Introduction

The Homeland Security officer at JFK airport flipped through the pages of my British passport. After noticing my birthplace was Karachi, he asked, ‘When was the last time you went to Pakistan?’ ‘In 1997, for my brother's wedding’, I replied. ‘Was it a shotgun wedding?’ he guffawed. I tried to grin. ‘Are you Pakistani?’ he asked. ‘I'm a British citizen’, I said. ‘Are you a Muslim?’ he asked. ‘I'm British’, I reiterated. ‘Do you identify as Pakistani Muslim? Are you a Pakistani?’ His voice was more insistent now. ‘I can put you in the group for secondary screening. Do you identify as Pakistani?’ In my befuddlement I was dumbstruck for a few seconds. All I could hear in my head was the beat of Salt ’n’ Pepa's ‘Push it’ with M.I.A.’s rap ‘Ain't that you with the Muslims?’ The track ‘Sunshowers’ had recently gone viral on the mixtape Piracy Funds Terrorism Volume 1. The way M.I.A. sang ‘Muslims’ as ‘Muzalimz’ sounded like the Homeland Security officer's pronunciation.

It's much harder for me to speak as Muslim than to listen as Muslim. My parents brought me up in England in an Islamic household where we were taught to recite the Quran, pray five times a day and fast during Ramadan. However, as a lapsed, non-religious middle-aged adult, I am and I am not a Muslim. That ambivalence and ambiguity are allowed for in my musical listening. I can recognise and navigate Muslim experiences through music, which allows me to inhabit a relatively open, fluid and contradictory cultural Muslim-ness. The sounds, words and images of hip hop, rock, pop and electronica may be explicit about Muslim people and places. However, much of the music does not mention Muslims or Islam. Instead it evokes emotions and affects that gel with recent Muslim experiences and ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams Reference Williams1977). Listening from a particular point of audition makes it Muslim, but called upon to speak out about what kind of Muslim, lapsed Muslim or unbeliever I might be, I am relatively inarticulate.

Even before the question of music, the idea of the Muslim seems impossible to martial, hugely diverse and contested as it is. You might not identify yourself as Muslim or identification may be fleeting rather than constant. You could be hailed and herded as Muslim with little or no choice. The Muslim is an ethnic category and racial profile, not only a designation of religious faith. After 9/11 many of us have become Muslim whether we wanted to or not, whatever our relationships with other Muslims or Islam. The pressure to be legible, audible and visible in prescribed ways has intensified from many directions – those suspicious of Muslims and Islam, and those who are advocates for them. Are you a secular, moderate, religious, conservative or radicalised Muslim? Are you integrated or assimilated? Do you make sufficient efforts to distance yourself publicly from extremist views and condemn all acts of Islamist terrorism? Do you wear hijab or a beard? Do you follow the tenets of such-and-such Islamic doctrine? Rounding up the usual suspects generates shared sentiments, even if all that binds us is the fact that we're in the same Islamophobic prison-house or database, or boxed-in or disavowed by Islamic orthodoxies and Islamists.

Music listening offers spaces to explore the limits of identities and the possibilities of alternative ways of being. You can pick and choose to an extent, but your agency is limited. Music hails you despite yourself. Thankfully, taken-for-granted relationships between musical sounds and cultural identities are less common today in popular music studies. The concept of homology, crucial to British cultural studies research on youth subcultures during the 1970s and 1980s, has lost its force (Hall and Jefferson Reference Hall and Jefferson1976; Hebdige Reference Hebdige1979). We understand sounds as offering a range of identifications, some of which can unfix and transform social categories. Simon Frith (Reference Frith1993) distilled this position in one of his memorable columns (appropriately titled ‘I am what I am’, after a Gloria Gaynor record): ‘the best studies of popular music don't try to pin-down sounds according to existing social maps, but rather allow the music to make its own political argument, to redraw social contours’ (p. 82). He confessed that his own ‘emotional and sensual identity … as a straight man’ was primarily a result of his engagement with ‘soul music, women's voices, and gay disco’ (p. 82). Yet ethnic epithets continue to mark musicians as either authentic or unusual outsiders for crossing the boundaries of racialised music styles (Negus and Roman-Velázquez Reference Negus and Roman-Velázquez2002). Afropunk has currency because it redresses the dominant whiteness of punk, even though Poly Styrene and Bad Brains are major figures in the history of the genre. Hip hop needs the qualifier Muslim hip hop, even though Muslims and Islam have long been integral to it.

