Beyond cultural reterritorialization: Rapping for Islam in London's East End

This article explores the role of contemporary music in the lives of young Muslims in Great Britain. For this group, music has emerged as a powerful tool in the negotiation of personal and group identity, and is also a marker of the way in which Muslims have arguably come to be positioned differently to other diasporic groups, notably Afro-Caribbean, in recent times (Modood 2006). In contrast to recent (macro) sociological analysis that has compared Islamic life and culture in different European countries, and also that which has focused on specific, local communities (the ‘micro’ approach), the research reported upon here has operated at a ‘meso’ level: mapping the interactions between local Muslim social/cultural spaces (specifically, Tower Hamlets and Camden in East London) with the supranational expression of Muslim identity as represented by the ummah. More specifically, this article focuses on Islamic hip hop culture as a medium for articulating complex cultural representations at the individual and collective level.