An Islamic
Sound with a Western Flavor
Shaheed GC makes music for young Muslims.
By Julia Roller
CAPE TOWN, South Africa — Tucked away in a tiny room in a white house on the beach in Muizenberg, a resort town in the troubled Cape Flats, Black Beach Music is an unlikely recording studio. But Shaheed GC is an even more unlikely rapper. Dressed in a black vest and a crisp white button-down shirt with wire-rim glasses sitting on his serious face, Shaheed looks more like a scholar than a musician. Yet he bends over the computer with a practiced air as it plays tracks from his three year music project: a mix of rap, reggae and rhythm & blues.
Still to be commercially released, his album is already raising eyebrows in the South African Muslim world — not because his music includes foul language or sexual images but because Shaheed, a devout Muslim convert, dares to rap about Islam and does it in Arabic, the traditional language of Islam.
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Shaheed GC takes a break at his studio, Black Beach Music, near the beach in Muizenberg. Photo by Julia Roller. |
"They say that my music is haraam (forbidden), but I speak from the holy Q'uran," he sings to steel drums accompaniment in "Blood from a Rock," a song about his self-given mission: translating Islam into "the language of the day."
Twenty-one year old Shaheed touts himself as the first man to put Muslim lyrics to this style of music.
"In Islamic circles this has never been done before that I know of," he said. "It's definitely a first in this part of the world."
Breaking new ground isn't a virtue within Islam, a religious tradition known for its resistance to change. But South Africa is itself such a diverse place that unusual cultural combinations are inevitable. Cape Town's landscape is a complicated tapestry of influences, from "Indian" religions such as Hinduism and Islam to native Zulu and Khosa traditions. Combinations like mosque and music, scarf and Snoop, turban and Tupac hardly raise an eyebrow.
In Shaheed's hometown, the Cape Flats area that surrounds Cape Town, the influence of both rap and Islam are visible. A quick glance around the poverty-stricken Cape Flats area reveals myriad images of the American rap music scene. Skillfully crafted graffiti images pay homage to such rappers as Snoop Doggy Dogg and Tupac Shakur. Even the names of local gangs reflect this dynamic: Junior MAFIA, the Dogg Pound, the Young Americans. This poor "coloured", or mixed-race area, is also at least 80 percent Muslim, evident by the head scarves and the omnipresent mosques.
Like almost every conflict in Apartheid-haunted South Africa, the conflict over Shaheed's sounds comes down to race. Islam has long been viewed as an "Indian" or "Malay" religion in South Africa, yet many of its most faithful adherents are mixed-race, especially in the Cape Town area. Black and mixed-race South Africans are expected to be Christian, even looked down upon for practicing an "Indian" religion. Even within Islam, a religion meant to unify, there are few, if any, traces of African influence. The only Muslim music currently available is either of Middle Eastern or Malaysian origins. These Indian-sounding kassidehs, "Odes to the Prophet", hold little appeal for self-described "young Western Muslims" like Shaheed.
"To me it sounds Hawaiian. It's listening music for the old folks," said Shaheed. "The young folks don't have anything to listen to."
So Shaheed decided to talk about Islam in rap, a language his young listeners understand.
His method is to take a couple of verses of the Q'uran and sing about them. Shaheed's practically a one-man band, doing all his own background vocals, instrumentation and production, except for a few percussion parts and one duet with a female vocalist.
His songs range from "Sweet Release", a bubble-gum sounding pop song about prayer with lyrics like "Five times a day I slip away" to "Full Moon", the unique sound of Arabic rap with minimal guitar background. The sheer diversity of his songs is astounding.
He does not quote the Q'uran or sing in Arabic (although he does rap in Arabic). Although his critics claim that music is forbidden in Islam, Shaheed says only the misuse of music is forbidden. And wouldn't it be better for Muslim youth to listen to his message based on the Q'uran rather than secular music?
Yet 20-year-old Maseeha Gangat of Johannesburg said she would never buy such a CD, despite its message.
"It isn't allowed," said Gangat, who calls herself a Muslim Puritan. "Islam doesn't allow instruments... We believe music breaks down your spirit. It breaks you slowly inside."
It's a reasonable notion to Gangat, whose roots are Middle Eastern rather than African. She believes that music can prevent Muslims from praising Allah. But it seems that her real fear is change within Islam.
"If you find this loophole now, then you're kind of breaking down the whole concept and then it's gone," she said. "Twenty years from now we'll have some studio company saying everything is fine as long as you preach Islam. He's doing more harm than good."
When asked about kassidehs, Gangat has a different opinion.
"That's not music," she said. "They sound like singing, but you are singing from your heart, praising Allah. It sounds like music, but it's not."
