Abstract
This article analyzes how hip-hop as a social movement influenced youth with a Muslim religious background in Austria. The study examines the influence of African American activist Malcolm X, a central figure in hip-hop culture, on young people in Austria in the 1990s, and specifically his influence on the Islamic Group of Upper Austria (IG OÖ), a social-movement organization founded in 1995. The article also explores what meaning hip-hop and Malcolm X had in the genesis of this group, focusing on syncretic identity construction and how youth from different contexts utilized hip-hop and Malcolm X's legacy to give meaning and mobility to their lives. The fusion of religion and youth culture created an alternative culture as an expression of protest against a hegemonic lifestyle and is interpreted as a struggle for recognition. Seven narrative interviews help analyze this never-before-documented history.
“Islam has been the iconic religion of hip hop … since the beginning of this complex youth music culture in New York in the 1970s.”1 So says religious studies scholar Richard Brent Turner. Hip-hop was born in New York in the 1970s but has since spread to have global influence. This spread was brought about especially through the example and activism of Malcolm X. With the diaspora for Muslims throughout Europe in recent decades, hip-hop's global reach has stretched as far as Austria. This article examines the influence of Malcolm X, a central figure in hip-hop culture, on young people in Austria in the 1990s, and specifically his influence on the Islamic Group of Upper Austria (IG OÖ), whose founders were inspired by Malcolm X to found the group in 1995.2 The focus will be on the analysis of syncretic identity construction and how youth history from different contexts utilized hip-hop and Malcolm X's legacies to give them greater meaning and mobility in their lives. The fusion of religion and youth culture together created an alternative culture as an expression of protest against a hegemonic lifestyle and is interpreted as a struggle for recognition.
Religious Movements and Youth in the Theory of Social Movements
In the literature on the theory of social movements (SMT), and despite its relevance to social structure, religion is often overlooked.3 This may be because of ethnic, transnational, and religious movements operating under the banner of fundamentalism, which is often viewed as antimodern and therefore ignored.4 Thomas Kern argues that this “hijacking of the definition of social movements … is [empirically] not justified.”5 Just as religious participants, organizations, and movements become visible as “antimovements to social and cultural transformation,” they are just as conceivable as “transformational powers (for example, the Civil Rights movement in the United States).”6 The reduction of research into Islamic movements in specialized ideological aspects has, among other things, recently been challenged, specifically from social movement theorists. Therefore, Islamic movements have been considered under the conventional rubric of social movement theory (resource mobilization, possibility structures, framing, etc.), just like other social movements.7
The category “youth” makes an appearance in most social movement theory as an appendix. Linda Herrera and Asef Bayat make the case for “youth” to be made an analytical category.8 They describe youth as a habitus or disposition, with mental and cognitive structures—a type of being, feeling, and life. Youth, therefore, in the sense that characterizes an everyday practice or cultural politics—in their dealings with adults, in the free movement in their own cultural spaces, in rebellion against the establishment, in the formation of subcultures, and in regarding their future as adults. These practices are needed on both an individual and collective level.9 Muslim youth—like youth overall—are affected by particular disciplines and controls from authority. “Yet,” as Bayet and Herrara explain, “Muslim youths from almost all social classes (rich, poor, and middle class), in settings where they make up minorities (as in Europe and Africa) and majorities (in the Middle East and parts of Asia), share a broader kind of concern: the violation of rights to a lifestyle, a concern that involves the young population as a whole.”10 As its own category and in contrast to youth in general, “Muslim youth” loses some of its legitimacy by the fact that Islam, through global events in international politics, has been made to be a significant part of youth identity, independent of how different lifestyles develop.11 This holds true for the Muslim minority in Europe, as well as for young Muslims in Muslim-majority countries.12 Youth movements, therefore, must not be purely revolutionary. For Bayat, youth movements, which take part in fewer political actions, are often not as organized as student movements but rather move forward with mere “presence.” As he writes, “The identity of a youth movement is based not as much on collective doing as on collective being, and the forms of their expression are less collective protest than collective presence.”13
Generally, new social movements should therefore be characterized, among other things, by how they “focus on questions of self-identity and identity education, rather than economical exploitation or participation in political decision processes.”14 It is critical to consider this dualism in women's movements, where they not only present the identity of women, but also the women's right to decide their role. Collective identities would again take center stage, and their affiliations with local, regional, or religious communities would function paradoxically as “a platform for the betterment and defense of individual needs”15 since the state social welfare system, in the course of its successive erosion of access for all members of society to its services, has now become unable to protect all societal subsystems. The participation of Muslims in movements comes amid their experience of discrimination, such as bans against the wearing of the hijab, bans against the building of minarets, and the discursive exclusion of Islamic identity from the European collective body.16 In this sense, the sociologist Bader speaks of “negative collective identities” and thereby means those identities that are constituted by a third party, for example, by a racially discriminatory group.17 If the “normative core is at the center of the theory in new social movements … the idea of self-determination”18 demands for equality and de facto equal treatment can be regarded as protests supported by the idea of self-determination, even if they are based on, and fall back on, religious identities. These identities must, after all, always be measured against the background of reinterpretation, where old traditions are experienced in new contexts, colorations, and amendments. Herrera and Bayat explain that the choice to wear or not wear the hijab can be an expression of youth, as long as it challenges the dominant norms in a society and the corresponding establishment. By doing so, youths express their own autonomy and bring it to the forefront.19 The central conflict about youth movements is less about politics or economics, but rather lifestyle, which represents a new societal shift. Recreation, clothing, and music all have the potential to be an expression of protest,20 and therefore a religious, youthful lifestyle also has the ability to be part of a youth movement.