The turn to affect in cultural studies approaches to music tempers some of the more rigid identity discourses attached to music (Gilbert Reference Gilbert2004; Hesmondhalgh Reference Hesmondhalgh2013; Thompson and Biddle Reference Thompson and Biddle2013). Music is partly non-discursive, so emotions, moods, feelings are key to understanding its power. Yet music is still representational and steeped in social discourses. In shifting our emphasis to the transmission of affects rather than identity categories, we shouldn't lose sight of the ‘stickiness’ of certain emotions as they adhere to particular social groups (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2004; Muñoz Reference Muñoz2000). Music cultures in ‘the West’ circulate some recognisably transnational Muslim affects. Non-Muslims may be just as effective in circulating these non-exclusive Muslim affects. Affects can be shared across constituencies. They are not independent from cognition and discourses (Wetherell, Reference Wetherell2013). Some of these feelings centre on particular representations, and others are less object-oriented moods. Music enacts and enables affective attunements that can become radical counter-moods and foster political agency (Flatley, Reference Flatley2012). To begin with, we can at least acknowledge some distinctive ‘Muslim’ affects as they circulate in contemporary music culture.

As a young Muslim I was taught that I belonged to the ummah, a global community of Muslims with shared values and practices that operates like a diaspora (Sayyid Reference Sayyid and Hesse2000; Cooke and Lawrence Reference Cooke and Lawrence2005). Muslims are used to hearing accounts of failed states and reminded of futures that were not to be. The lavishly packaged and annotated reissues and compilations of vintage Iraqi and Iranian pop, Turkish disco, Afghani psych and Pakistani rock on labels such as Sublime Frequencies are inevitably filtered through the fog of recent wars in the Muslim world. Their photographs and text, sometimes even their titles, give us a world that seems forever lost. The historical moment of national development and secular modernity marked by a Western-influenced pop music was disassembled by Islamist revolutions and theocratic regimes. Young women that once wore skirts and hip huggers are now in hijab. Young men who were more likely to be at the disco or learning Hank Marvin guitar licks are now wannabe mullahs. The faces and poses of now silent or executed musicians grace gatefold sleeves (Various Artists, 2011). These vinyl products are steeped in the aching nostalgia of Muslim postcolonial melancholy, even if at the same time, they contribute to an archive that might challenge Western histories of global popular music.

Another cluster of sentiments that stitches Muslims together transnationally is solidarity with the Palestinians. The electronic music of Muslimgauze – for example, Salaam Alekum, Bastard (1995) with its synth washes, jarring volume changes, distortions to ‘ethnic’ percussion, shards of muffled and often incomprehensible sampled Arabic vocals – transmits the anger and disgust associated with American, European and Israeli policies in the Muslim world. When I first heard this music, I thought it was probably a British Muslim artist with a political axe to grind. Muslimgauze turned out to be an irreligious white man (Bryn Jones) from Salford, England who recorded so much music in his bedroom studio that new releases continue to emerge long after his death in 1999. He had never travelled to the Middle East. Criticising him for his digital Orientalism does not engage fully with its power to articulate a structure of feeling that have been recognised by Muslim writers (Khider Reference Khider2014; Ali Reference Ali2016). Muslimgauze's album titles such as The Rape of Palestine (1988), United States of Islam (1989), Vote Hezbollah (1993) and many photos of veiled women and girls with guns as cover art indicate a single-minded industrial music provocateur with slogans ready to hand (Taylor Reference Taylor2001, p. 141). Jones set out his stall with little ambiguity, stating in a letter to a fanzine editor: ‘The principal influence behind Muslimgauze is the political facts of the Middle-East, though support of the P.L.O. is the main backbone. There are no musical influences, only political facts and figureheads e.g. Arrafat (sic), Gadaffi, Bhutto, Khaled, etc. Such things are the starting point from which Muslimgauze music is taken’ (Khider Reference Khider2014, p. 107). Despite this tunnel vision, the music does incorporate Arabic and South Asian influences, and is open to wider interpretations. What has largely gone unremarked in commentary about Muslimgauze is Jones's black humour in some of his Orientalist song titles, possibly inadvertent, although I detect a wry northern English sensibility in titles such as ‘Girl who lived inside a sitar’ from Tandoori Dog (1998), ‘Enchante, Monsieur’ from Vampires of Tehran (1998) and Iranian Female Olympic Table Tennis Team Theme (1999). Orientalist perspectives on the Muslim world surround Western Muslims. In the West's sonic imagination, dark and foreboding chords, minor keys and noise have signified the Muslim (and particularly the Arab) world. The Orient is troubled, mysterious and unfathomable.

