Sufi Rapper

Sufi Rapper PDF Author: Abd al Malik
Publisher: Inner Traditions
ISBN: 9781594772788
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
French rap star recounts his journey from the ghettos of Strasbourg through radical Islam to the Sufi message of universal love • Explains how the luminous message of love in Sufism now animates Malik’s music • Offers an intimate look at life in the ghettos and madrassas of the poorest neighborhoods in Europe As a poor black resident in one of the notorious French banlieues (the ghettos surrounding French cities), Abd al Malik had every chance of meeting the same fate as many of his peers: drug addiction, prison, and/or an early grave. Despite his early involvement in the endemic crime that was routine in his neighborhood, his keen intelligence won him admission to some of the most prestigious schools in Strasbourg. His dual life as honor student/pickpocket ended when he converted to Islam, where again his intellect and sensitivity prevented him from entering the hate-filled spiral promoted by the fundamentalists. His distaste for the hatred they preached in the madrassas and his love of music led him to Moroccan Sufi master Sidi Hamza al-Qadiri al-Butchichi, whose message of universal love and joy now animates the rap songs of this prize-winning composer and performer. As the singer says in his Ode to Love: “Love the other whatever the cost and direct the struggle against yourself The treasure of the just is buried within my chest If there is enough for one, let’s share it, there is enough for all.”

Sufi Rapper

Sufi Rapper PDF Author: Abd al Malik
Publisher: Inner Traditions
ISBN: 9781594772788
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Get Book

Book Description
French rap star recounts his journey from the ghettos of Strasbourg through radical Islam to the Sufi message of universal love • Explains how the luminous message of love in Sufism now animates Malik’s music • Offers an intimate look at life in the ghettos and madrassas of the poorest neighborhoods in Europe As a poor black resident in one of the notorious French banlieues (the ghettos surrounding French cities), Abd al Malik had every chance of meeting the same fate as many of his peers: drug addiction, prison, and/or an early grave. Despite his early involvement in the endemic crime that was routine in his neighborhood, his keen intelligence won him admission to some of the most prestigious schools in Strasbourg. His dual life as honor student/pickpocket ended when he converted to Islam, where again his intellect and sensitivity prevented him from entering the hate-filled spiral promoted by the fundamentalists. His distaste for the hatred they preached in the madrassas and his love of music led him to Moroccan Sufi master Sidi Hamza al-Qadiri al-Butchichi, whose message of universal love and joy now animates the rap songs of this prize-winning composer and performer. As the singer says in his Ode to Love: “Love the other whatever the cost and direct the struggle against yourself The treasure of the just is buried within my chest If there is enough for one, let’s share it, there is enough for all.”

Global Sufism

Global Sufism PDF Author: Francesco Piraino
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 178738344X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Sufism is a growing and global phenomenon, far from the declining relic it was once thought to be. This book brings together the work of fourteen leading experts to explore systematically the key themes of Sufism's new global presence, from Yemen to Senegal via Chicago and Sweden. The contributors look at the global spread and stance of such major actors as the Ba 'Alawiyya, the 'Afropolitan' Tijaniyya, and the Gülen Movement. They map global Sufi culture, from Rumi to rap, and ask how global Sufism accommodates different and contradictory gender practices. They examine the contested and shifting relationship between the Islamic and the universal: is Sufism the timeless and universal essence of all religions, the key to tolerance and co-existence between Muslims and non-Muslims? Or is it the purely Islamic heart of traditional and authentic practice and belief? Finally, the book turns to politics. States and political actors in the West and in the Muslim world are using the mantle and language of Sufism to promote their objectives, while Sufis are building alliances with them against common enemies. This raises the difficult question of whether Sufis are defending Islam against extremism, supporting despotism against democracy, or perhaps doing both.

Jewish-Muslim Interactions

Jewish-Muslim Interactions PDF Author: Samuel Sami Everett
Publisher: Francophone Postcolonial Studi
ISBN: 178962133X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
This volume analyses Jewish-Muslim interactions across North Africa and France in the 20th and 21st centuries, through an examination of performance culture, across the genres of theatre, music, film, art, and stand-up. We explore influence and cooperation between Jewish and Muslim performers from Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and diaspora communities in France.