Islamic Activism in the “Hoamatland”21
For decades, a reorientation of Muslim youth in a religious context has been constructed, but it is still barely researched. Julia Gerlach speaks of a global phenomenon of pop-Islam, which mixes a Western lifestyle with Islamic traditions and cancels out old categories of Islamist vs. West.22 Werner Schiffauer speaks in accordance with Bayat about members of the post-Islamic generation, who demand their “right to difference” and neither represent communitarian positions nor flow into quietistic escapism,23 but rather commence an open search that relocates their religious positions in Western societies.24
In 1995, young (male) people with a Muslim creed came together with a common goal: to devote themselves to Islamic activism. I fall back on Quintan Wiktorowicz's definition of “Islamic activism” as “the mobilization of contention to support Muslim causes,” a definition that openly and consciously refers to many very different movements within the Islamic spectrum.25 Their new group, like so many other so-called new social movements, had nothing to do with economic conflicts but rather with topics such as migration, ethnicity, and religion.26 March 5th, 1996, is the official (recorded) birthday of the Islamic Group of Upper Austria (IG OÖ), from which arose the Muslim Youth of Austria (MJÖ) three years later. In 1996, seven youths between the ages of 13 and 19 came together as the original members of a German-speaking, multiethnic association, founded by two of them. The group reflected their diverse ethnic backgrounds.27 Two were of Egyptian Austrian heritage (born in year 1977 and 1978), one had an Iraqi background (born 1983), one was Senegalese Austrian (born in 1977), and one had a Turkish background. The two youths who directly founded the IG OÖ converted to Islam before establishing the organization.28
The founding members were active in other associations at the same time of the founding. Two served as volunteer firefighters, three in the Socialist Youths of Linz or its umbrella organization, the Critical Students Action, and one in a multiethnic Islamic club called Islam Austria. Therefore, this activity within the Islamic area should not be understood as a fundamental protest against society, but rather as a complementary addition. Dirk Halm has found that participation in a religious field (such as the exercise of Muslim religious practice), which in traditional socialization alternatives does not exist, is often higher.29 The founding youths did not exchange their work as volunteer firefighters and membership in the Socialist Youths of Linz for the IG OÖ, but rather chose the latter as an additional group to suit other needs.
What is special about the IG OÖ is that its founders were influenced by the relevance of hip-hop and its connection with Malcolm X, the African American Muslim activist. The ideas of Malcolm X influenced several different youth movements and philosophies, such as the Black Panthers, the US Organization, Kawaida, and Afrocentricity.30 Malcolm X served as an important bridge between the New York–born youth culture of hip-hop and the genesis of the IG OÖ and MJÖ. The small number of founding fathers of this Muslim youth movement makes it possible, with the help of seven narrative interviews, to analyze this never-before-documented history and to investigate this history against the background of significant aspects of social movement theory, namely, how social movements emerge.31 It should be noted that people are not be reduced to one essential identity (here, Muslim) but are rather a hybrid “dependent on changing reference points” always in a struggle for power.32 The examination below will therefore investigate how hip-hop and Malcolm X translated into the lives of Muslim Austrian youths and how these syncretic compositions of different identities work, as “people do not acquire culture as such, but also engage with their concrete cultural context, which they don't simply accept, but adapt to and interpret at the same time.”33 This “patchwork” collective identity is always a “process of selective accentuation.”34 This research reveals the selection process by which specific aspects of the life of Malcolm X contributed to these youths' identities.
Hip-Hop, Malcolm X, and Islam
“Islam has been the iconic religion of Hip Hop … since the beginning of this complex youth music culture.”35 Turner shows how, through hip-hop, young students in American universities found their way to Malcolm X, and many then to Islam and civil engagement.36 Malcolm X is cited by followers and sympathizers of the Nation of Islam (NOI)37 and the Nation of Gods and Earths (also called 5 Percenter). Public Enemy, Wu-Tang Clan, Afrika Bambaataa, Ice Cube, Rakim, and many more have been influenced by him.38 Islamic terms and symbols are present in hip-hop language and culture, even when the respective artists do not recognize them as coming from Islam.39 Islamic motifs and Arabic terms move through the lyrics of hip-hop and make “Islam hip hop's official religion.”40 Central music stars such as Mos Def, Ali Shaheed Muhammad (from A Tribe Called Quest)41 and today Lupe Fiasco, Raekwon (from Wu Tang Clan), and others admit openly to following Islam. Despite many theological orientations, Malcolm X stands firmly as a leading figure of young African American youths and MCs (masters of ceremony) in the mid-twentieth century. Because of the omnipresence of the rhetorical genius of Malcolm X and his role as the “mastermind of the Black Power movement in the 1960s and as an important inspiration for radical movements,” the “neo-nationalist Hip Hop Generation [created] a militant identification figure who never betrayed their ideals.”42 Rappers like KRS-1 and Public Enemy mixed original sounds in their texts, thereby raising their cultural capital,43 and familiarized youth around the world with Malcolm X.