For artists that deploy unsettling and dissonant sounds in their work, noise has an Orientalist legacy, even as its visceral pleasures seek to transgress tuneful conventions and counter cultural racism. Mutamassik (Giulia Loli) takes her artist name from the Arabic word for ‘stronghold’ and ‘tenacity’. She combines cello, keyboards samples of Egyptian Sa'idi percussion, Baladi breakbeats and orchestration with hip hop turntablism and scratching. In her early recordings such as War Booty (2002), the music's grinding, shifting tempos and sudden explosions of sound conjure conflict zones with the pressing melodrama of Egyptian string orchestration. In their halting, broken beats and fragmented sonic journeys, albums such as That Which Death Cannot Destroy (2010), Rekkez (2012) and Symbols Follow (2015) also suggest the struggle to make buried or neglected histories and voices audible and visible. This interpretation is encouraged by Loli's sleevenotes for such tracks as ‘Dr Aida’ on Rekkez, which is dedicated to her Egyptian grandmother, who had a promising career stopped when her family took her out of medical school to be married. The clunky poetry of fanzine-style liner notes for Symbols Follow (2015) mimics the structure of much of the music:

The paucity of lyrics in many sample-based and electronic recordings places greater stress on the supporting words and images. Yet in spite of these pointers, the sound mix presents relative openness in how we might interpret these tunes, at least in comparison with the more direct lyrics and rhymes of singers and MCs.

The name Vatican Shadow is a dub echo of Muslimgauze, an influence on US musician Dominick Fernow, who works prolifically under different names for several distinctive projects in industrial music, noise and ambient electronica. Fernow often presents Vatican Shadow's murky, lo-fi techno loops live in US army uniform. A typical early release is the cassette Kneel Before Religious Icons (2010). The cover photo shows Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Palestinian-American psychiatrist in the US army who shot dead 13 military personnel and injured 30 more at Fort Hood in Texas on 5 November 2009. The titles of ominous synth tracks sound like blank pastiches of news headlines: ‘Chopper crash marines’ names released’ and ‘Worshippers at the same mosque’. Photographs of terrorists and US politicians such as George Bush and Hillary Clinton appear in the packaging of cassettes and dense collages that accompany vinyl releases. Others feature maps and symbols that resemble corporate logos or the iconography of secret societies and religious organisations. The music itself holds little pedagogical clues. With the textual information provided, the whole package suggests the impenetrability of truth behind the press images and endless cycle of media-speak about the War on Terror. The looped quality of the instrumental music implies the stasis of perpetual war. The title ‘More of the same’ on Media in the Service of Terror (2016) reinforces this feeling. The music on such recent releases continues to be glacial, but shinier in its electronic patina, as if the military–industrial–media complex churns out ever more information more efficiently but remains smoothly opaque. When describing the drive behind the project, Fernow remarked

There may be an invitation in Vatican Shadow's work to read, talk and find out more, but the drift of the music poses rather than answers questions about military conflict and terrorism; it is noteworthy that the degeneration to which Fernow refers is akin to the ‘sound of decay’ in post 9/11 music, whether it is dominated by a nostalgic hauntology or a sense of cultural exhaustion (Fisher and Flota Reference Fisher and Flota2011). This structure of feeling seems rooted in technological change and a diffuse pessimism about progressive politics in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis. However, we should also recognise the depressing ambience or undercurrent of life during wartime. Retro-tech fetishism for the hiss of tape and crackle of vinyl are brought together with an indeterminate cultural melancholy in the music of Burial (Will Bevan). Notably, ‘Come down to us’ from his Rival Dealer EP (2014) is used in the first two minutes of Adam Curtis's film Bitter Lake (2015) about the US, UK and Soviet Union's involvements and failures in Afghanistan. One of the key moments in the film involves a disabled Russian veteran in a wheelchair shouting at the other passengers on a Moscow train, ‘We've brought back Mujahideen ghosts’. Burial often sounds to me like the paranoid city the night after a terrorist attack.

