At the beginning of the Iranian revolution, the new regime in Tehran tried in vain to dissuade Iranians from celebrating this ancient feast, exhorting them to concentrate more on Islamic feasts.

It was no use. People fiercely resisted such policies and ended up celebrating Nowruz even more enthusiastically.

A day after this year’s Nowruz, on March 20th, a beloved artist/singer passed away from cancer in Maryland. He was seventy-eight years old. His name was Faramarz Aslani. We, the generation from before the Iranian revolution, grew up with his music, a mix of Spanish guitar and Persian melancholic lyrics.

Aslani, like so many singers who did not fit the new regime’s definition of culture, left Iran for England and eventually emigrated to the U.S. He continued to sing. His voice was deep, warm, and passionate, sometimes sad.

At the beginning of the Revolution, like so many artists and intellectuals, he was for change, not knowing what the future had in store. He sang a song depicting the struggle against the former regime in favor of the people’s movement. But soon, like so many he became disillusioned. His songs were forbidden and called taghouti, a Quranic term describing anything tyrannical and commonly used for the shah’s regime.

Yet, the youth in Iran still enjoyed his music and would listen clandestinely.

Over the years, things changed. I vividly remember that on one of my last trips to Iran, a large gathering of men and women and youngsters was held on the grounds of the Borj Milad in Tehran.

Faramarz Alsani’s music filled the air.

Aslani held concerts with other famous singers in cities with a high concentration of Iranian expatriates such as Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. He was revered not just as a musician but as a fine human being who truly cared about his country and his people.

“Faramarz Aslani Feat. Dariush: Age Ye Rooz | داریوش و فرامرز اصلانی: اگه یه روز | Official Video”

He started a tour in the U.S. in 1992 at the Shrine Auditorium in L.A. received by an enthusiastic crowd, he said, “These songs are from all the sweet and bitter memories of my life.”

A year later, he finished an album called Hafez, A Memorandum, which consisted of eight poems by Hafez, Iran’s most famous mystical poet.

In 2010, he released another album titled, The Third line (Khatte Sevvom).

Yet, his song, Age Ye Rooz, (if you go on a trip one day), became the signature song of nostalgia for many Iranians, evoking the past, a different era.

Like so many before him, Faramarz Aslani died in exile, far away from his homeland, where he had grown up and had learned to love and compose music.

He became a journalist in London, but it was always his music and his songs that remained.

He is gone now leaving behind a legacy. The many tributes on social media are filled with his music, remembering a legend that died a day after Nowruz.

Adieu Mr. Aslani….

The current Israel-Hamas war has dominated the news for the past few months. As reports of military machinations and diplomatic efforts have gained attention, the art world has struggled with responses to the horrors of this war.

For example, controversy and calls for transparency and accountability followed the departure of Anishinaabe-kwe curator Wanda Nanibush from the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). The departure was apparently related to her expressed opinions on the war.

After the Royal Ontario Museum tried to change a Palestinian American artist’s work, Jenin Yaseen staged a sit-in and others protested.

I have been teaching and writing about the “art world” — what sociologist Howard Becker calls the network of artists, art institutions, funders, patrons and audiences — for years, and researching how artists navigate their thorny relationship with contentious political moments.

Policies and regulations can serve artists, but can also engender a lack of trust and create administrative burdens that impact the healthy functioning of artists and organizations.

Endeavouring to speak truthfully, meaningfully

The Globe and Mail reported some Canadians “active in a support group of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem” expressed concern to the AGO, and that one signatory to a letter said the letter didn’t call for Nanibush’s departure but rather for “antisemitism training and for the AGO to make use of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism.”

If the gallery did try to silence Nanibush, critics have reason to be concerned about how they reacted as the curator and others in the art world endeavoured to speak truthfully and meaningfully in a time of crisis.

In a statement, the AGO’s director and CEO Stephan Jost expressed the gallery’s support for Indigenous artists and a need to “reflect on our commitments to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report …”

Refugees in their Own Homeland, by Mohammad ElMetmari; Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

He acknowledged cultural institutions are “being asked to better define the rights and limits of political and artistic expression in a locally diverse but globally complex environment” and that “intense discussion” also raises questions about good governance.

Rights, limits, regulation and the purpose of artists’ work are what is at stake in this discussion. An investigation is underway to see how the gallery’s policies may have impacted the board’s decision-making.

People trying to create and speak truth

How people assess the value of policies and regulation affecting the art world depends on how much they feel the art world should, or should not, reflect political realities.

Some might suggest that artists should entertain and enlighten us but stay away from contentious issues.

I believe artists have a unique role, different than that of journalists, political leaders or even documentary filmmakers. Beyond parsing the facts of a situation or deliberating and brokering political solutions, artists work to bring human richness and complexity to experiences like conflict and strife.

Art and our lives

Thinking about “art worlds” as “patterns of collective activity,” as Becker does, helps us to think about art in relationship to our social and political lives, and the conditions under which artists create.

Art schools, professional organizations, galleries and performance spaces all play a part in enabling some artists and their messages to shine, whether through financial support, attention or time — while constraining or even silencing others.

Museum and gallery spaces, frequently dependent on government and philanthropic funding, curate and elevate certain artworks and in so doing mediate relationships and foster cultural dialogue between governments and pluralistic communities of citizens. At the same time, they prescribe behaviours and actions that constrain both artists and the public perception of their work.