Malcolm X's transformation—from a street hustler to the mouthpiece of the NOI (who supported a race-based theology and saw their founder Elijah Muhammad as the last prophet Fard Muhammad and as God in human form) and finally to the Sunni Muslim who in his pilgrimage to Mecca recognized the universal value of humankind outside of race—was for millions of African Americans an example and a guide to Sunni Islam.44 As the Viennese anthropologists Kämpfer and Zips show, the “historical [total] personality of Malcolm X, with its dynamic process of knowledge … took the place of the images of his life, action, and thought.”45 The rapper KAM saw the Muslim in Malcolm X, the group The Goats made his independence from the NOI a subject of discussion, Big Daddy Kane spoke about his militancy and his audacity, and the group Full Force showed him as the leading figure for the idea of “Black Capitalism” that they advocated for.46 The life of Malcolm X (alias El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, his last Muslim religious name) was complex and it has been interpreted in many different ways.47
From Hip-Hop to Malcolm X: An Upper Austrian Experience
This section, based on interviews that I conducted with one of the founders of the IG OÖ, discusses what meaning hip-hop and Malcolm X had to the personal lives of the original members and in the founding of the IG OÖ.48 The two main founders of the IG OÖ knew each other previously from their primary school days and had dedicated their lives to the hip-hop scene before they started the IG OÖ. The Egyptian Austrian youth described his way to hip-hop as a way to a positive view of himself.
For me, it was then a peculiar movement…. Today I would say, I would summarize it as a … proud to be black movement, … a new consciousness had emerged and then it overpowered us. Parts of it were, for example, … TV series with black actors. Bill Cosby, … people like MC Hammer…. Pop-Rap was the first thing to cross over, and as a teenager it completely overpowers you. The interesting thing about it was that, what fascinated me, is that it was the first time I positively identified with my roots. Yeah. My roots were of course viewed positively within the family, but outside opinions were divided, so I just, my parents had different backgrounds—my father is from Egypt, my mother from Austria—and my mother comes from a farming context, they're both viewed negatively. The farming background and the foreign context are both viewed negatively. There's nothing you can be proud of. Pride is better phrased as proud to be, which is more neutral in the context of being Austrian. In any case, there was this movement. That was also my first contact with hip-hop….
During this period, controversy, in the broadest sense, began with the black community. I read interviews in Brave … and when people said that they were proud of their African background, even though they actually lived in America, for me, that was something strange. Because I also have an “African” background and live in Europe and thus managed to find a positive context. I experienced very … concrete xenophobic and/or Islamophobic attitudes, even in school. Where, for example, they said the speeches made by Muslims, or obviously Islam, were spread by fire and sword, or Muslims were seen as dumb and naïve because they fast during Ramadan, not eating or drinking anything. Fasting during Ramadan was once a topic in my cooking class, and the whole class burst out laughing. And I fell into an inner crisis because of this…. It wasn't clear for me what I should do, and this is classic, also for the debate then in the 80s, I was caught in the middle, yeah. Whereas I differed completely, because I met so-called Muslims that adhered to one ethnicity and I tried to separate myself from them…. I also couldn't rediscover myself there. In both a positive and negative sense. Neither in an Islamic context nor in the exclusionary mechanisms that I experience…. I really participated in Austrian society. I didn't differ so much….
Ultimately it's about the things that I thought about, that from the beginning I saw as very negative, that for the first time became positive. And it was about Africa…. I discovered something with this part, which I had thought of as very negative and tried to separate myself from, … that it can be positive, … and then I occupied myself with hip-hop music. And it didn't take long then until I got the first albums from Public Enemy or Gang Starr or Ice Cube or Ice-T.
Hip-hop's content allowed me to start looking and working on myself…. I heard that famous quote from Chuck D, that said: Rap is black CNN…. That was the point when I fell in … and that ultimately meant that I busied myself even more with hip-hop … and I noticed even more how socially critical rap can be…. I had more and more CDs at home … and one day a good friend … gave me a CD, it was Ice Cube, and the CD was called The Predator and I read in the booklet “thanks to Allah” and “all praise due to Allah” and I thought to myself … what's my religion doing there? It made me completely curious….
Then I started to look into it really intensively. My hunch that there was a relation between Islam and Ice Cube was proved correct through research…. I then encountered other things that were, for me, a huge puzzle. You have to understand that all of this happened in a time without Wikipedia, without Google, and also when you found very little if you went to the library. Because the Black Power Movement didn't really have any fallout…. When different rappers now said different “Thanks to” in their albums, then this forged even more of a connection to Islam, then the connection to Malcolm X or the NOI appeared, and because of this I drove to the next largest city, Linz, sat down in the library, and just researched these names…. I read things in the Linz library like “Negro Leader,” black leader of '68, militant black leader, etc., all of these discouraging things…. And Malcolm X was … always placed as the militant antithesis to pacifist Martin Luther King…. During my own revolt in my youth, Martin Luther King had a powerful attraction, yeah, because this way of protest fascinated me…. Later, as I then differentiated between these things and my picture of Malcolm X became more complex, this attraction strengthened. Later I bought his autobiography, which I had to look for for a long time, and then I also saw the film. Each chapter came alive for me: … his childhood really impressed me … and I also looked for parallels between the discrimination that Malcolm X faced and my own life. It's not the same, but as an adolescent it was an interesting frame of reference….
Islam came alive for me in the person Malcolm X…. When you realize just how many years my father tried to bring Islam closer to me, and I was just completely disinterested…. It just wasn't for me; my world, my language. And then came Malcolm X, who was in every single rap booklet, good or bad, all of my big heroes of the rap world had Malcolm X in and had figured out the way to the heart of Sunni Islam. It was completely crazy…. At a certain point it was also a search for meaning. I was at home with it, with where I actually was and so many things that I had thought of as contradictory, they just simply weren't.