"This is a real double standard," said Ebrahim Moosa, former head of Islamic Studies at the University of Cape Town. "South African Islam is predominantly of Indian and Malay background and they're not giving anything to the African converts."
Shaheed originally viewed Islam as an Indians-only religion. Growing up Christian in the predominantly Indian city of Durban, he had only contempt for Islam. As a member of the mixed-race (coloured) class, Shaheed saw Islam as the faith of those Indian men who employed and exploited his brothers. All he knew about Islamic beliefs was that he was irritated by the call to prayer that reverberated three times daily through predominantly Muslim Durban.
"I was coloured," he said. "I was brought up always living a neighborhood away from Indians. So apartheid really messed me up."
But one day, Shaheed came across the Q'uran and eagerly dove into it, planning to "cut it up" the way he had cut up the Bible a few years earlier. Instead, he became captivated.
"I couldn't do anything else," he said. "I became saturated. I ate, slept, breathed it."
It is more than this captivation with the message of the Q'uran that Shaheed is bringing to his music; he's also bringing a long-absent African influence to Islam.
"He's providing a legitimate cultural background," said Moosa. "This guy's trying to get a message across."
Ideas about Islam's prohibition of music are mostly tradition, and few Muslims can cite a specific verse. But their ideas do come from certain interpretations of the Q'uran. Verse 31:6 states in a Saudi Arabian translation to beware of "idle tales [music,singing]." Other translations, however, only say "idle tales" and do not mention music or song.
"The debate is confined to scholarship," said Rashied Omar, head of the Claremont Mosque. "I don't really think that the debate is at the level of ordinary Muslims."
And scholastically speaking, Omar approves of music.
"It's not true that music can take you away from God," he said. "It's understood that in Sufi traditions they use music to worship."
Omar's daughters have a rough copy of Shaheed's music and listen to it as well as popular music with their father's approval.
"What I tell my daughters is that it's fine as long as it doesn't interfere with their schoolwork," he said, as Eiffel 65's club song "Blue" blasted in the background from his daughter's room.
Like Omar's daughters, many Muslim teens in Cape Town have heard of Shaheed and support his music, despite the fact that his album has yet to be released.
"I would buy it," said Rahdia Khan, 17, who works at the local Radio 786, a Muslim community station. "It's good and I think he's an inspiration for a 21-year-old."
She points out that Radio 786 already plays kassidehs, many of which have instrumental accompaniment.
Cape Town, home to Khan and Shaheed and the musical center of South Africa, is a more accepting environment than Durban and Johannesburg.
"The Cape Town community is unique in that we have a strong musical tradition," said Omar. "The original Muslims in South Africa were slaves, and singing was an essential part of expressing their aspirations and dreams."
Musical festivals like the Malay Choirs and the Coon Carnivals in which Muslim singing groups compete in full costume have blurred the line between Islam and music in Cape Town, explains Omar. Jazz musicians like Abdullah Ibrahim, also known as Dollar Brand, and Hotep Idris Galeta have come out of this tradition.
But even in the musically tolerant Cape Town, Muslims are wary of Shaheed's music. Muslim community radio station Voice of the Cape refuses to play some of Shaheed's music on the air because he raps in Arabic.
"Arabic is somehow a holy language that you shouldn't use in any other way, but in one of the songs I rap in Arabic, and Voice of the Cape is not comfortable with that," said Shaheed. "'All things are one' has also raised some eyebrows because a man and a woman are singing together."
In the mostly Indian Muslim communities in Johannesburg and Durban, local Muslims are sure to disapprove of all of Shaheed's music.
Johannesburg shopkeeper Yoonus Essop is quick to say that all music is forbidden in Islam, but when asked about the song playing on his store radio, he quickly relents.
"Well, this is okay," he said about the kassideh on the radio. "Anything that shakes you up, makes you dance, that is haarem. Haarem is haarem."
Even Shaheed believes dancing to his music would be inappropriate, Shaheed says he would refuse to let his music be played in a disco.
"I've tried to make it listening music," he said. "I've tried to make it difficult to dance to."
But the music is danceable; it's catchy. Some of the songs are reminiscent of American pop Christian groups like Jars of Clay.
And this, according to Rashied Omar of the Claremont Mosque, one of Shaheed's mentors, is the problem with Shaheed's music. Shaheed shouldn't be trying to convert non-Muslims, Omar said.
"Just like there are Bible thumpers in Christianity, he doesn't want me to be a Q'uran thumper," said Shaheed.
But at this point, predictions about the future of his music are mere speculation.
"This is something really new, and it has the potential to be a big success and also a really big flop," admitted Shaheed.