In this way, the support systems around artistic work have political implications, just as much as the art itself may have.

Discipline via funding

As I examined in my doctoral research, the Summerworks Theatre Festival briefly lost funding from Canadian Heritage in 2011 after staging playwright Catherine Frid’s controversial play Homegrown.

The play critiqued the reach of the Anti-Terrorism Act and the use of solitary confinement as it examined the story of one man convicted of participating in a terrorist group. This was after a high-profile 2006 RCMP investigation saw 18 Muslim individuals accused of terrorism. (Charges against seven people were stayed or dropped, while four people were convicted). Some accused the play of being pro-terrorist.

Artists responded to this institutional censure by staging readings of the play to support the festival.

The art world will find pathways to speak its own truth in the face of such pressures.

For instance, as the Globe and Mail reported, the Belfry Theatre in Victoria made a recent decision to cancel its run of the Israel-set play The Runner. But Vancouver’s PuSh Festival is sticking by plans to run the play as a part of its program along with other works, including the immersive installation Dear Laila that depicts a model of one artist’s former home in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp.

When political pressure closes one door, the art world will often seek to open another, though we have yet to see how this might play out in the case of the AGO and Nanibush.

What do we want from our artists?

In the face of numerous wars, the climate emergency, housing and food insecurity, this is a challenging time. People around the world face what some scholars and activists have called a “polycrisis.”

Artists represent and reflect this social and political upheaval. Banksy scrawls murals on the blasted Ukrainian cityscape. Theatres across the world stage performances or screenings — like The Gaza Monologues — to try to represent Palestinian voices.

Especially in a time when trust in our political leaders and institutions continues to wane, artists, arts leaders and policymakers face daunting but critical questions about making ethically sound decisions.

If the public trusts the art world to do their work with rigour and honesty, artists and arts institutions can be a community of voices expressing diverse perspectives on our collective humanity, reflecting suffering and the power of resistance to violence in this polarizing conflict.

We must critically assess the value of the arts and of artists to perform this important work. And we should be mindful of desires to discipline the art world at a time when its voices are so deeply needed.

Lowell Gasoi, Instructor in communication studies at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa, Carleton University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Almost a decade ago, the Sunni jihadist network known as the “Islamic State” (IS) declared the formation of an Islamic Caliphate after they captured the Iraqi city of Mosul in June 2014.

In response, tens of thousands of Shia men joined a complex patchwork of militias to fight against IS. Many of these militias are notoriously violent and directly loyal to Iran’s theocratic state.

But very little is known about how these Shia militias were so quickly and so effectively mobilised. In our research, we have taken a novel approach, examining the many popular music videos produced by these militias.

These music videos drew on a complex cocktail of historical myths and contemporary clergymen to mobilise Iraq’s Shia population to fight the IS.

Foundational myths, historical grievances

The popular music videos explicitly reference a deeply held set of religious myths and symbols that have informed Shia politics since its inception.

One video shows images of militiamen driving towards the front-lines and firing from a bunker at IS targets.

The singer extols the religious virtues of fighting the IS by comparing those killed today with the Shia martyrs at the Battle of Karbala:

We fight our enemies. Our martyrs are similar to the martyrs of Karbala. Our people are supporters of Hussein.

The divide between the Sunni and Shia sects dates back to the early years of Islam.

A debate emerged after the Prophet Muhammad’s death about who should lead the Islamic community. The majority accepted the authority of the Prophet’s senior companion, Abu Bakr. A minority, later identified as Shiites, believed only a blood relative of the Prophet – in particular, his cousin Ali – had the right to lead.

In the year 680, the division between the two sects escalated at the Battle of Karbala, where Ali’s son Hussein and many of his followers were defeated and executed by Sunni forces.

The legend of the Battle of Karbala has come to symbolise the historical injustice of the Shia faithful at the hands of the Sunni majority. It is commemorated at the annual Ashura festival in which Shiites reenact the battle, including by self-flagellation.

The emotive lyrics and tone of the song are specifically designed to resonate with this history of suffering.

The Shia jihad against the IS

The popular music videos produced by different Shia militias also draw on fatwas (religious edicts) issued by several prominent Shia clerics in response to the violence of the IS.

In 2014, Iraq’s most senior Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Sistani issued a fatwa announcing a jihad (holy war) against the IS.

He called for a mass Shia mobilisation, arguing

It is the legal and national responsibility of whoever can hold a weapon to take up arms to defend the country, the citizens and the holy sites.

Some popular music videos explicitly cite the fatwas of Sistani and other clerics, encouraging their young supporters to heed these calls. A short clip shows armed members of one militia chanting: “Al-Sistani is like a crown on our heads. Your wish is our command.”

One very slickly produced music video refers to both historical grievances over the failure to recognise Ali as the legitimate heir of the Prophet Muhammad and to the centrality of Sistani’s fatwa to their decision to fight the IS:

We are the Turkmen [of Iraq]

We follow Ali’s path

Iraq must live in peace and happiness

When Sistani orders us, we obey. We will defeat and destroy the IS

We believe in the fatwas of our religious authorities, and we defend our holy sites.

As the singer recites each verse, the footage shows heavily armed Shia men posing in front of a tank. It also features live action footage from various battles against the IS, including advancing on key targets, firing machine guns and heavy artillery.

