American Journal of Islam and Society Vol 39 No 1-2.indb 174 Representing Islam: Hip-Hop of the September 11 Generation B L O O M I N G T O N : I N D I A N A U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S , 2 0 2 0 . X I I + 2 0 6 P A G E S . K A M A L U D E E N M O H A M E D N A S I R For the past decades, broad questions as to “what is Islam” and “what does it mean to be Islamic” have haunted much of the fields of sociology and anthropology of Islam, arousing vigorous conceptual and method- ological dialectics in scholarship. Without centralizing the conceptual problematic in the first place, and without being confined to the preced- ing theoretical struggles, Kamaludeen Mohamed Nasir’s Representing Islam: Hip-Hop of the September 11 Generation, a cultural and social her- meneutic of the synthesis between Islamic religiosity and hip-hop culture as practiced and perceived by Muslim youth around the world, never- theless provides interesting answers, in both conceptual and empirical forms, to these primordial questions. It sheds new light on understanding and interpreting the articulation, manifestations, and implications of and about Islam in this globalized and digitalized age. At first glance, studying the expressions and discourses on Islam through the popular art form of hip-hop music may seem to be located on the very periphery of the scholarship of Islamic studies and the con- ception of “Islamic civilization”, especially through the conventional B O O K R E V i E W S  175 “central/peripheral” and “religious/cultural” dichotomous perspectives. Through a critical engagement of empirical data of Muslim hip-hop artists’ articulation and discourses, analysis of the historical circum- stances and social experiences shared by Muslims around the world in the post-September 11 era, and some pertinent sociological perspec- tives including identity authenticity (as in Chapter 2), social movements and solidarities (Chapter 3), performativity and management of body (Chapter 4), and governmentality and multiculturalism (Chapter 5), Nasir productively demonstrates and argues for the opposite position: that this edgy space intersecting religiosity and pop culture is precisely one of the most discursively dynamic and far-reaching realms of Islam and one of the most fruitful grounds for studying Islamic culture in our time. Nasir situates Representing Islam in constructive dialogue with per- tinent bodies of literature including studies of the hip-hop generation in general in the United States and worldwide, scholarly works on the interaction between black culture and the Muslim world, and studies on Muslims and popular musical genres in both localized and cross-cultural contexts. Exemplar works of these fields include Sujatha Fernandes’s Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip-Hop Generation, Sohail Daulatzai’s Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America, and Hisham Aidi’s Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture. Representing Islam should also be understood as a substantial expansion of a chapter on Muslim hip-hop from the author’s earlier monograph Globalized Muslim Youth in the Asia Pacific: Popular Culture in Singapore and Sydney (2016). That former chapter laid the perspectival and conceptual foundation for the present book under review. In theoretical terms, students and researchers of sociology and anthropology of Islam in general and those who specialize in Muslim popular cultures may benefit from and be inspired by three underlying theoretical perspectives that are cornerstones to the conceptual frame- work of Representing Islam: the generational perspective of identity formation, the homological imagination, and the provincialization of cul- ture. First, despite the perpetual tension and debates in conceptualizing a generation (as in the conceptualization of any other social groupings), 176  A M E R i C A N J O U R N A L O F i S L A M A N d S O C i E t Y 3 9 : 1 - 2 it would be valid, as the present book demonstrates, to hypothesize that there is at least a degree of perceptual and discursive sharedness embedded in narratives and discourses given by people both within and outside the imagined generation, i.e. when they talk about it as a group. More specifically, as indicated in Representing Islam, there can be multiple types of markers for conceptualizing a “generation”, e.g. age group, parental and personal migration background, and major his- torical events. An interesting way that this hermeneutic generational perspective can inspire future ethnographic and other microsociological studies is to look beyond any “essence” shared by most or all individuals within a generation, but rather to look at how individuals perceive and deploy those generational elements (be it stage of life, personal or famil- ial migration experiences, and/or marked historical events) to construct the self, significant others, and a coherent experience in their narratives, as well as the similarities and dissimilarities in those perceptions and narrative deployments. Second, the concept of “homological imagination” coined by the author is precisely a penetrating lens to look at this rather ambigu- ous and obscure sharedness between cultural practitioners, as well as its sources, mechanism, and implications. A theoretical advancement from the more conventional concepts by which imaginative sharedness or collectivity is discerned (e.g. Saidian geographical imaginations and Andersonian