Recent electronic music draws upon the modes of war on Muslims. Kuwaiti American Fatima Al Qadiri's synthetic sound with its choral pads and pinging sounds is influenced by the audio palettes of video games. Her Desert Strike EP (Reference Al Qadiri2012) takes its name from a war game released in 1992 shortly after Operation Desert Storm. Tracks such as ‘Ghost raid’ from this EP return to the desert as a haunted and haunting place. Her cover art and videos and those of label mates at Fade to Mind draw on the look and sound of computer war games in the age of shock and awe and remote drone warfare.

Elsewhere in electronic music culture, the simulations of war are pleasurable in the ‘sonic dominance’ of music indebted to Jamaican sound system culture (Henriques Reference Henriques2011). The early dubstep recordings of Shackleton (Sam Shackleton) in tracks such as ‘Hamas rule’ from Applebim & Shackleton's Soundboy's Bones Get Buried in the Dirt Vol. 2 (2006) and ‘Blood on my hands’ (inspired by the 9/11 attacks) on the Soundboy's Nuts Get Ground Up Good and Proper EP apply the pressure of bass and sub-bass frequencies for brooding intensity. No producer embraces the bass aesthetics of ‘sonic warfare’ (Goodman Reference Goodman2010) more than The Bug (Kevin Martin). Martin's Twitter and Facebook feeds often include references to the concert equipment needed to achieve heavyweight impact that will ‘destroy’ the audience as it takes masochistic pleasure in the onslaught of rhythm and bass power. These concerts and recordings such as London Zoo (2008) are theatrical assaults on our ears that seem timely when music has been used as a weapon and instrument of torture (Cusick Reference Cusick2008; Daughtry Reference Daughtry2015).

These examples from electronic music genres have enabled me to feel the wars on Muslims through the sublimation that music provides. Engaging with war through creative products is conflicted and politically questionable in certain respects. However, these multivalent and largely instrumental sounds are involved in ‘affective mapping’ (Flatley Reference Flatley2008). Such maps are not stable representations of fixed spaces, but orient the listener, so that ‘a political problem that may have been previously invisible, opaque, difficult, abstract, and above all depressing may be transformed into one that is interesting, that solicits and rewards one's attention’ (Flatley Reference Flatley2008, p. 4). Such affective maps engender ‘small temporary pockets of shared becoming’ (Kassabian Reference Kassabian2013, p. 112) and listening formations that are ‘fragile coalitions’ and ‘systems of thought and practice … in constant states of sedimentation and erosion’ (Devine Reference Devine2013, p. 167). A subjective or collective listening formation is partly constituted by the specific forms and modes of address of music genres through which ‘music may effect a redirection or a new affective coalition of the identity formations that it set itself to mediate’ (Born Reference Born2011, p. 383).

In its rhymes, rap projects states of mind and how bodies are subject to power. The line by M.I.A. (Maya Arulpgragasam), ‘Ain't that you with the Muslims?’, exemplifies how MCs have explored the position of Muslims as suspect individuals and communities. The taint of association with Muslims exists alongside the suggestion that you as a non-Muslim might also be subject to the surveillance and profiling tested and refined on Muslims. New York MC Heems (Himanshu Rai) quotes the line in ‘Benny Lava’ on the Swet Shop EP (2014), his first collaboration with British rapper Riz MC (Riz Ahmed) as the duo Swet Shop Boys. In the same tune, he goes on to criticise the stop-and-frisk programme of New York City Police. The trauma of 9/11 permeates Heems’ solo album Eat, Pray, Thug (2015). Riz's own The Post 9/11 Blues (Reference Riz2006) uses comedy to cope with anti-Muslim policies in the UK and US, listing ways in which Muslims have to watch themselves. He name-checks Belmarsh, the British prison for terrorists, and Guantánamo. Citing the London Metropolitan Police's mistaken killing of Charles De Menezes at Stockwell station soon after the July 2005 Islamist bombings on London Transport, he instructs, ‘Shave your beard if you're brown and you best salute the crown/Or they'll do you like Brazilians and shoot your ass down’.