The connections between Upper Austrian youth and Malcolm X were numerous. In the words of Molefi Asante, Malcolm X is seen as the spiritual father of Afrocentricity—the idea of replacing African self-hate with African self-awareness.49 This Malcolm X–created self-awareness—whether a black or an Islamic identity—offered a point of connection for an adolescent who up until then had sought to keep these building blocks of his identity out of the open. Islam was for the youths of Upper Austria “always a little bit ghetto, and there were always some things I wasn't proud of. It was all … a little bit shitty. Religion class was shitty, the mosque was shitty, the people were shitty. It was all so ‘second class.’” What was new for this interviewee was first that there existed a visible Muslim who (in his youth culture) was recognized when, for him at the time, “Muslims were generally losers. To be Muslim, to be a foreigner, or to be black, and so on, was not cool. And suddenly it was all cool. It was in, it was stylish.” While Islamic and African heritage were fashionable, the Upper Austrian Nazi scene was able to strengthen its presence in youth culture through bomber jackets, black combat boots with white shoelaces, and so forth—as the interviewee explained—as it met with an alternative culture. Malcolm X's version of Islam became a third alternative between two unattractive options for youth at the time: “From some inferiority complexes on one side, and a nostalgic national pride à la ‘we are Ottoman,’ which I couldn't get into.” But for others, a “connection between music and religion” was easy to infuse into youth culture. Malcolm's life—from a hair-straightening imitator of white people and the inferiority complex that followed to a self-confident leader of the African American community—was a powerful lesson in autonomy.
The public image of Islam did not follow the same trajectory as it did for these youths. Just as Malcolm X tried to change public perception of a Negro into an independent African American,50 so these youths tried to change the perception of a Mohammedan into a Muslim, to make the specter of a violent Islam into an Islam of peace, and with that, to challenge and break hegemonic interpretations. The youths drew these parallels. This experience was also shared in large part with other members who came from a Muslim background outside of Europe.
An Upper Austrian of Iraqi background told of his adolescent youth characterized by graffiti painting and break dancing—two important elements of hip-hop youth culture—and how he found his way at age fourteen to Malcolm X through this medium.
I became aware of Malcolm X through rap music…. It was partially texts from KRS-1 and the group A Tribe Called Quest that mentioned Malcolm X. And the old records from Afrika Bambaataa. Grand Master Flash always included speeches and selections of sections from Malcolm X. Of course Public Enemy also made use of Malcolm X…. You always asked yourself who this Malcolm X was. Who is this personality that denounced these social conditions in America? … His speeches at the beginning and at the end of the mix tapes were pretty impressive.
Here is the importance of what the father of hip-hop, Afrika Bambaataa, said in an interview as he recognized African American Islam as the central religious and political influencing factor in the emergence of hip-hop. Malcolm X stands next to Elijah Muhammad, Louis Farrakhan, and Muhammad Ali as one of the central male idols of hip-hop culture.51 This can also be seen in his impact on the Upper Austrian youth with an Iraqi background, who echoes the sense of this impact. “Malcolm X is a very strong personality and displays an unbelievable self-confidence. This strong rhetoric, the strong performance, the strong self-awareness was … impressive. Malcolm X is someone who came to the Nation of Islam and then became a practicing Muslim, who made the Hajj, and so on. Of course there are parallels to my life; you can identify with someone like that.”
The consequence of this youth's fascination with Malcolm X was that he was driven to find many more parallels between his own life and that of Malcolm X, like discrimination, bravery, and Islam. At the age of fourteen, he read Malcolm X's autobiography written with Alex Haley “three times in German and twice in English.” “It was the first book I read in my youth with such a high page count. I devoured it.” Reading the autobiography and later seeing the 1992 film based on it had a permanent influence on the young Iraqi Austrian, a sort of conversion narrative that is also common within the African American community.52 One sequence in the film of the autobiography (directed by Spike Lee, with Denzel Washington as Malcolm X) particularly influenced him.
There's a scene in the film that often impressed youths, and it's the scene where Malcolm is in prison and opens this dictionary for the first time and then decides to copy down the entire dictionary from A to Z so that he can further his knowledge and expand his vocabulary. This experience impressed kids in the extreme, because it shows that he was a gangster from the street that had consumed drugs and broke into houses, and how suddenly his life shifted 180 degrees. And that carried a huge fascination for Muslim youths, I think…. At the time, I also got a dictionary and started to copy it…. It motivated me to read books and also to … learn more about Islam and educate myself.
For the native Austrian who later came to Islam, Malcolm X was influential as a famous Muslim and activist whose nationalistic programming and time in the NOI imparted more of a feeling of attraction than repulsion.
What I really liked about Malcolm X was the activism, the attempt to change something negative. At the beginning, the Nation of Islam was a theme [in the IG OÖ] … I personally couldn't get into it, because it just seemed racist to me…. The other end of the spectrum from Malcolm X …, when he found true, balanced Islam, then for me he was a completely acceptable idol, an example in the sense of his confession to Islam, activism for Islam, yeah, and full of commitment to Islam. And also this balanced approach, and the aim to change the negative, not to stay passive, was definitely a defining figure.
In contrast to those youths who claim another ethnicity along with being Austrian, the ethnic identity of African Americans and the accompanying experiences of discrimination did not exert an attraction or increased identification on Austrian-born youths. For them, Malcolm X was not important because of his radical black nationalism but rather because of the religious dimension in the form of his conversion. Already, one of the founders of IG OÖ liked the central ethnic principles of hip-hop. “The first influence was from Islam, it was also characterized by Islam, that overall in the hip-hop scene there was this access to high, noble principles, ideals, that you can hold up, that you can align with…. Take abstinence from drugs as an example as to how we felt a belonging to the Zulu Nation.” The Zulu Nation is an Islamic organization founded by Afrika Bambaataa. It is significantly characterized by Hip Hop and has strong prohibitions on alcohol, drugs, and violence in its code of conduct.53 Clearly, his early socialization in hip-hop youth culture laid the grounds for accepting the rules of discipline in the religion of Islam.
