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Barbarian: ‘Muslim Cool’ Artist Mona Haydar’s Anti-Colonial Music Video
Recent PhD student Lamiae Aidi offers this blog post (the fourth and final in a series) on Islamophobia and Islamic representation in popular culture as a knowledge mobilization component of her successful degree, recently completed under the supervision of Vivek Venkatesh. To read previous blogs in the series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
“This nose
Decolonize
This hair
Decolonize
This skin
Decolonize
This body
Decolonize
This mind
Decolonized,” raps Muslim Cool Syrian-American hip hop artist Mona Haydar. Music videos is a type of popular culture that came into being only in the mid-1980s. It is therefore a recent generation of diasporic Muslims that expresses its woes, hopes and aspirations in the form of videos. They nevertheless continue an earlier tradition of music, located in the Civil Rights movements that began in the mid-1960s to communicate messages on freedom. ‘Muslim Cool’ is a space for American Muslim artists that is also the link between the hip hop generation and the Black Power movement through the arts (Abdul Khabeer 2016). Contemporary Muslim music videos from the post-9/11 era, I argue, also dwell in this space, including in locations outside of the US. The goal behind the Black Arts Movement, be it in the form of literature or music, is to express the culture and aspirations of a beleaguered minority while raising the consciousness of the masses by disrupting negative stereotypes of that group of people (Abdul Khabeer 2016). Muslim Cool artists working in hip hop music videos today draw on and continue this tradition. They continue the legacy of the Black Arts Movement by presenting Muslim culture in the West, while speaking out against stereotypes of Muslims. With regard to styles of Muslim women’s dress, and especially headscarves, which are a prominent feature of both stereotypes and anti-colonial responses to those stereotypes in music videos created by Muslim women, Mona Haydar’s attire is to simultaneously signify religion, race, and a certain Muslim femininity.
“If they're civilized
I'd rather stay savage
Lemme think back
I remember days on these big lips,
Oh, they used to hate
Now the script flipped
Oh, hey! They gotta lip kit (Kylie J One hunnit)
Real talk, that's what I'm on
If I'm a savage
Then you're a fraud
So fresh and so eloquent, uh
I keep it humble and elegant, ah
Your beauty standard irrelevant
A revolution is so imminent
Barbarian? That's how you really feel?
Like you didn't start war over oil fields?
Opium, poppy seed
Money moves, Cardi B
Tried to make me hate me for my hips and nose
Now they got imposters, on a spread in Vogue
Not a single feature
That they let us own
Oh, they packing fillers Styrofoam
Ultralight beam
Metaphysical, huh, power no longer invisible, huh
Your beauty standard is cynical, oh
A revolution is so critical
Power so deep and so mystical
They say the personal is so political
Oh women, our future is winnable
We gotta be indivisible
We don't let them win
We beautiful barbarians.”
As an alternative form of popular culture, Barbarian stands for a racial-religious self-making intended to counter stereotypes of Muslims. ‘Muslim Cool’ contributes to building social identities that counter traits assigned by non-Muslim imaginaries. These include stereotypes related to gender. It is for these reasons that I place Muslim music video artists, Mona Haydar, in the tradition of ‘Muslim Cool’, despite the fact that she does not, to my knowledge, use that label. ‘Muslim Cool’ is a platform at the intersection of not only religion and race, but also gender.
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Abdul Khabeer, Su'ad. Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States. NYU Press: 2016.
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