Islamic Awareness Week Begins

About 40 students turned out last night for the kickoff event of Islamic Awareness Week—a structured discourse called “Islam, Hip-Hop and Black America,” featuring two speakers who discussed the relationship between modern Islam and the African-American community.

The event was co-sponsored by the Harvard Islamic Society, the Harvard Foundation, the Black Students Association, the Association of Black Harvard Women, and the Black Men’s Forum.

Adisa Banjoko, a provocative hip-hop journalist and author of Lyrical Swords, gave a 45-minute speech about Islamic influence on hip-hop cultures.

Banjoko explained that the rise in popularity of hip-hop was a result of social pressures of the early 1970s and the aftermath of 1960s civil rights movements.

Banjoko also attributed hip-hop’s rise to cutbacks in the funding for art programs in the “education establishment,” which inspired African-American youth to create new forms of art as self-expression and rebellion.

“If you’re not going to teach us poetry, I’m going to teach myself poetry my own way with my own rhythms,” Banjoko said.

But Banjoko said that African-American Christian churches immediately began to attack the fledgling hip-hop movement, creating tension between African-American youth and traditional Christianity.

“Most African-American males do not relate to the Bible and do not trust the Bible,” Banjoko said, a fact which enabled Islam to appeal to a greater segment of the population.

This fissure, according to Banjoko, produced an explosion of Islamic themes and lyrics in rap music.

Banjoko pointed to the Malcolm X quotations used in many 1980s rap songs as well as to more recent incarnations—such as the title of 50 Cent’s song “Ghetto Qua ran.”

Banjoko also noted that white musicians such as Anthrax have covered songs which feature Islamic nomenclature, including Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise.”

“Hip-hop made it cool for black kids to be smart,” Banjoko said.

Banjoko spoke after an introduction by Taha Abdul-Basser ’96, a Ph.D. candidate in Islamic Studies and an Islamic representative to the United Ministry at Harvard.

Abdul-Basser spoke about the need for further investigation into “the differential between the familiarity of African-Americans with Islam and the familiarity between the rest of American culture and Islam.”

“Whether it be my home town of New York City or any urban center, you’d be hard pressed to find an African-American who couldn’t respond to the traditional Muslim greeting,” Abdul-Basser said.

Abdul-Bassar described two theories which are often used to explain the discrepancy between African-American familiarity with Islam and Caucasian familiarity with the religion.

He called the theories: “The one fourth of them were Muslim thesis,” and the “Islam as a counter-establishment in order to spite the white majority thesis.”

The first thesis identified evidence of Islamic influence that survived from the Atlantic slave trade and the ante-bellum era, while the second thesis attributed Islam’s prominence among African-Americans to the effectiveness of such recent figures as Malcolm X.

“[Malcolm X’s] impact can barely be overstated,” Abdul-Basser said.

The two hour event, whose audience was predominately male, was followed by a session of prayer and a book signing.

—Staff writer Joshua P. Rogers can be reached at jprogers@fas.harvard.edu.