Video of Charlie Hebdo Suspect Released

A video showing Cherif Kouachi, 32, one of two brothers being hunted for yesterday’s brutal attack on satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, was republished by French newspaper Le Figaro today, January 8.

Cherif and his 34-year old brother Said stormed into the newspaper’s Paris headquarters on Wednesday morning and killed 12 people.

The clip, which is from an old episode of the French investigative journalism program “Pièces à Conviction,” shows Cherif in his early 20s in 2004, and begins with a voiceover describing him as “a guy who was more into rap music and pretty girls than going to the mosque,” before cutting to a scene of him rapping.

According to the clip’s narration, Cherif was radicalised by a preacher called Farid Benyettou just a few months after the footage was taken. Then, in 2008, Cherif was jailed for his role in a group called “Buttes-Chaumont Network” that helped send would-be jihadists to fight for Al-Qaeda during the US-led invasion of Iraq.

This is not the first time that news outlets have drawn a connection between a violent jihadist and the Muslim rap scene. Ever since London rapper L.Jinny, otherwise known as British-Egyptian man Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary or “Jihadi John”, became one of the key suspects as the masked Islamic State (IS) killer of several Western journalists and activists, beginning with US journalist James Foley, the world has turned its attention to Muslim rap, a genre as global as Islamic extremism itself. 

Bary, 23, 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 in 2004 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.”

The early 2000s, when the footage of French-Algerian Cherif was shot, was a time when Muslim rap, a global genre that incorporates the music of young Muslims from North America to Europe and second-generation children of Muslim immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa, South East Asia and African-Americans that is often referred to as Muslim hip-hop, was becomingly increasingly popular in France.

“It was in the 2000s that the Muslim hip-hop scene really expanded, especially with the rise of French rappers, “ says Peter Mandaville, a professor of Islamic Studies at George Mason University who spoke to IranWire about Bary in 2014. “French rappers have had more mainstream success in the world of French music than say their British counterparts.”

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. 

“Hip-Hop is a powerful tool for self-expression and given a lot of youth grow up with it 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.” 

There a few British jihadist rappers that have attracted attention for their music including 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. 

“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. 

On Thursday, January 8, France was left even more rattled by the news that a police officer and street sweeper had been shot on the streets of Paris. It is clear that French authorities — and the international community — have an immensely complex investigation ahead of them, and will embark on a series of counter-terrorism measures that will not only have to look at the future of French society, politics and security, but also consider a fragmented, complicated past. As part of this, Muslim rap may offer a glimpse into the frustrations and grievances of young Muslims in France and the rest of the West. The fact that such grievances, when left unaddressed, find expression through allegiance to international Muslim causes like IS, is something that European societies will undoubtedly explore as part of their attempts to prevent further acts of terrorism.