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Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture
Pantheon
March 2014
On Sale: March 4, 2014
432 pages ISBN: 0375424903 EAN: 9780375424908 Kindle: B00F1W0D9K Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
This fascinating, timely, and important book on the
connection between music and political activism among Muslim
youth around the world looks at how hip-hop, jazz, and
reggae, along with Andalusian and Gnawa music, have become a
means of building community and expressing protest in the
face of the West’s policies in the War on Terror. Hisham
Aidi interviews musicians and activists, and reports from
music festivals and concerts in the United States, Europe,
North Africa, and South America, to give us an up-close
sense of the identities and art forms of urban Muslim
youth. We see how the current cultural and
political turmoil in Europe’s urban periphery echoes that
moment in the 1910s when Islamic movements began appearing
among African-Americans in northern American cities, and how
the Black Freedom Movement and the words of Malcolm X have
inspired the increasing racialization and radicalization of
young Muslims today. More unexpected is how the United
States and some of its allies have used hip-hop and Sufi
music to try to deradicalize Muslim youth
abroad. Aidi’s interviews with jazz musicians
who embraced Islam in the post–World War II years and took
their music to Europe and Africa recall the 1920s, when jazz
inspired cultural ferment in Europe and North Africa. And
his conversations with the last of the great Algerian
Andalusi musicians, who migrated to Paris’s Latin Quarter
after the outbreak of the Algerian War in 1954, speak for
the musical symbiosis between Muslims and Jews in the kasbah
that attracted the attention of the great anticolonial
thinker Frantz Fanon. Illuminating and
groundbreaking, Rebel Music takes the pulse of the
phenomenon of this new youth culture and reveals not only
the rich historical context from which it is drawn but also
how it can foretell future social and political change.
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