Mobilising young men

These videos serve as a unique archive of the war against the IS, demonstrating the ways in which these militias found novel ways to mobilise young men to fight by drawing on a rich catalogue of Shia religious symbolism as well as the fatwas of clerics like Sistani.

Slick popular music videos draw on a rich catalogue of historical motifs of suffering as well as the contemporary edicts of key clergymen, produced by different Shia militias and shared on YouTube and other social media platforms.

These evocative and poignant songs played an underappreciated and under-examined part in mobilising young men to fight back against the horrors of the IS, indicating the powerful role popular culture plays in contemporary warfare.

Benjamin Isakhan, Professor of International Politics, Deakin University and Ali Akbar, Sessional lecturer and researcher, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Ever since the United States’ “war on terror” began, American media has been rife with stereotypes of Muslims as violent, foreign threats. Advocates trying to push back against this characterization sometimes emphasize that “Islam means peace,” since the two words are derived from the same Arabic root.

Indeed, the traditional Muslim greeting “al-salamu alaykum” means “peace be upon you.” Some Americans were already familiar with the phrase, thanks to an unexpected source: hip-hop culture, which often incorporated the Arabic phrase.

This is but one example of Islam’s deep intertwining with the threads of hip-hop culture. In her groundbreaking book “Muslim Cool,” scholar, artist and activist Suad Abdul Khabeer shows how Islam, specifically Black Islam, was a crucial part of hip-hop’s roots – asserting the faith’s place in American life. From prayerlike lyrics to tongue-in-cheek references, Islam and other religions are woven into hip-hop’s beats.

That’s the focus of a class we teach at Boston University. One of us is a professor of religion, history and pop culture, while the other is a graduate student in Islamic Studies.

More than ‘hello’

In Muslim cultures, “al-salamu alaykum” is more than a way of saying hello. It points to the spiritual peace of submitting to God – and not only in this life. Saying “peace be upon you” is a prayer that God will grant heaven to the person with whom you are speaking. Many Muslims believe that “salam” is also the greeting heard upon entering heaven.

The Quran instructs Muslims that “when you are greeted with a greeting, respond with a better greeting or return it.” This means that the proper response to “al-salamu alaykum” is, at a minimum, to respond in kind: “wa alaykum al-salam.”

This exchange has been adapted by several rap artists – including Rick Ross, who does not identify as Muslim, and turns the phrase’s meaning on its head. Ross uses the greeting in the hook of his song “By Any Means,” referencing a famous speech by civil rights leader Malcolm X, who was a minister of the Nation of Islam for many years until shortly before his assassination. In 1964, Malcolm X declared African Americans’ right “to be respected as a human being … by any means necessary.”

Half a century later, Ross rapped,

By any means, if you like it or not
Malcolm X, by any means
Mini-14 stuffed in my denim jeans
Al-salaam alaykum, wa alaykum al-salaam
Whatever your religion kiss the ring on the Don

Ross’s use of the phrase, right after he mentions Malcolm X, appears to insinuate that if one wishes him peace, he will wish them the same. However, if one wishes him violence, he will not hesitate to respond in kind.

‘Peace to all my shorties’

Other hip-hop artists have used “al-salamu alaykum” in many different ways, including lyrics that show broader familiarity with the laws of Islam. For example, it is sometimes contrasted with pork, which is prohibited in Islam, and by extension, the police – the “pigs,” in derogatory slang – though it is more common for non-Muslim singers to use it in this way.

“Tell the pigs I say Asalamu alaikum,” Lil Wayne says in “Tapout,” a song that has little else to do with Islam. Joyner Lucas likewise raps, “I say As-salāmu ʿalaykum when I tear apart some bacon,” in the song “Stranger Things.” Combinations of the sacred and the profane are present throughout hip-hop, not limited to references to Islam.

Finally, many rappers, particularly those who are Muslim, use the greeting in a more straightforward manner. In their 1995 song “Glamour and Glitz,” A Tribe Called Quest raps:

Peace to all my shorties who be dying too young
Peace to both coasts and the land in between
Peace to your man if you're doing your thing
Peace to my peoples who is incarcerated
Asalaam alaikum means peace, don't debate it

Here they affirm and assert that the core of the greeting is one of peace and harmony – not only between people, but between all of God’s creations.

Shared identity

But even if Muslims come in peace, society may not see them that way – and that experience of discrimination often comes through in some lyrics. Rapper French Montana, who immigrated to the Bronx – the birthplace of hip-hop – from Morocco, raps in his 2019 song “Salam Alaykum:”

As-salamu alaykum, 
That pressure don’t break, 
It don’t matter what you do, 
they still gon’ hate you

It’s a harsh recognition that whatever one’s actions, whether violent or peaceful, they may still result in racism – a realization he shares with some fellow Muslim rappers in Europe. A comedic take on this is done by Zuna and Nimo in their 2016 song “Hol’ mir dein Cousin,” where at the start of the song, Nimo states he has a shipment of “haze–” marijuana, but at the end of the video, it turns out the shipment is of “Hase–” bunnies. Yet, throughout the song the rappers speak about violence and drug trade, painting a conflicting picture of innocence versus guilt.

Fatima El-Tayeb, a scholar of race and gender, calls hip-hop a “diasporic lingua franca” in her 2011 book “European Others,” highlighting how an art form created by African Americans, and speaking to their experiences, has become one of the main ways minorities around the world speak about their struggles and successes. Some young Muslims in Europe, for example, use hip-hop as a key way to assert their sense of belonging in societies.

