By BETH WINEGARNER

A decade or so ago, when Columbia University lecturer Hisham Aidi worked as a journalist covering youth culture in New York's Harlem and the Bronx, he discovered that Muslim kids from around the world were making pilgrimages to what Aidi calls "the Mecca of hip-hop": the Bronx, where the genre was arguably born. They would come in order to meet some of the genre's founders, including Afrika Bambaataa and DJ Kool Herc; to trace the pathways of the place where hip-hop and Islam first mingled; and to visit the grave of Malcolm X, whose Islam-inspired messages of black empowerment had found a new voice in the music.

Those pilgrimages helped give rise to Aidi's new book, "Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture." His book provides an intense tour of some of Islam's most fertile zones in America, Europe, and the Middle East -- places teeming with music, faith, ideas and, frequently, the tension between popular culture and the messages of conservative Muslim leaders. Aidi is in the Bay Area as a part of UC Berkeley's Fifth Annual Conference on Islamophobia Studies. He's featured on a panel titled "Islamophobia in Australia, Austria, Belgium, and the UK" that runs from 11 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. on Saturday, April 19 at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law.

Although music isn't explicitly mentioned in the Quran, "there is a centuries-old debate of whether music is permissible in Islam," Aidi told me in an email interview earlier this month. Many factions, including literalists, Sufi scholars, and others, have weighed in. But these days, it's the conservative Salafis who are most well-known for opposing music, and even banning it outright. In other countries, such as Iran, pop music in all forms has been outlawed, Aidi says.

Meanwhile, Aidi notes that Muslims in Africa, the Middle East, and America are constantly inventing new ways to fuse Islamic ideas with genres such as jazz, punk, and heavy metal. For most Muslims, the act of making music isn't itself rebellious; the book's title instead is a reference to the album from Bob Marley, one of the patron saints of an Islamic reggae style known as Gnawa. This style is connected with a Moroccan Sufi order that is, in turn, aligned with the descendants of formerly enslaved West Africans. Gnawa aims to heal people who are possessed by the jinn -- by summoning beneficent spirits and saints. Aidi says, in Gnawa, Marley himself is included among those spirits who can heal.

"Rebel Music" also digs into the world of Muslim punk, a genre born from Michael Muhammad Knight's 2003 novel "Taqwacores." In true punk fashion, taqwacore band Kominas went after popular Sufi-rock band Junoon -- which itself had once been banned in Pakistan for "belittling the concept of the ideology of Pakistan" -- after Junoon won favor with heads of state in the Middle East and the West. Kominas penned two songs slamming Junoon, "I Want a Blowjob" and "I Want a Handjob." The musicians in Kominas ran into their own trouble with the government of Pakistan, which took issue with their anarchism and agnosticism.

The tangled alliances between popular music and Islam are no more apparent than in the world of hip-hop, whose stories are woven throughout "Rebel Music." Aldi writes that hip-hop is the music of choice among many Muslim youth across the world, for its entertainment value , as well as its ability to communicate Islamic ideas. That latter aspect is so powerful, in fact, that the U.S. State Department in 2005 began sending "hip-hop envoys" to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East in an effort to change the perception that Muslims in the U.S. are oppressed. Meanwhile, pop and hip-hop artists in the West have occasionally co-opted Islamic symbolism in their work -- Lil' Kim wearing a burka while saying "Fuck Afghanistan" or 50 Cent's song "Ghetto Qu'ran."

"The relationship between Islam and hip-hop is complex and dynamic," Aidi says. It appeals to Muslim youth, in particular, because of its many Islamic references, which in turn come from its urban-American roots. "Hip-hop disseminates African American Islam the way reggae broadcasted rastafarianism in the 1970s. So rap introduces non-Muslim youth to Islam, and Muslim youth to black history, transforming cultures and identities." To illustrate his point, Aidi has provided SF Weekly with an annotated playlist.

MC Koringa - "Dana Sensual"

This is the funk soundtrack to Brazilian telenovela Salve Jorge, which addresses relations between Brazil and Turkey and caused a mania for Turkish things in Brazil.

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Rebel Music Author Hisham Aidi on the Relationship Between Hip-Hop and Islam