Influence on Youth in the Upper Austrian Hoatmatlond
After hip-hop became their elixir of life, young Upper Austrian Muslims also began to engage openly in youth work, especially as an antithesis to the increasingly strong neo-Nazi scene in the Mühlviertel, where both founders lived. Later, there was real contact with founders of old school hip-hop. At a hip-hop jam in Linz, they met Popmaster Fable from the Rock Steady Crew, which was formed in the Bronx in 1977. Like them, Popmaster Fable had already converted to Islam (adding the name Shukri, “the Grateful”) and afterward was a leading member of the Zulu Nation. The socially critical examination by Advanced Chemistry—a German-speaking hip-hop group and member of the global Zulu Nation—and in particular their song “Fremd im eigenen Land” (Stranger in My Own Land) as a reaction to the burning of asylum homes in Germany in the 1990s inspired these Austrian adolescents to increase their self-awareness, to stand up to make their own brand of hip-hop public, and to organize themselves.
Malcolm X's example gave the youth pride and had taught an open, public declaration of belief in Islam. The young convert tells about the open representation of Islamic symbols at the hip-hop jams.
You always had the prayer caps, went to the hip-hop jams, were present there, and because there were also famous examples of Islam in the hip-hop scene and it was also modern, it was also an expression of pride to be Muslim. This was shown completely. You prayed at the hip-hop jams. Fable from the Rock Steady Crew, when he went to breakdance on the stage, wore the prayer cap and said an invocation before his dance, and then we all prayed together in a row right there in the event hall of the hip-hop jam.
The step from public confession to Islam to the formation of an organization was not much further. Hip-hop again helped. MC Torch, the “king” of the first German chapter of the Zulu Nation and also known as Frederik Hahn, invited the two founders of the IG OÖ to a hip-hop jam to set up an information stand about Islam to get the attention of thousands of youths. Early experiences like this encouraged the young people in their Islamic identity and supported the connection between hip-hop p and Islam. The event later inspired them to set up more information stands themselves in public roads to present a peaceful image of Islam. One founder wondered if the connections between Islam, hip-hop, Zulu Nation, and Malcolm X would later prompt the question, “Why go to the blacksmith when I have a forge?” which only intensified his occupation with Islam.
From Malcolm X to Islamic Groups
Grandmaster Flash defines hip-hop as “the only genre of music that allows us to talk about almost anything.”55 Hip-hop as a megaphone for a minority in the Bronx became a megaphone for ethnic and, in this case, religious minorities in Europe. Coming from hip-hop culture and inspired by Malcolm X, they looked for common identification patterns.
With such a self-awareness for the rights of blacks or to criticize the injustices of white America in the 50s and 60s, it's something I can kind of identify with. There are certain parallels to my own reality and, because of this, Malcolm X was certainly someone to look up to. Not so much because I live in a white Austria that's comparable to America then, but rather because you either felt as a youth or you knew from the beginning that you can't be a regular, “normal” part of a pretty homogenous majority, but you have, you're also perceived as something other…. I've had thoughts like, yeah, okay, there also are … experiences of discrimination in my life, for example, and that's why we look up to people who challenge and criticize that. Even if it's not to the same extent, it's not exactly the same. Discrimination experiences in school due to the color of your skin, your ethnicity, religion.
The “application” of Malcolm X, as it was described by one of the IG OÖ's originators, drove people to action. For both founders, it was hip-hop that led them to social engagement. The example of dealing with the consequences of slavery and racism in the United States required dealing with issues like “poverty, asylum, refugees, and exploitation” in a local context, says one of the founders. The Iraqi-born youth explains the exemplary role Malcolm X played for him as analyst, activist, organizer, and visionary, and what conclusions he drew from his own circumstances.
A characteristic of Malcolm X is that he did not accept the injustices that he saw, that he … really influenced the Nation of Islam and built it up and furthered it and carried his message outward. I think that this also played a role in the founding of the IG OÖ, because at the time we also had a wish to build something for Muslims in this country. And just like Malcolm X spread his message, we also had an inner wish to do something and to change something. And to be socially active and not just accept things as they are. This call to activism and this desire to make things better or to change something is something we learned from Malcolm X.
We watched the Black Panther Party film and a three- or four-part ARTE [Association relative à la télévision européenne] documentary about this movement, that also sketched out the reasons for the demise of the movement…. At the time we talked about it amongst ourselves: okay, what do you have to do to make an organization strong and what internal cohesion it needs and how people should be educated and how important the elements of brotherhood are. It produced a lot of discussions. The Black Panther Party also really impressed us because they organized themselves and showed a lot of discipline. And we also said: to be successful you need structure, you need discipline, you need proper task allocation…. As far as the Nation of Islam is concerned, we've seen a controversy around Malcolm X … that there were several disintegration processes, internal tensions and problems, and we talked about how you avoid things like that and how to build an organization where such things don't happen.