In hip-hop, “al-salamu alaykum” is not treated as though it were part of a foreign culture. These rappers’ beats create a space where it’s OK to be Muslim – a space in which Islam is not merely tolerated, but recognized as a valuable part of pop culture.

Margarita Guillory, Associate Professor of Religion, Boston University and Jeta Luboteni, Ph.D. Student in Religion, Boston University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(The Conversation) – I was 9 years old when Eric B. and Rakim’s “Paid in Full” dropped. I have vivid memories of the bass-laden track booming out of car stereos and hearing it on Black radio, like Kiss FM’s top eight at 8 p.m. countdown.

On the track “Move the Crowd,” Rakim – also known as “the God MC” – rhymes “All praise is due to Allah and that’s a blessing.” Growing up as a Black Muslim in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, I was already familiar with the phrase. Like all Muslims, I learned to say it during my daily prayers and as an expression of gratitude.

But when Rakim laced those words into the lyrics of what ultimately became a popular song, he affirmed what I was seeing around me in my Brooklyn community – that Islam and Muslims were prominent features of Black life.

A key concept

Rakim dropped another familiar phrase in the song: knowledge of self.

With knowledge of self, there’s nothing I can’t solve
At 360 degrees I revolve
This an actual fact, it’s not an act, it’s been proven
Indeed and I proceed to make the crowd keep moving.

When Rakim extols the benefits of “knowledge of self” to himself as an emcee and a human being, he is drawing on a philosophy that has been critical to Black Islam, a term I use to describe the different forms of Islamic belief and practice found in Black America.

Knowledge of self comes from this tradition, beginning roughly a century ago, which has become known for advancing Black consciousness, resistance and redemption. Knowledge of self is an ethical pursuit to understand one’s place in and relationship to the world in order to positively change it.

In my 2016 book, “Muslim Cool: Race, Religion and Hip Hop in the United States,” I demonstrate how knowledge of self is fundamental to hip-hop. It is often described as hip-hop’s “fifth element,” the others being DJing; emceeing or “rhyming”; graffiti or “writing”; and dance, from “b-boying” to “pop locking.”

While the phrase and the consciousness that it represents have been mentioned in too many songs to count – from Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” to Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop” and Talib Kweli’s “K.O.S. (Determination)” – history shows the term has been a part of Islamic literature for nearly a millennium. For example, the first chapter of the celebrated 12th-century Islamic scholar Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali’s famous text “The Alchemy of Happiness” is titled “The Knowledge of Self.”

The concept of ‘knowledge of self’ was instrumental in Lauryn Hill’s breakout 1998 single ‘Doo Wop:’

In my book, I make the case that Islam, specifically Black Islam, gave hip-hop knowledge of self.

Su’ad Abdulkhabeer, Muslim Cool
Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States.. Click here.

The lessons

Rakim’s reference to knowledge of self’s being an “actual fact” is a nod to the “actual facts” of the “Lost-Found Muslim Lessons,” the catechism taught by Master W.D. Fard Muhammad, who founded the Nation of Islam on July 4, 1930. Master Fard taught these lessons to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, who would become the religious movement’s leader.

These lessons are fundamental to the way that the Nation of Islam understands the world and the role of Black people in it. The lessons are also studied by the Nation of Gods and Earths, a related spiritual path, of which Rakim is a member. Knowledge of self comes to hip-hop through these lessons.

Rakim was not alone. During the golden age of hip-hop, a period from about the mid-1980s through mid-1990s, rappers – influenced by Black Islam – steadily proclaimed their knowledge of self in their music. Big Daddy Kane declared there’s “no pork on my fork,” an acknowledgment of the Islamic injunction against the consumption of swine. The Poor Righteous Teachers gave the Arabic greeting as salaamu alaikum with the dome of Harlem’s Masjid Malcolm Shabazz in the background in the music video for “Rock Dis Funky Joint.” And from Brooklyn to the California Bay, acclaimed emcees like Guru and local acts were rhyming about “praying to the east,” a reference to the Muslim practice.

The message

Long before rappers spoke of knowledge of self in the 1980s, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad expounded on the term in his book “Message to the Blackman in America,” released in 1965 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. In it, he emphasized Black self-reliance – with knowledge of self being a key component.

“The so-called Negroes must be taught and given Islam,” Muhammad wrote. “Why Islam? Islam, because it teaches first the knowledge of self. It gives us the knowledge of our own. Then and only then are we able to understand that which surrounds us … this kind of thinking produces an industrious people who are self-independent.”

In some ways, it comes as little surprise that a term promulgated by a fierce advocate of self-reliance in the mid-1960s would be so widely embraced by hip-hop shortly after it was born as a counterculture in the early 1970s.

Hip-hop’s consciousness

When Black Islam helped hip-hop culture cultivate knowledge of self, it created an aspiration, arguably unique for contemporary popular music as a whole, to not just rhyme about it or write graffiti about it, and so on, but to apply it in real life. As a result, knowledge of self became hip-hop’s consciousness, emphasizing an awareness of injustice and the imperative to address it through both personal and social transformation. Critically, this consciousness, while informed by Black Islam, is embraced by hip-hop community members of all stripes.