African Languages, Literatures, and Postcolonial Modernity

African Languages, Literatures, and Postcolonial Modernity PDF Author: Samba Camara
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527559009
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
This book offers a fresh look into the “languages of postcolonial modernity” in Africa and, to a lesser degree, its diaspora. It foregrounds the notion of postcolonial modernity in reference to modernization as experienced in the postcolony and its contemporary legacies, and investigates how African languages and literatures, both as means of communication and as instruments of cultural agency, have embodied and mediated modernity. Each chapter grapples with the literary or linguistic dimensions of postcolonial modernity as portrayed in African novels, film, poetry or popular music or as embodied in African and Afro-diasporic languages and dialects. The chapters also reveal how literature and language, respectively, document and embody discourses, phenomena, histories, ideologies, and beliefs that resulted from the legacies of colonialism.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Muslims and Popular Culture

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Muslims and Popular Culture PDF Author: Hussein Rashid
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350145416
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Muslims and Popular Culture illustrates how Muslims participate in a broad spectrum of activities. Moving beyond a framework that emphasizes ritual, legal, historical, or theological issues, this book speaks to how Muslims live in the world, in relation to their religion and the realities of the world around them. The international team of contributors provide in-depth analysis that chronicles Islamic cultural products in regional and transnational contexts, explores dominant and emerging theories about popularization, and offers provocations in the field of religion and popular culture. The handbook is structured in six parts: spaces; appetites; performances; readings; visions; and communities. The book explores a variety of Muslim societies and communities within the last 100 years, ranging from the Islamic presence in Latin American architecture to Muslim Anglophone hip-hop, and Muslims in modern Indian theatre.

Tales of a Modern Sufi

Tales of a Modern Sufi PDF Author: Nevit O. Ergin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1594779295
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
A collection of modern Sufi tales by renowned Rumi translator and Sufi initiate Nevit Ergin • Contains 24 deceptively simple stories that invoke questioning and awareness • By the renowned English translator of Rumi’s complete Divan-i Kebir Sufi stories have traditionally been a means of opening a portal that allows us to advance from our basic perceptions into states of extraordinary awareness. This collection of deceptively simple stories by renowned Rumi translator and Sufi Nevit Ergin has the ability to remove readers’ complacent sense of self and identity and to expand their ordinary awareness of reality from every possible direction. In his stories the primrose path we travel suddenly turns into a trickster’s hall of mirrors where we learn that we are not children of Adam and Eve so much as children of our perceptions. The protagonists and antagonists of these stories are constantly morphing and exchanging places. They exist in a world where individuals are stalked by a cricket that is an “invisible monster with the face of a demon,” confront the ambiguous burden of ridding oneself of one’s own corpse, and discover the “invisible fence of reality” existing in the layers of a discarded piece of art. The symbols in these stories are booby traps designed to release the mind from the sense of its own importance and awaken the realization that “if you refuse to be born, you cannot die.” Blind faith, the author says, has proved itself incapable of producing wisdom, tolerance, or world peace. This is because the answers to humanity’s problems lie beyond our ordinary perception and require love and ecstasy to be made visible. Our thirst for wisdom and understanding must go to the fountain of universal truth. These stories provide water from that fountain.