As an example to learn from, Malcolm X was not just a Sunni Muslim who had separated from the NOI; the example of his positive and negative experiences with the NOI and with the Black Panther Party, which supported black nationalism's misinterpretation of Malcolm X, also served to inform the Austrian youth. The “identification” thus went beyond the experience of being a Muslim and extended to the experiences of injustice that befell African Americans, as well as their reactions to these grievances. The first founder, with Austrian Egyptian roots, also stressed that the NOI had “a very strong attraction” to him at the beginning. “It showed me just how much power is in organized work, that's in an organized activism…. The Black Panthers really fascinated me; the possibility to recruit, to organize, to start a civil movement.” In retrospect, the influence that the African American fight for civil rights and equality in the 1960s and 1970s is also evident as a fundamental impulse for the Muslim Youth of Austria's (MJÖ) work.
I think it was an important impulse … for the formation of the MJÖ…. The story of Malcolm X or the history of the black civil rights movement in America [were] a huge motivating factor…. I thought to myself at the time, when someone like Malcolm X or when the Nation can build a movement like this across America, … then it's also possible in another time and place for a good reason and it's possible to build another community or an organization that would be successful in pursuit of an ideal. It was a huge motivating factor.
For me it was clear pretty early on that societal changes … have to be anchored in society, they have to have power to mobilize, … to organize, and above all is a very important factor, and that's education. That's a very central part…. I said, if there was something that really fit my convictions, a movement, then I would definitely be there. [But] that didn't exist for me…. The criteria for me were a very youth-specific issue, and it was clear it had to be something German-speaking, it had to, so to say, deal with the themes that I focus on, which in this case is Islam, but also societal issues. And that did not exist. There were different ethnic groups and so on. I said, either there's something and I'm a part of it, or there's not and we have to make it ourselves.
The contextualization of hip-hop, which formed a global movement but also built a local sense of belonging (East Coast vs. West Coast or “proud to be” from the Bronx, from Brooklyn, and the roots of respective hip-hop crews in their “neighborhoods”), played an instructive role. The IG OÖ had to build a local identity that started with being German-speaking and was oriented around working within Upper Austria. Societal-political themes that were important to them at the time ranged from asylum homes to the strengthening of the rightwing populist Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ). The NOI and the Black Panthers taught them activism, and hip-hop modeled local patriotism.
Malcolm X Today
Even though Malcolm X is no longer the most significant figure for the MJÖ, the successor organization of the IG OÖ, he is not completely out of the picture. A young member of the MJÖ explains what pedagogical relevance Malcolm X still has for youth work and how his life story is implemented in the education program of the MJÖ. “We always use the history of Malcolm X in lectures, in working circles, in different ways, to present to Muslim youth the success story of Malcolm X, and show him as a role model. It still has relevance to our work. And we're constantly explaining to the active members of the MJÖ which role Malcolm X and his movement played in the beginning of the MJÖ.” He spoke of a concrete experience that he had during a trip to London with the MJÖ during the spring break of 2012, when they showed the film Malcolm X during the bus ride.
I had a conversation with a small 14-year-old boy who comes from a difficult family situation: parents divorced, he's been hit by his father for years, his brother is in a home, his mother in a psychiatric facility. So he comes from a really difficult situation. And he said in the Facebook group for the London trip, “I learned something on this London trip. Namely, I read that Malcolm X came from the bottom and got all the way to the top and that showed me that I can also make it to the top.” That really moved me, that statement, … the fascination Malcolm X can hold for teenagers.
In 2010, the MJÖ organized a week dedicated to the forty-five-year anniversary of the day Malcolm X died. They hosted a showing of the Spike Lee film along with two lectures, “Malcolm X, A Revolutionary Life,” and “Malcolm X, Hip Hop, and Islam.” Malcolm X continued to be taught and celebrated as an activist, cultural leader, and a role model by Austrian Muslim youth.
Conclusion
This research has shown that, through the medium of hip-hop music, Malcolm X was received by Upper Austrian Muslim youths as a “cultural teacher with lessons on self-consciousness, respect, and dignity for all humans … and moral uprightness.”61 His life as an enlightened believer, thinker, activist, and conciliator were central examples for the founders of the IG OÖ. Both founders experienced discrimination in Austria based on the color of their skin and on their religion. From these individual experiences, they formed a more collective identity syncretically composed from different influencing narratives: hip-hop youth culture, Islam, Malcolm X, the civil rights movement, and the fight against oppression. They drew on the experiences of others—like the burning of asylum homes in Germany and the murder of Malcolm X's father at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan—linking their own experiences to global events to forge a shared experience, and from that, action. Some also found a religious role model. Through Malcolm X, these Muslim youth in Upper Austria found that a connection between global hip-hop youth culture, their Muslim religion, and a modern “Western” lifestyle was possible and had strong, desirable precedents. This Islamic awakening generated identities that were perhaps not as commercial and superficial as the generation of Pop Islam,62 but rather more socially critical and reflective owing to their reception of the history of racism and black nationalism in the United States. A central moment was the experience of cultural marginalization, which led to the fight for recognition of the marginalized aspects of identity (skin color and religion). The growing self-awareness of their own religious identity in relation to a white Catholic Austrian nation formed a focal point for these Muslim youths from Upper Austria to organize themselves around, an impetus to educate themselves further, and a later spur to mobilize other people. The fight for recognition should also be seen as a protest against a homogeneous understanding of Islam, which they want to break in order to introduce alternative interpretations. Like other youth movements increasingly devoted to collective action,63 the members of the IG OÖ and the MJÖ were also concerned with how the public presence of their Islamic identity was perceived. Malcolm X and their hip-hop icons were tools for self-discovery and examples of public activism and presentation.
Footnotes
Richard Brent Turner, “Malcolm X and Youth Culture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Malcolm X, ed. Robert E. Terrill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 101.