Via Pixabay/ Wikimedia.. The 1989 song ‘Self-Destruction’ opens with a sample of a speech by Malcolm X.

The consciousness led to different forms of hip-hop-based activism. Songs against gun violence like The Stop the Violence Movement’s “Self-Destruction” and “We Are All in the Same Gang” by the West Coast All Stars.

“Self-Destruction” opens, not inconsequentially, with a sample of a speech by Malcolm X, the onetime spokesman for the Nation of Islam and icon of Black Islam. The consciousness also contributed to the formation in 2004 of the National Hip-Hop Political Convention, which set the stage for other, albeit less radical and comprehensive, engagements with politics by the hip-hop generation, like the Vote or Die campaign and the push for Obama in 2008.

Nearly 10 years later, this consciousness was on display at the 2017 Grammy performance by A Tribe Called Quest, Busta Rhymes and Consequence that was an open call to “resist” in the Trump era. This consciousness also continues to inspire the many organizations like Kuumba Lynx and the Inner-City Muslim Action Network in Chicago that use hip-hop as a form of arts-based activism for youth.

And, of course, it remains in the music.

The knowledge continues

On the track “Family Feud,” Jay-Z – like Rakim – praises God, but this time in Arabic: “Alhamdulillah,” Mumu Fresh questions others’ knowledge of self with the line “Good morning, sunshine, welcome to reality/I tried to wake you, but you were sleepin’ so peacefully in your fallacy.” Busta Rhymes dropped “Extinction Level Event 2: The Wrath of God,” full of warnings and prophecies. And in a freestyle viewed around the world, Black Thought rhymes about the wisdom he got at the masjid. This consciousness is so entwined with music that Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” became a Black Lives Matter movement anthem.

Like hip-hop, this consciousness operates globally. Take, for example, the Iraqi-Canadian Narcy, Cape Town’s YoungstaCPT, Cuban hip-hop artist Robe L. Ninho and the U.K.’s Enny, whose works track their own journey for knowledge of self.

Things have changed since Rakim dropped “Move the Crowd” in 1987. Gentrification is pushing my community out of Brooklyn, and Islam and Muslims are more known and subject to the state and interpersonal violence of anti-Muslim racism. Yet hip-hop still affirms what I see around me – knowledge of self is as vital as ever.

Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, Associate Professor of American Culture, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

When news broke July 26, 2023, that the gifted Irish singer Sinead O’Connor had died, stories of her most famous performance circulated amid the grief and shock.

Thirty-one years ago, after a haunting rendition of Bob Marley’s song “War,” O’Connor ripped up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on live television. “Fight the real enemy,” she said – a reference to clerical sex abuse. For months afterward, she was banned, booed and mocked, dismissed as a crazy rebel beyond the pale.

Commemorations following her death, however, cast the protest in a very different light. Her “Saturday Night Live” performance is now seen as “invigorating,” the New York Times’ pop critic wrote, and “a call to arms for the dispossessed.”

Attitudes toward Catholicism, sex and power are far different today than in 1992, whether in New York or O’Connor’s native Dublin. In many people’s eyes, the moral credibility of the Catholic Church around the world has crumbled, and trust in faith institutions of any sort is at an all-time low. Sexual abuse, once discussed only in whispers, is now beginning to be talked about openly.

I join the chorus of voices today who say O’Connor was decades ahead of her time. But leaving it just at that, we miss something profound about the complexity and depth of her religious imagination. Sinead O’Connor was arguably one of the most spiritually sensitive artists of our time.

I am a scholar of Catholicism in the modern era and have long been interested in those figures – the poets, artists, seekers – who wander the margins of their religious tradition. These men and women are dissatisfied with the mainstream centers of religious power but nonetheless compelled by something indelibly religious that feeds the wellsprings of their artistic imagination.

Throughout her life, O’Connor defied religious labels, exploring multiple faiths. The exquisite freedom in her music cannot be disentangled from that something transcendent that she was always after.

‘Rescuing God from religion’

Religion is often thought about as discreet traditions: institutions that someone is either inside or outside. But on the ground, it is rarely that simple.

The Catholic Church had a strong hold on Irish society as O’Connor was growing up – a “theocracy,” she called it in interviews and her memoir, “Rememberings” – and for many years she called for more accountability for the clerical abuse crisis. But she was also open in her love of other aspects of the faith, albeit often in unorthodox ways. She had a tattoo of Jesus on her chest and continued to critique the church while appearing on television with a priest’s collar.

Ten years after her SNL performance, O’Connor took courses at a seminary in Dublin with a Catholic Dominican priest, Rev. Wilfred Harrington. Together, they read the prophets of the Hebrew Bible and the Psalms: sacred scriptures in which God’s voice comes through in darker, moodier, more human forms.

Inspired by her teacher, she made the gorgeous album “Theology,” dedicated to him. The album is a mix of some of her own songs inspired by the Hebrew Bible – like “If You Had a Vineyard,” inspired by the Book of Isaiah; and “Watcher of Men,” which draws from the biblical story of Job – and other tracks that essentially are sung versions of her favorite Psalms.

In a 2007 interview with Fordham University’s WFUV radio station, O’Connor said that she was hoping the album could show God to people when religion itself had blocked their access to God. It was a kind of “rescuing God from religion,” to “lift God out of religion.” Rather than preaching or writing, “music is the little way that I do that,” she said, adding, “I say that as someone who has a lot of love for religion.”

