Gangsta tales, culture, Christianity, American Islam and the re-formation of Muslim identities in black American hip-hop music: Scarface

Abstract

This paper explores the role of the religion of Islam as a site from which black American singers have drawn cultural resources to mould enduring identities of the self and black community. The paper explores some songs by Scarface, the black American artist who has accepted religious hybridity as the condition of possibility for emerging personal and collective black communities’ identities in a globalised cultural context. The songs of Scarface have been sampled because they all proclaim a relation with Islam, whether in practice or through the songs created. Therefore, purposive sampling has been used as the method or unit of analysis. However, there is also the academic debate to be addressed in the paper, and this relates to how religion has structured and filtered the experiences of American hip-hop artists; its converse also relates to how the singers have selectively appropriated some concepts from Islam and transformed them in their composition to arrive at new levels of defining the self within the black communities using the cultural and spiritual grip provided by Islam and Christian values.