Hip hop is a significant Muslim formation. Canonical artists such as Digable Planets, Eric B and Rakim, Gang Starr, Pete Rock & CL Smooth, Public Enemy and the Wu Tang Clan are Muslim or are influenced strongly by Islamic ideas (Alim Reference Alim2006; Mohaiemen Reference Mohaiemen and Miller2008). Every time I hear Big Daddy Kane sign off on ‘Ain't no half steppin’’ (1988) with the words ‘assalaam alaikum’, that gesture seems like an act of solidarity and inclusion. We belong to this African-American culture. Like jazz before it, hip hop is one element in the ‘Muslim International’, a set of affiliations between black liberation movements in the US and anti-colonial movements in the Third World after World War II (Daulatzai Reference Daulatzai2012). On their track ‘Auditorium’ from Mos Def's album The Ecstatic (2009), Slick Rick describes a US soldier encountering an Iraqi boy in occupied Baghdad and Mos Def (Yasiin Bey) signs off with a sample of proletarian revolutionary Ali La Pointe's dialogue from the anti-colonial film The Battle of Algiers (1966). Young Muslims today from different ethnic and national backgrounds use the pedagogical elements of hip hop and the African-American experience to understand and respond to structural racism wherever they are. They also become more aware (against many intra-Muslim prejudices) of the importance and particularity of African-American movements (such as the Nation of Islam) in the broader Islamic world (Khabeer Reference Khabeer2016). Across the globe, hip hop is an ideological battleground between MCs critical of state policies against Muslims and those compliant with them. The US State Department deploys hip hop as soft power, echoing the use of jazz in the Cold War (Aidi Reference Aidi2014).

Music genres like hip hop and punk demonstrate the heterodoxy of Muslim views and identities in condensed and spectacular fashion. As someone shaped by British punk in the 1970s but disappointed to find myself the only Asian at so many gigs, when I read Michael Muhammad Knight's novel The Taqwacores (Reference Knight2004) with its Pakistani American narrator telling the story of a Muslim punk scene in a college town, I thought, ‘Damn, I wish we'd had this when I was a teenager in the UK’. Knight's punk scene did not exist, it was only a fiction, but the novel either inspired young North American Muslims to start bands or happened to emerge at the same time that a generation of Muslims started making punk rock. Whatever the arguments about the determining factor of Knight's novels, a number of short-lived groups such as the Secret Trial Five, Al Thawra and the more longstanding Kominas created a much-hyped scene in which to negotiate their often vexed relationship with mainstream Islamic beliefs and practices, as well as to comment on anti-Muslim racism in North America, all through the profane vocabularies and dissident gestures of punk. The Kominas rewrote the Sex Pistols' ‘Anarchy in the UK’ (1976) as ‘Sharia Law in the USA’ on their Wild Nights in Guantanamo Bay (2008):

Donald Trump's nightmare scenario had a music video that sampled a sequence from an Iranian film with hijabi women riding bicycles. The video was banned from YouTube for a few months. The Kominas' song ‘Rumi was a homo (but Wahaj is a fag)’ from the same album describes the sexual encounters of the Sufi poet while berating the homophobic head of the Muslim Alliance in North America, Imam Siraj Wahaaj: ‘Rumi could fuck Shams [Rumi's beloved mystic Shamshuddin], Wahaj has to wack’. As well as pissing off imams, including those who advocate that music is haram (prohibited by Islamic law), the Kominas may be the only group that has sustained itself beyond the brief moment of Taqwacore. Their album Stereotype (2015) takes more swipes at appropriate targets, somewhat more tunefully than their early work. The song ‘4 white guys’ features the chorus ‘We're just 4 guys/We're just for white guys’. The music video includes an interview with Maher Khalil, one of the growing number of Muslims taken off American planes on the prompting of anonymous passengers.