Reading the prophets

In doing so, she stood in the long line of the prophetic tradition itself.

The great Jewish thinker Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book “The Prophets” begins with this sentence: “This book is about some of the most disturbing people who have ever lived.” Over and over, the Bible shows the prophets – the prophets who inspired “Theology” – mounting bracing assaults on hypocrisies and insincerities in their own religious communities, and not politely or calmly.

To many horrified Catholics, O’Connor’s SNL appearance and her many other criticisms of the church were blasphemous – or, at best, just throwing stones from outside the church for attention. Other fans, however, saw it as prophetic condemnation. It was not just a critique of child abuse but of church officials’ professed compassion for children – sanctimonious pieties as they covered up the abuse.

In calling this out and so much more, O’Connor was often seen as disturbing: not just the photo-of-the-pope incident, but her androgyny, her shaved head, her openness around her own struggles with mental illness. But for many admirers, as the documentary “Nothing Compares” makes clear, all this showed that she was free, and like the prophets of old, unashamed and unafraid to provoke.

Rasta to Islam

At the same time, O’Connor’s religious imagination was so much more than a complex relationship with Catholicism. Religion around O’Connor was eclectic and intense.

She was deeply influenced by Rastafarian traditions of Jamaica, which she described as “an anti-religious but massively pro-God spiritual movement.” She considered Sam Cooke’s early album with the Soul Stirrers the best gospel album ever made. She counted among her spiritual heroes Muhammad Ali – and converted to Islam in 2018, changing her name to Shuhada’ Sadaqat.

Yet O’Connor’s vision was not fragmented, as if she were constantly chasing after bits and pieces. The miracle of Sinead O’Connor is that it all coheres, somehow, in the words of an artist who refuses to lie, to hide or not say what she thinks.

When asked about spirituality, O’Connor once said that she preferred to sing about it, not talk about it – as she does in so many songs, from her luminous singing of the antiphon, a Marian hymn sung at Easter services, to her Rasta-inspired album, “Throw Down Your Arms.”

In “Something Beautiful,” a track from the “Theology” album, O’Connor speaks both to God and the listener: “I wanna make/ Something beautiful/ For you and from you/ To show you/ I adore you.”

Indeed she did. To be moved by her art is to sense a transcendence, a peek into radiance.

Brenna Moore, Professor of Theology, Fordham University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

O’Connor maintained to Dr. Phil that she was an abused child, the victim of her mother, Johanna O’Grady: “She ran a torture chamber. My earliest memory, she’s telling me I shouldn’t have been born. She didn’t want me … She was a person who took delight, would smile in hurting you.”

She ran away from home when she was 13. She was later caught shoplifting and had to spend 8 months in a home for fallen women, which she remembered as a horrific experience. When she was 18 her mother died in a car accident, leaving Sinead forever unable to work through that difficult relationship, which haunted her.

Dylan inspired her to take up music. She came to prominence with her 1987 punk-rock hit in the UK, “Mandinka.”

Her breakout song was a cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares to U” in 1990, a song about the depth of loss, in which she genuinely wept at the end of the video. Tom Eames explains that it stayed at the top of the US charts for four weeks in 1990.

Sinéad O’Connor – Nothing Compares 2 U (Official Music Video) [HD]

She was becoming a pop star, but it wasn’t what she wanted. She said she was a punk, a protest singer. She insisted on shocking her fans. Issy Ronald explains that as an abused child herself, she was sensitive to the stories in the back pages of the Irish newspapers on victims of priest child abuse, and grew more and more furious about it. When she was invited to perform on Saturday Night Live in 1992, she sang Bob Marley’s “War” a capella, and ended by tearing up a photograph of Pope John Paul, whom she blamed for having declined to confront the pedophilia crisis in the Church. She shouted “Fight the real enemy!”

“Sinéad O’Connor on ripping up Pope photo in 1992 SNL performance”

I remember watching that performance and wondering what in the world was going on. I didn’t become aware of the priest pedophilia issue until much later.

Ironically, Ms. O’Connor wrote in her memoir, Rememberings that she probably became a musician because, as a woman, she was barred from becoming a priest. Her spiritual yearning, visible throughout her life, was not squelched by the patriarchy and abuse of major religious institutions. She continued to seek the transcendent truth, but outside such frameworks.

She battled her own demons, including bipolar disorder, and had difficulty maintaining lasting relationships. She was a deeply lonely person who kept seeking intimacy and failing to find it. She had four failed marriages, one lasting just a week.

As someone who felt oppressed herself, she sympathized with both the Jews and the Palestinians. Daniel Hilton at Middle East Eye explains that she agreed to do a concert in Jerusalem in 1997 for a group of Israeli and Palestinian women who were campaigning for Jerusalem to be the shared capital of Israel and Palestine. This was when the Oslo Peace Accords had created an expectation that there would be a Palestinian state, before far right Likud politician Binyamin Netanyahu derailed the agreement.

An Israeli extremist group, the Ideological Front, made death threats against Ms. O’Connor, who cancelled the concert. One of the activists threatening to kill her was Itamar Ben-Gvir, whom Netanyahu made minister of national security this winter. Ben-Gvir boasted, “Due to us she is not arriving.” He added, “We are calling the pressure we put on her … a success,” according to AP at the time. As always, Ben-Gvir and his fellow violent extremists were the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. They delivered the death threat to the British embassy. Ms. O’Connor was Irish.