The use of the term “social movement” and “social movement organization” follow the decision of Della Porta and Diani, who define the term social movement as wider than the social movement organization, and as a “fluid phenomenon.” Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani, Social Movements: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 25–28, 135–62. A social movement organization in this sense ties together a social movement, which doesn't have a hard and fast structure, and is a part of the movement itself. For this article, the social movement organization IG OÖ ties together the social movement of hip-hop on one side, and the Muslim youth on the other.
Ulrich Willems, “Religion und Soziale Bewegungen: Dimensionen eines Vernachlässigten Forschungsfeldes,” Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen 17, no. 4 (2004): 28–41.
Willems, “Religion und Soziale Bewegungen,” 32; Thomas Kern, Soziale Bewegungen: Ursachen, Wirkungen, Mechanismen (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008), esp. 14–15, 74–84. Despite the takeover of strategies, tactics, and structures that are found in “progressive” movements (62–63), religious movements would be subsumed under the term “antimovements” in contrast to the so-called new social movements. For the latter, the idea of the autonomy of the individual should be intrinsic. The former, on the other hand, is often aimed against gay rights, abortion rights, and other issues, and would therefore “block social learning processes, or even move them backward” (52–57).
Kern, Soziale Bewegungen, 63.
Nele Boehme, Ansgar Klein, Anja Löwe, and Ulrich Willems, “Does Religion Matter? Zum Verhältnis von Religion und sozialer Bewegung,” Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen 17, no. 4 (2004), 3.
Quintan Wiktorowitcz, The Management of Islamic Activism: Salafis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and State Power in Jordan (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001); Wiktorowitcz, ed., Islamic Activism: A social movement approach (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004); Asef Bayat, Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn. Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Werner Schiffauer, Nach dem Islamismus: Die Islamische Gemeinschaft Milli Görüs: Eine Ethnographie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2010); Asef Bayat and Linda Herrera, eds., Being Young and Muslim: New Cultural Politics in the Global South and North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Asef Bayat and Linda Herrera, “Introduction: Being Young and Muslim in Neoliberal Times,” in Bayat and Herrera, eds., Being Young and Muslim, 3.
Ibid., 6.
Ibid., 13.
Ibid., 19, 24. Bayat and Herrera understand “Muslim youth” as not religious youth, but rather youths who construct their “Muslim” identity as a reaction to open debates andpolitics in the areas of safety, integration, multiculturalism, and citizenship. Thus, they count equally Muslims that identify as secular, hybrid, as a member of a minority, and as religious. See Asef Bayat and Linda Herrera, “Conclusion: Knowing Muslim Youth,” in Bayat and Herrera, eds., Being Young and Muslim, 357–58.
Bayat and Herrera, “Introduction,” 21.
Asef Bayat, “Muslim Youth and the Claim of Youthfulness,” in Bayat and Herrera, eds., Being Young and Muslim, 29–31. Bayat argues that a youth movement should not be identified as such only when the youth show themselves to be participants. The movement's demands and complaints should be the determining factor.
Kern, Soziale Bewegungen, 55. Several scholars demonstrated that the importance of identity is not new in essays in Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, ed. Craig Calhoun (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Myra Marx Ferree and Silke Roth, “Kollektive Identität und Organisationskulturen: Theorien neuer sozialer Bewegungen aus amerikanischer Perspektive,” in Neue soziale Bewegungen, ed. Ansgar Klein, Hans-Josef Legrand, and Thomas Leif (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1998), 81.
Kern, Soziale Bewegungen, 95.
On discrimination, see Martha C. Nussbaum, The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). On hijabs, see Sabine Berghahn and Petra Rostock, Der Stoff, aus dem Konflikte Sind: Debatten um das Kopftuch in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2009). On minarets, see Farid Hafez, Jahrbuch für Islamophobieforschung 2011 (Wien: Studienverlag, 2011). On the conflict between Islamic and European identity, see Patrick Bahners, Die Panikmacher: Die deutsche Angst vor dem Islam, Eine Streitschrift (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2011).
Veit Bader, “Ethnische Identität und ethnische Kultur. Grenzen des Konstruktivismus und der Manipulation,” Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen 8, no 1 (1995): 36.
Kern, Soziale Bewegungen, 57.
Bayat and Herrera, “Introduction,” 14.
Della Porta and Diani, Social Movements, 49–51.
The term “Hoamatlond” (or Heimatland, homeland) brings to mind the current anthem of Upper Austria, “Hoamatgsong,” which was composed by Franz Stelzhamer, a native of western Upper Austria.
Julia Gerlach, Zwischen Pop und Dschihad: Muslimische Jugendliche in Deutschland (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2006), 10–13.
Werner Schiffauer, Nach dem Islamismus: Die Islamische Gemeinschaft Milli Görüs, Eine Ethnographie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2010), 212–23.
Ibid., 10–17.
Quintan Wiktorowitcz, “Islamic Activism and Social Movement Theory,” in Islamic Activism: A Social Movement Approach, ed. Wiktorowitcz (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004): 2–3.
Della Porta and Diani, Social Movements, vii.
The fact that the members legally organized at a very early stage, and even registered with the police, shows that the present work may also be of significance for the alleged “underillumination” of the relevance of associations in the social sciences, which had already put them in the file as an “antiquated and no longer contemporary form of organization.” See Sebastian Braun, “Die Wiederentdeckung des Vereinswesens im Windschatten gesellschaftlicher Krisen,” Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen 17, no. 1 (2004): 26.
