New Muslim Cool : An American Story
Watching New Muslim Cool as part of the Center for Social Media‘s Tenth Annual Human Rights Film Series I found myself unnerved at times but ultimately inspirited by the uniquely American story that Director Jennifer Maytorena Taylor captured.
In the film we meet Hamza and Suleiman Perez, Puerto Rican American Muslim converts whose self-depricating admittance to being unable to speak English, Spanish, or Arabic properly sets up a perfect paradox that the rest of the film operates upon. Throughout the film we see the Perez brothers trying to find a balance between three separate worlds while trying to better their community through outreach, education, and engagement.
Hamza is determined to use the faith and subsequent re-awakening he found at 21 to try and get other members of his community off the streets so that they can refocus the drive, energy, brotherhood, and commitment they exerted in drug dealing and gang banging into more productive outlets. As a former drug dealer himself, Hamza sees all of life as a hustle but hopes to inspire people in his community to embrace lawful and productive means of success. Hamza breaks down American life into a pimps and hos dichotomy in which all people are subject to the forces of ‘The Man,’ which requires for certain members of society to fail and fall into crime to operate smoothly.
It is in these scenes and in ones where The M-Team rhyme about Zionism controlling America that the Perez brothers fall into a problematic mode that has come to define much of the Muslim American rhetoric. It is also these moments that I found to be most troubling, because one has to wonder what the Perez brothers knew about Zionism before their conversion and why the Muslim youth at the concert in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania seem to identify so much with the lyrics about oppressive systems?
Perhaps much of the feelings of paranoia that plague Hamza relate directly to his days on the streets, but that makes the community’s inaction to the questionable raiding of their Mosque all the more troubling. Director, Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, spoke to this following the screening. She said she had expected for the community to rise up and protest (something that perhaps would have been more adaptable to film), but they didn’t. Rather than making the raid a political battle the Muslims of Pittsburgh looked inward and saw it as a spiritual struggle.
Though that may seem noble in principle, the community’s unwillingness to speak out, seek a lawyer, and protest could further disenfranchise them politically. Yes, they can (and did) rebuild, and yes, they always will be a community, but even Hamza himself raised the question in the film as to why a video camera was pointed directly at their Mosque when on the other side of the street was where the drug dealers and gang bangers hung out? That question, which defines so much of the lives of the Perez brothers and others like them, deserved a further exploration by the community.
It is not until a year later, when Hamza’s security clearance from the prison he was working at is taken away, without legal need for explanation under the Patriot Act (as the jail Chaplain points out in frustration), that he finally takes on ‘the man.’ After receiving no clear answer as to why his clearance was revoked, Hamza seeks legal representation from the ACLU.
At the question and answer session following the screening, Director Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, stated that she aimed to capture the post 9/11 talk of the Clash of Civilizations through a study of Hip Hop and Islam. Rather than a clash of civilizations however, what Taylor captured was a uniquely American story. The story of a Puerto-Rican Catholic who went from dealing drugs to discovering the transformative power of Islam and Hip Hop, marrying a fifth generation Muslim woman, who finds himself unwittingly in the middle of an FBI raid, and ultimately befriending an old Jewish woman whom he met through their mutual love of the written word. Every bit of Hamza Perez’s story is American and ultimately proves that for a young Muslim there may be no better place to grow up, discover, and challenge your faith than the United States of America.
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