Ms. O’Connor said, “I cannot put in danger the lives of my two children, my musicians and my technicians, so I have decided to cancel.”

She then wrote an open letter to Ben-Gvir, her would-be murderer. She said, “God does not reward those who bring terror to children of the world, So you have succeeded in nothing but your soul’s failure.”

Well, God may not reward them, but Netanyahu will put them in his Cabinet.

She became increasingly concerned about the plight of the Palestinians under Israeli military rule and in 2014 she declined to play in Israel. She told an Irish music magazine, “Let’s just say that, on a human level, nobody with any sanity, including myself, would have anything but sympathy for the Palestinian plight. There’s not a sane person on earth who in any way sanctions what the f*** the Israeli authorities are doing,”

In 2018 she announced that she had converted to Islam, tweeting, “This is to announce that I am proud to have become a Muslim. This is the natural conclusion of any intelligent theologian‘s journey. All scripture study leads to Islam. Which makes all other scriptures redundant.”

She also praised the beauty of the Qur’an, saying, “Listen to Qur’an recitation… it goes straight to your soul… I find it powerful to hear. What I love is to listen to the beautiful recitations in Arabic and then hear the spoken English. The Arabic recitation has to be listened to.”

Such a lovely reflection on the beauty, poetry, and musicality of the Qur’an. https://t.co/qSJaKMKflh

— Ambereen Dadabhoy 🪬 (@DrDadabhoy) July 27, 2023

I concur, and remember the warm feelings I got from studying the Qur’an in Arabic in Cairo back in 1975.

Khaled Baydoun noted that few obituaries featured pictures of O’Connor, who privately took the name Shuhada Sadaqat, in hijab:

Many Mainstream media outlets are overlooking or erasing Sinead – or Shahuda’s — Muslim identity

RT this pic.twitter.com/NKlyGCBxyg

— Khaled Beydoun (@KhaledBeydoun) July 26, 2023

On the other hand, she was an LGBTQ+ ally, and once wore a rainbow hijab. And to be fair, she didn’t always wear a Muslim veil after her conversion. She wrote in her memoir that it wasn’t really possible for her to perform her music in one.

I hope she wrote more about what Islam meant to her in private diaries and correspondence, which will come to light. As with everything in her life, her take on it will have been brave, original and full of deep ethical insight.

Those who want to know more about Islam and the Qur’an, which clearly held attractions for O’Connor, can consult my book,

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“The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is a Persian poetry collection first put together in 1460 in Shiraz. It consists of quatrains, four-line poems, with a set of unconventional themes. The poetry is irreligious and questions the afterlife and God’s providence. It shows keen awareness of the shortness of life and the finality of death. It advises therefore that every fleeting moment of every day should be savored, with wine, lovers and song. The combination of a serious philosophy of life and a carefree attitude has made the poetry popular for centuries. In 1859, Edward FitzGerald brought out a loose English translation that took the world by storm. It became the most beloved and widely known poem in the English language for decades until its popularity finally faded in the late twentieth century. Although they were attributed to the great mathematician and astronomer, Omar Khayyam (d. 1131), the poems were by many anonymous hands, and he was just a frame author, akin to Scheherezade in the Arabian Nights.” – Dr. Juan Cole, Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan

About the Composition of Adam Lenhart: “Two Scenes from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám” explores and embodies two of the main themes that carry throughout the quatrains of the poem collection. In FitzGerald’s translation, the quatrains follow a day to night cycle. The two movements reflect this by starting off with an abrupt “wake up” section and ending the piece with a nocturne. The first movement, “Wine”, celebrates the camaraderie, joy and chaos that comes through the physical joy of being with friends. The clarinet, violin and piano interact in a conversational way, talking, laughing, and insulting one another in their own independent lines.

The second movement is entitled “Intimacy” and explores the emotional joy of connecting with one another. The movement is set in a waltz style dance and draws influence from Chopin, Liszt and other romantic era composers. This is juxtaposed by youthful and energetic phrases so that the piece embodies all forms of love: young love, years of marriage and even friendship. Each movement has a sense of urgency and density which is present in the rubá’iyát as well, expressing to the reader that our time on Earth is so short and to make the most of each day.

Purchase this score at: https://www.sheetmusicdirect.com/en-U… Watch the score follower video at:    • Two Scenes from T…   Movement I, “Wine”: 0:00 Movement II, “Intimacy”: 3:52

For the Cole translation:

For the earliest collection of verse attributed to Omar Khayyam see
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Just days before his September 30 arrest, the 32-year-old Salehi released his latest music video, in which he makes foreboding predictions about the future of Iran’s clerical regime if it continues its violent crackdown against ongoing anti-government demonstrations.

“I am the predictor, the fortune teller,” he raps in the video for Omen, which shows him reading the patterns left in his coffee cup and warning that brute force will not prevail.

Toomaj Salehi has gained notoriety in recent years for his open opposition to the country’s leadership, using his music and social media presence to take on issues that resonate with Iranian youth.

“I saw a cage in the coffee grounds — a lion was hunting a jackal,” he explains, alluding to a fairy tale about wisdom defeating physical strength. “We will rise from the bottom and target the top of the pyramid.”

Salehi goes on to warn that the regime’s protectors — including the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the Basij paramilitary forces, the Intelligence Ministry, and the state media — will all get their day in court.

