by many as a glorification of terrorism. Others include Omar Hammami’s song “Make Jihad with Me” and Sheikh Terra’s song “Dirty Kuffar” (dirty non-believer) which includes lyrics like, “OBL (Osama Bin Laden) cru be like a shinin’ star, Like the way we destroyed them two towers, ha ha!”

“There are only a few examples of Jihadist raps that I can think of [in which] people actually talk about killings and that kind of thing. But just because it’s Islamic rap doesn’t mean it’s sympathetic to militant causes,” says Charlie Cooper, press officer at the Quilliam Foundation, a counter-terrorism think tank. He says that militant groups have yet to take full advantage of rap’s ability to reach out to young people. 

Western intelligence agencies estimate that foreigners from about 50 countries have made the journey to join the Islamic State insurgency, with an estimated 500 fighters coming from Britain alone and about 100 from the United States.

“The Islamic State relies heavily on the recruit of foreign fighters; and they are purposely targeting Europeans, particularly those in Britain,” says Mandaville. “Part of their strategy in doing this is by using music in the form of nasheeds and rap to draw in new recruits. This is not entirely new; Hezbollah and Al-Shabab have done this as well to an extent—the reason being, it appeals to young people.”  

Professor Mandaville adds: “Nasheeds in their traditional form are Islamic devotional songs, and are the staple genre, more so than hip-hop, of these militant organisations. Unlike hip-hop, nasheeds are used to extol the battlefield and the sacrifices made in the name of Allah, and they have become popular, particularly among younger European Muslims, since the 2000s when artists began infusing them with pop music to make them sound more like pop ballads.”

The Pew Research Center estimates there are about 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, or 23 percent of the global population, and of these, it is thought almost 70 percent are under the age of 30.

“Rap has a lot of anti-establishment, ‘let’s try and change the world’ thoughts and so do new forms of political Islam so I think this is why there’s long been a link between the two,” says filmmaker Adam Wishart, whose documentary “The White Widow” looks at Samantha Lewthwaite, a English woman who married one of the July 7 bombers and is widely believed to be a member of the al-Shabaab terrorist group. 

Wishwart notes that Bary’s relationship to extremist violence is familial; his father is currently awaiting trial in New York for his role in the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. “It isn’t his love of hip-hop that caused him to go over to Syria but his very personal affiliation to the ideology. Rappers sing about their political grievances and this is clear evidence to me. We should be listening to them more intensely.” 

Though jihadi rap itself still hovers on the outskirts of a broader Muslim hip-hop scene, the genre of Muslim rap offers a window into the frustrations and grievances of young Muslims in the West. The fact that such grievances, when left unaddressed, find expression through allegiance to international Muslim causes, is something that British society must explore, in its attempt to understand why so many of its young men have their eyes on Syria.