Taqwacore never really existed as a local music culture, but managed to reach scene-like status because of the media novelty of Muslim punk and its use of Facebook and Twitter to sustain and spread its ideas (Hsu Reference Hsu2013; Murthy Reference Murthy2010). After its brief media moment, fuelled by a well-received documentary and a less critically lauded indie film adaptation of the Knight novel, Tanzila ‘Taz’ Ahmed made the point that ‘This scene, gang, virtual twitter/facebook posse or whatever it is, it is real. And though it may have publicly revolved around a couple of the bands, there's a whole mess of punks that are in the scene that aren't in bands, much like the archetypes of the book’ (Ahmed n.d.). Ahmed is a writer and activist who now hosts the monthly podcast #GoodMuslimBadMuslim with comedian Zara Noorbakhsh.

The life of Taqwacore as a media phenomenon demonstrates that listening at a distance should be as significant for ethno-studies of music as identifying racialised communities of listeners in a specific place. Media technologies provide the infrastructure for identity formation. Social media platforms have accelerated and intensified the dispersal of Muslim affects, with their everyday stories of violence, and more indignities and prejudice faced by Muslims. However, before ubiquitous social media, I made mixtapes, CDs and mp3 playlists as therapeutic exercises and audio memoirs for myself to negotiate anxieties about the wars on Muslims. Living in Auckland, I was far away from the war zones. I wasn't a member of any local Muslim community. I did not belong to a local scene or subculture that shares these musical tastes. Over the years, I have usually averaged about one of these compilations a month, but after 9/11 and leading into the early months of the Iraq war, the number grew exponentially. Assembling music into playlists generated affective maps to make sense of the crisis. In 2003, I must have averaged four mixes a month in the lead-up to and early months of the war. These tapes had ironic and corny punning titles to lend the dark content some humour – Between Iraq and a Hard Place or Rumsfeld, Saddamy and the Bush, named after the Pogues' album Rum, Sodomy and the Lash (1985). The latter, from 19 March 2003 included:

These music enabled me to process geopolitics intimately from a distance. Most of the tunes did not refer to this political context, but their titles and lyrical fragments resonated with the moment of impending doom and military disaster. The sounds gained more meanings as well as eliciting familiar pleasures. These are the coping mechanisms of the voracious music consumer drawing on DJ culture to respond to post-9/11 discombobulation.

The day after the twin towers collapsed, I distributed an email to colleagues about a peace meeting at the Quaker city mission in Auckland. The announcement called for no bombing of Afghanistan. Several senior colleagues wrote that a work email list was not the forum for political activism. A few responded in my support. But I will never forget one email from a university staff member I did not know that just said, ‘Who are you and who do you represent?’ That shook me. A few days later, after I had made the banal point (as a media academic) in a New Zealand Herald story that reporting of terrorism might lead to scapegoating of Muslims, talkback radio hosts interviewed me and said I was being ‘ridiculous’. One of the hosts, a former left-wing politician, said sarcastically on the air, ‘You have a degree in what?’ I hadn't been trained for the assault tactics of tabloid media. These incidents in quick succession encouraged me to keep stumm. This instinctive response could be supported by the more intellectual and postmodern justification that identities are unfixed and open. But really, I didn't want to put myself in the line of fire as a Muslim.

One passage from an essay by an avowedly secular scholar, Akeel Bilgrami, has remained in my back pocket for over 20 years. Bilgrami describes his response to a landlord's question (‘Are you a Muslim?’) during his search for paying guest accommodation in a predominantly Hindu neighbourhood in Delhi: ‘almost to my surprise, I heard the words “I am a Muslim” on my lips … It was clear to me that I was, without strain or artificiality a Muslim for about five minutes. That is how negotiable the concept of identity can be’ (Bilgrami Reference Bilgrami1992, p. 822). That quotation is out of my back pocket now, but frankly I am still relying on the vibrant musical cultures I've described above to sound out the troubling feelings and urgent questions for Muslims today. They reveal that there are many paths to becoming more or less Muslim.