Race, Faith and Community in Contemporary Britain Essays on Black, African, and African Caribbean Muslims in the UK PROUDLY MUSLIM & BLACK REPORT 2022

Despite the overt institutional exclusion, the Black Muslim community in Britain has actively
sought to maintain and express their history, heritage and faith through many artforms. In the
UK, various forms of music and poetry have been a popular way to communicate and preserve
not only customs, religion and culture but also express social and political discontentment.
Whilst, vocal artists such as Pearls of Islam, Sukina Douglas, Mohammed Yahya, and Ahmed
Ikhlas choose the combination of music, instruments and poetry to convey a message of
spirituality and faith, it has been the genre of rap and hip-hop music that has really been at the
fore of connecting the African and Black Caribbean Islamic identity with that of their British
identity (South, 2017). The relationship is explained by a founding member of the hip-hop
group Mecca2Medina which was established in 1996 by Rakin Fetuga.
Where other people were just talking random stuff at the time, we were dealing with [Islamic]
knowledge because we had that as our background. And Mecca2Medina was great because
it helped and inspired lots of people, lots of women were happy, and mothers were happy
because we were talking about women’s rights in those days. And we wasn’t scared to tackle
the issues. Female circumcision, they’re just talking about that now, honour killing, all these
kind of issues. We talked about those years ago. These were just the issues that we picked
up. These were the issues, anything that we saw that were wrong with the community, the
racism, we used to talk about it (Fetuga, 2018).
However, as much as music is an intrinsic part of the community in terms of expression of
faith, history and heritage, it is also at the fore for criticism from within the wider Muslim
community. According to Muneera Pilgrim, Cultural Producer and one-half of the hip-hop duo
Poetic Pilgrimage:
Hip-hop is intrinsically Black music. When you look at its genesis, it goes back to West
Africa and the tradition of storytellers. But, there’s this idea within some non-Black Muslim
communities that anything that comes from Black culture is inherently bad or evil, almost
like our particular form of music is not acceptable among Muslims. For some people, it’s not
that music is haram (prohibited) - although I can understand people who think that, it’s that
they don’t like the culture it comes from (Khan, 2018).
In recent years, Warsan Shire, Rakaya Fetuga, Momtaza Mehri, and the professional basketball
player Asma Elbadwi have brought the diverse lived experience of the community into the
mainstream using poetry while gaining national recognition through various high-profile
awards. The poems are explicit and detailed stories, of migration, racism, discrimination
and politics. They celebrate race and characteristics of unique heritage, with the trajectory
and intersection of their history with British politics and social constructs, which once past
generations would hide in fear of seeming ungrateful for their place in their new homeland.
As a consequence of migration and adaptation of storytelling, diasporic communities in Britain
have continued the tradition of using many forms of artistic expression to convey and preserve
their history and heritage. For more than twenty years, the Khayaal Theatre based in Luton,
has used the theatrical stage to perform and share the wisdom in stories of Muslim heritage
from across the world to audiences from school children to politicians and heads of state.
More recently, performers such as Wale Hassan and Alim Kamara are using storytelling to
communicate traditional stories from Africa and the Caribbean to connect the diaspora to the
heritage of their ancestral homelands in school workshops.
Also, artists of a traditional nature, photographers and filmmakers such as Sheila Nortley,
Ejatu Shaw, Amaal Said, Latifat Obanigba and Wasi Daniju, although still poorly represented
in mainstream galleries (Larbi, 2020), are using their artistic talent to highlight and document
history and heritage through traditional fine art, photography, film and mixed media to produce
works that reflect the artists’ personal interpretation of their heritage and their place in the
world.
The future of documenting Black Muslim history in Britain now, more than ever, is one of selfempowerment.
Social media has removed barriers and constraints found within traditional
organisations and has enabled individuals, Black-led organisations and community groups to
take charge of telling their own narrative. Since 2017, Black Muslim-led initiatives such as Black
and Muslim in Britain, Mustafa Briggs, See My Dunya, Black Muslim Forum, Black Muslim Awards,
Mostly-Lit, Black Muslim Girl and Black Muslim Festival have developed projects and platforms
that are connecting and exploring the ethnic diversity of the community and documenting
the everyday experiences of Black Muslims in Britain. Even more importantly, they are able
to create diverse ‘Black-only’ spaces, connecting usually disparate Black communities and
Mecca2Medina
Muneera Pilgrim
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