Hardcore Muslims: Islamic Themes in Turkish Rap in Diaspora and in the Homeland

Abstract

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Islam has, according to various estimates, between 900 million and 1.4 billion adherents in more than fifty countries, making it the second-largest religion in the world. Rap music and hip-hop youth culture have also, in their brief history, achieved global status, as the essays in Tony Mitchell's edited volume Global Noise (2001b) illustrate. It is perhaps not surprising that the long-standing world religion Islam and the more recently global musical genre of rap have intersected in various ways. Both the religion and the musical genre have spread over the globe as people and ideas move around, and people use the material and expressive resources at their disposal in practices of identity construction. It is not necessarily contradictory or paradoxical that some people may find it useful and compelling to imagine their identities using both Islam and rap music.