national imaginations, which tend to focus on societies and communities with clearer territorial boundaries), “homological imagi- nation” is a timely theoretical tool to portray the even more globalized, intersectional, fluid, and instant processes of culture and identity for- mations in this digital age characterized by the dominance of social media since the early 21st century. In this sense, the global Muslim hip- hop culture in the making, as depicted in the book under review, can be understood as a constellation of discursive and creative processes constituted by and drawing on the imagined, homological attachment and affiliation to multiple “centers” of cultural authenticity, such as the African American-rooted hip-hop tradition, the Islamic theological tradi- tion, the sharedness of historical and social experiences between African Americans and post-9/11 Muslims, the shared experiences of Muslim B O O K R E V i E W S  177 around the world, the notion of social justice as embedded in both tradi- tions and both strands of experiences, as well as to the diverse sects and elements within each of these discursive “authenticities”. Further to the detailed analysis of social hermeneutics on the discursive and creative field of Muslim hip-hop culture, as it has been thoroughly demonstrated in Representing Islam, it would also be interesting for future studies to focus more on the functions of diverse “homological imaginations”, at the more idiosyncratic level, of individuals as cultural options and resources, in relation to their own unique social situatedness, self-construction, and sense-making of the world. Third, the idea of “provincialization of culture” is closely connected to homological imagination in that they can be understood as two concep- tual forces of a hierarchical relation, and towards opposite directions, in the same discursive force field. If the homological imagination is initially about the mental process (both shared and individual) of associating cul- tural practices and experiences with an existing form of cultural center or authenticity, provincialization of culture denotes a countercurrent and meta-process of de-centralizing and re-centralizing cultural practices and experiences, which demands a new form of homological imagination and intends to create a new type of authenticity. Nasir’s conceptual- ization of Muslim hip-hop culture as a discursive field, in particular, exemplifies such a meta-interpretive process where the creative and consumptive practices and experiences of Muslims in relation to both hip-hop and religious piety should not be simply understood as deriv- ing either from hip-hop’s African American “core” or from the Islamic tradition’s Middle Eastern or Arabian “origin” (cf. the classical “Islamic- Islamicate”, “great-and-little-traditions”, and central-versus-peripheral views in conceptualizing Islam), or as a derivation from both traditions combined; it should be understood, rather, as something dialectical on its own, drawing on a multiplicity of elements from diverse cultural traditions, personal and collective practices and experiences, and specific economic, political, and social circumstances in the localities where the cultural products are created and consumed and the cultural activities are conducted and experienced. My only conceptual concern over pro- vincializing culture is about the role and positionality of the sociologist 178  A M E R i C A N J O U R N A L O F i S L A M A N d S O C i E t Y 3 9 : 1 - 2 or anthropologist. By using the term meta-process or meta-interpretive process above, I pointed to the fact that, in many if not most cases, the sociologist/anthropologist, in provincializing a culture or tradition, in fact plays a role of more than just interpreting and analyzing the forma- tion of a “new” culture or identity; rather, it is the research output, the sociological/anthropological writing itself, that has consolidated, if not created, the existence of such a new province, along with the concurrent homological imagination and authenticity associated with it. Scholars of social hermeneutics can thus explicitly discuss the discursive conse- quences of their own works. From the methodological and analytical perspective, even though Representing Islam (unlike many of Nasir’s previous works, whose pri- mary data are ethnographic in nature) principally makes use of existing interviews with hip-hop artists and the lyrics and music videos of hip- hop songs, the book successfully integrates both the micro-hermeneutic perspectives (i.e. the sense-making and meaning-articulating processes embedded in both interviews and content of art productions) and the macro-structural processes (i.e. more widely felt and recognized cultur- ally or politically hegemonic power structures, such as state management and policies regulating ideologies and cultural productions, moral entre- preneurship of religious or communal elites and leaders, broader public debates and discourses on social justice issues including rights of women and ethnic minorities, etc.). A strategic and critical engagement between the micro and macro perspectives in sociology of Islam, Representing Islam is recommended to all students and researchers interested in Islamic religiosity, Muslim popular cultures, and research design in social hermeneutics approaches. Martin Jiajun He PhD Student, School of Social Sciences Nanyang Technological University Singapore doi: 10.35632/ajis.v39i1-2.3071