Toomaj: موزیک ویدیو “فال” از توماج

Salehi followed up on the new video by posting on social media images of him standing alongside protesters and chanting against security forces in his native city in Isfahan Province. The rapper, an ethnic Lur who was arrested last year after releasing other songs critical of the government, offered to turn himself in if protesters detained in his hometown of Shahinshahr were released.

In subsequent posts, he called the provincial authorities “cowardly vermin” and “scum who suppress and arrest [innocent] people.”

Shortly afterward, Salehi went missing and has not been heard from since.

State media reported on September 30 that Salehi had been arrested, and a news agency close to the IRGC published a photo of the blindfolded rapper inside a car.

صفحه تلگرامی وابسته به سپاه از دستگیری توماج صالحی در غرب کشور خبر دادند.#مهسا_امینی #اعتراضات_سراسری pic.twitter.com/l9fED7IHkO

— Roya Maleki (@1RoyaMaleki) October 30, 2022

A short video later released by a press club associated with Iran’s state broadcaster purports to show the rapper admitting he made a mistake.

But the reports’ claims he had been caught while “illegally exiting the western borders of the country” have been fiercely disputed, and the video confession has been labeled a fake by some and a coerced confession by others.

Family members as well as Salehi’s official Twitter account have said the rapper was, in fact, arrested in the southwestern Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari Province, hundreds of kilometers from Iran’s western border.

In a statement, Salehi’s uncle Eghbal Eghbali said his nephew was in the province’s city of Borujen on the morning of September 30 when he wrote saying “suspicious things” were happening outside his home. Soon after, Salehi stopped communicating. Eghbali said he learned from Salehi’s neighbors and friends that security personnel had arrived to take the rapper away.

Later on September 30, a prosecutor in nearby Isfahan Province was quoted by the Meezan news agency, which is close to Iran’s judiciary, as saying Salehi was arrested “in one of the provinces of the country.” The prosecutor alleged the rapper had played a key role in “creating disturbances and inviting and encouraging the recent disturbances in Isfahan Province and in Shahinshahr.”

Salehi is among the hundreds of prominent young voices, including activists, artists, and athletes, who have been arrested for speaking out against the state’s bloody crackdown on the protests.

The official IRNA news agency, meanwhile, quoted a judiciary official from Isfahan Province as saying Salehi stood accused of “propagandistic activity against the government, cooperation with hostile governments, and the formation of illegal groups with the intention of creating insecurity in the country.”

Thousands of Iranians, many of them from the younger generation, have taken to the streets in recent weeks to protest the September 16 death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died shortly after being arrested for allegedly violating Iran’s hijab law requiring that women cover their hair.

As the protests have continued, the authorities have intensified their crackdown, resulting in the deaths of at least 305 people, including 41 children, according to the latest figures released by the Oslo-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) on November 6.

Salehi is among the hundreds of prominent young voices, including activists, artists, and athletes, who have been arrested for speaking out against the state’s bloody crackdown on the protests. Overall, activists estimate thousands of people have been arrested by the authorities since the rallies erupted.

Faced with a potential existential threat to Iran’s clerical rule, 227 of 290 Iranian lawmakers this week called for even greater force by urging the judiciary to “deal decisively” with those behind the protests.

In recent years, Salehi has gained notoriety for his open opposition to the country’s leadership, using his music and social media presence to take on issues that resonate with Iranian youths.

In the song Normal, he highlights the effects of poverty, saying “Our children sleep hungry at night” and asking Iran’s leaders how their conscience can let them sleep.

The song Rathole, released in 2021, accuses members of the media and art community both inside and outside Iran of being an “ally of the tyrant,” a reference to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

In another song, he blasts Tehran’s close relationships with Moscow and Beijing, asking: “Haven’t you robbed us enough? Now, you want to give away half [of our resources] to China and the rest to Russia.”

Salehi was detained in September 2021 after security agents raided his home in Isfahan, with Human Rights Watch decrying the detention of the artist for “exercising his right to freedom of expression.”

Salehi was charged with “spreading propaganda against the state,” but after more than a week was released on bail. In January, he was sentenced to six months in prison but was released on a suspended sentence in February.

While out, he continued his work and released Omen amid the state’s increasingly violent crackdown on anti-government protesters.

“Someone’s crime was dancing with her hair in the wind,” he raps. “Someone’s crime was that she was brave and criticized.”

Listing a litany of violent acts carried out by the authorities against protesters, Salehi asks, “How many young people did you kill building a tower for yourself?” and predicts that next year, the 44th year of the clerical regime’s rule, will be its “year of failure.”

Salehi’s arrest has led to widespread condemnation inside and outside Iran, and his advocates have spread the #FreeToomaj hashtag on Twitter to shed light on his situation.

His family has said they do not know Salehi’s whereabouts or health, leaving them wondering if he is even alive.

But the authorities have shed some light on the fate of another Iranian rapper arrested shortly before Salehi. The judiciary announced on November 7 that Saman Yasin, a rapper from Kermanshah Province — a northwestern region with a significant Kurdish population and that has been a focus of the government crackdown — has been accused of waging “warfare” against Iran and acting against the country’s security.

Based on reporting by RFE/RL’s Radio Farda, with contributions by RFE/RL senior correspondent Michael Scollon

RFE?RL