The Sufi Path of Annihilation

The Sufi Path of Annihilation PDF Author: Nevit O. Ergin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1620552752
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
An exploration of the profound Sufi practice of Itlak Yolu • Examines the three main facets of this practice: zikr or breathing exercises, fasting, and mental suffering • Shares new Sufi parables, the sayings of Sufi master Hasan Lutfi Shushud, and Rumi’s philosophy on annihilation of the Self • Reveals how once the Self is annihilated higher levels of perception are reached In this exploration of the profound spiritual practice of Itlak Yolu, the Sufi path of annihilation, Nevit Ergin examines the three main facets of this path: zikr or breathing exercises, fasting, and mental suffering. Sharing experiences and discussions with Hasan Lutfi Shushud, renowned Sufi saint and final guide of Gurdjieff’s disciple J. G. Bennett, the author illustrates how suffering--“the searing fire of contrition”--is the most effective instrument of spiritual progress, for it is suffering that burns the Self. He explains how faithful practice of zikr and fasting will bring on this kind of suffering when the student is ready and will make the suffering tolerable. He shows how once the Self is annihilated higher levels of perception take hold and one finds oneself on the path to sainthood and immortality. Interwoven throughout with sayings by Shushud, Sufi parables, and poems by Rumi, Ergin shares the unique Itlak perspective on the major questions of every seeker: the true nature of love and religion, life and death, and other major spiritual questions. The book also includes an essay on annihilation and absence in Rumi’s philosophy and biographical portraits of Hasan Lufti Shushud by other aspirants who met with him.

Music, Sound, and Architecture in Islam

Music, Sound, and Architecture in Islam PDF Author: Michael Frishkopf
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 147731248X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Tracing the connections between music making and built space in both historical and contemporary times, Music, Sound, and Architecture in Islam brings together domains of intellectual reflection that have rarely been in dialogue to promote a greater understanding of the centrality of sound production in constructed environments in Muslim religious and cultural expression. Representing the fields of ethnomusicology, anthropology, art history, architecture, history of architecture, religious studies, and Islamic studies, the volume's contributors consider sonic performances ranging from poetry recitation to art, folk, popular, and ritual musics—as well as religious expressions that are not usually labeled as "music" from an Islamic perspective—in relation to monumental, vernacular, ephemeral, and landscape architectures; interior design; decoration and furniture; urban planning; and geography. Underscoring the intimate relationship between traditional Muslim sonic performances, such as the recitation of the Qur'an or devotional songs, and conventional Muslim architectural spaces, from mosques and Sufi shrines to historic aristocratic villas, gardens, and gymnasiums, the book reveals Islam as an ideal site for investigating the relationship between sound and architecture, which in turn proves to be an innovative and significant angle from which to explore Muslim cultures.

Muslim Rap, Halal Soaps, and Revolutionary Theater

Muslim Rap, Halal Soaps, and Revolutionary Theater PDF Author: Karin van Nieuwkerk
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292742592
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
From "green" pop and "clean" cinema to halal songs, Islamic soaps, Muslim rap, Islamist fantasy serials, and Suficized music, the performing arts have become popular and potent avenues for Islamic piety movements, politically engaged Islamists, Islamic states, and moderate believers to propagate their religio-ethical beliefs. Muslim Rap, Halal Soaps, and Revolutionary Theater is the first book that explores this vital intersection between artistic production and Islamic discourse in the Muslim world. The contributors to this volume investigate the historical and structural conditions that impede or facilitate the emergence of a "post-Islamist" cultural sphere. They discuss the development of religious sensibilities among audiences, which increasingly include the well-to-do and the educated young, as well as the emergence of a local and global religious market. At the heart of these essays is an examination of the intersection between cultural politics, performing art, and religion, addressing such questions as where, how, and why pop culture and performing arts have been turned into a religious mission, and whether it is possible to develop a new Islamic aesthetic that is balanced with religious sensibilities. As we read about young Muslims and their quest for a "cool Islam" in music, their struggle to quell their stigmatized status, or the collision of morals and the marketplace in the arts, a vivid, varied new perspective on Muslim culture emerges.

Breaking Bread, Breaking Beats

Breaking Bread, Breaking Beats PDF Author: CERCL Writing Collective
Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Publishers
ISBN: 0800699262
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
In this innovative project, ten individuals write as one voice to illuminate the ways that Hip-Hop and the Black Church agree, disagree, and inform each other on key topics. This book grows out of the popular religion and Hip-Hop course offered at Rice University by Dr. Anthony Pinn and Bernard 'Bun B' Freeman. Like the course, the book offers engaging insights into one of the most important musical genres and reflects on its broad cultural impact.