In 1999, owing to internal tensions, a new group was founded, the Muslim Youth Organization (MJÖ). The group is still active as a Muslim mixed-gender youth movement. With 30,000 members, it is the largest German-speaking, multiethnic, and Muslim youth organization in Austria. See Susanne Heine, Rüdiger Lohlker, and Richard Potz, Muslime in Österreich: Geschichte – Lebenswelt – Religion (Wien: Tyrolia Verlag, 2012), 87–88.
Dirk Halm, “Bürgerschaftliches Engagement in der Einwanderungsgesellschaft,” Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen 24, no. 2 (2011): 17.
Molefi Kete Asante, “Afrocentricity and Malcolm X,” in The Cambridge Companion to Malcolm X, 152. Asante describes Kawaida as a cultural and social school of thought, classified by Maulana Karenga, which stands on the seven principles of unity, autonomy, cooperative work and responsibility, cooperative economics, focus, creativity, and belief (156).
Kern, Soziale Bewegungen, 9.
Amani Abuzahra, Kulturelle Identität in einer multikulturellen Gesellschaft (Wien: Passagen Verlag, 2012).
Martin Jäggle, “Interkulturalität und Dialog,” in Tools: Österreichische Fachzeitschrift für Erwachsenenbildung 2 (2008).
Bader, “Ethnische Identität und ethnische Kultur,” 37.
Turner, “Malcolm X and Youth Culture,” 101.
Ibid.
The Nation of Islam and Malcolm X parted ways on March 8th, 1964.
Turner, “Malcolm X and Youth Culture.”
Richard Brent Turner, “Constructing Masculinity: Interactions between Islam and African American Youth since C. Eric Lincoln's ‘The Black Muslims in America,’” in Black Routes to Islam, ed. Manning Marable and Hishaam D. Aidi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009): 147–48.
Hisham Aidi, “The Grand (Hip Hop) Chessboard: Race, Rap and Raison d'État,” Middle East Report 260 (Fall 2011): 28.
Joseph D. Eure and James G. Spady, Nation Conscious Rap (New York: PC International Press, 1991).
Heinz Kämpfer and Warner Zips, Nation X: Schwarzer Nationalismus, Black Exodus & Hip Hop (Wien: Promedia Verlag, 2001), 264, 290; David Hillard and Donald Weise, eds., The Huey P. Newton Reader (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), 11.
Kämpfer and Zips, Nation X, 309.
Turner, “Malcolm X and Youth Culture,” 103–4.
Kämpfer and Zips, Nation X, 291.
Ibid., 310.
This reception does not apply only to Muslims. Even Barack Obama could not let Malcolm X go unmentioned in his autobiography. In Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York, NY: Three Rivers Press, 1995), he mentions Malcolm X next to Baldwin, Ellison, Hughes, Wright, and DuBois and honors their “unconditional demand for respect” (101). Even Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's second-in-command, once tried to use Malcolm X as the opposite of Obama, characterizing him as the “direct opposite of honorable black Americans.” In the jargon of one of Malcolm's most famous speeches, al-Zawahiri called Obama a “house slave” (the correct term would have been “house negro” in contrast to the brave “field negro”). (See “Al Qaeda Leader Mocks Obama in Web Posting,” CNN.com, November 19, 2008, http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/11/19/obama.alqaeda/.) His goal was to increase sympathy for al Qaida within the black community (Michael L. Clemons, “Epilogue: Toward Foreign Policy Justice in the Post-Bush Era,” in African Americans in Global Affairs: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Michael L. Clemons [Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2010], 359–60). Such connections, in turn, allow for authors such as Gilles Kepel to place the undifferentiated religious awakening of the Jordanian jihadist and ISIS founder Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a row with Malcolm X (Gilles Kepel, Beyond Terror and Martyrdom: The Future of the Middle East [Cambridge, MA: Harvard Belknap Press, 2008], 43).
The tendency toward conversion to Islam through Malcolm X is not a singular phenomenon. It is shown by other works on converted Muslims in Europe. See Robert Lambert, Countering Al-Qaeda in London: Police and Muslims in Partnership (London: Hurst, 2011), 155–76.
Asante, “Afrocentricity and Malcolm X,” 156.
Ibid., 152.
Turner, “Constructing Masculinity,” 143–44.
Samaa Abdurraqib, “Faith or Fight: Islam in the African American Community,” in Teaching Against Islamophobia, ed. Joe L. Kincheloe, Shirley R. Steinberg, and Christopher D. Stonebanks (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 170–71.
Turner, “Malcolm X and Youth Culture,” 104–5.
Moustafa Bayoumi, “Being Young, Muslim, and American in Brooklyn,” in Bayat and Herrera, eds., Being Young and Muslim, 171.
Quoted in Turner, “Malcolm X and Youth Culture,” 142.
Della Porta & Diani, Social Movements, 5.
Bader, “Ethnische Identität und ethnische Kultur,” 36.
Bayoumi, “Being Young, Muslim, and American in Brooklyn,” 165–66.
Mayer N. Zald and John D. McCarthy, “Religious Groups as Crucibles of Social Movements,” in Social Movements in an Organizational Society, ed. Mayer N. Zald and John D. McCarthy (Oxford: Transaction Books, 1987), 69, 76–79.
A thirteen-part speech by Imam Siraj Wahhaj titled “The Life of Malcolm X” can be found online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyB9Y4Y6CAg, accessed 18 July 2012.
Asante, “Afrocentricity and Malcolm X,” 156.
Gerlach, Zwischen Pop und Dschihad, 11.
Bayat, “Muslim Youth and the Claim of Youthfulness,” in Bayat and Herrera, eds., Being Young and Muslim, 29–31.
