(Image source: Awakening Music)

A groundbreaking music video opens with a shot of a spacious, tastefully decorated living room. Sunlight streams through the windows, enveloping the white furniture and modernist décor with an ethereal quality. A wavy-haired, bespectacled, handsome man – wearing stylish jeans and a t-shirt – walks across the room. He is inspecting a roll of film. The walls of the living room are filled with pictures of natural landscapes, urban architecture, and children – the young man is a photographer. Soft and slow music plays in the background – light hand-drums and the ooh-ing of male vocal harmonies. The opening sequence cuts to a close-up of the young man, singing to the camera. “We once had a teacher [who] changed the world for the better,” he begins, with gentle, melismatic vocals. But we’ve “wronged ourselves” and “strayed” from his teachings to make us “better creatures.” The teacher in the pop star’s lyrics is the Prophet Muhammad.

The song, “Al-Mu’allim” (The Teacher), is the title track from the debut album by the British Muslim singer Sami Yusuf, released in 2003. As opposed to other pop hits, it is not a ballad about hot-blooded heterosexual romance, but a yearning for the Prophet Muhammad. In the music video, only two women get airtime – the smiling, hijab-wearing mother whose hand Yusuf kisses reverentially before leaving the house, and a young girl in a group of children he plays with at the mosque after he performs his prayers. The video contains no dancing – not even the rhythmic swaying one might expect in a conventional pop video. Instead, the visuals are dominated by slow, lingering shots of Yusuf performing everyday good deeds like helping a blind man cross the road.

This portrayal of Islamic ideals via an attractive male, Muslim, musical messenger did not emerge in an ideological vacuum. Yusuf’s debut album was released in July 2003, three months after the illegal U.S.-led invasion of Iraq as part of its War on Terror. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Western media and political discourse were saturated with debates about whether Islam was inherently a violent religion, often accompanied by images of bearded Muslim male terrorists.

By contrast, Yusuf projected an image of tender, pious Muslim masculinity that comfortably navigated secular and religious settings. He represented Muslim men as agents of creativity and goodness, inspired directly by the teachings of their faith. His album and music videos were primarily marketed to Muslim audiences, initially in the Middle East and then globally. Within three years, he was dubbed “Islam’s biggest rock star” by TIME, “the biggest star in the Middle East” by The Guardian and the “King of Islamic Pop” by Al Jazeera.

The emergence of this musical genre and its effects on contemporary Islam are the focus of The Awakening of Islamic Pop Music by Jonas Otterbeck, Professor of Islamic Studies at the Aga Khan University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations in London. Otterbeck explores the rise of Islamic pop by telling the story of Awakening, the company that first signed Yusuf and subsequently other Muslim pop hitmakers. Otterbeck’s main argument is that Awakening was and remains a major player in “altering the very formulations of Islamic thought” through “popular culture and the creative arts.” Since Awakening has, to date, signed only male performers, Otterbeck argues that the style and substance of artists like Yusuf can be understood as carefully curated expressions of “ethical masculinity.” This concept refers to the expectation that artists will produce content that conforms with traditional Islamic teachings and project a “proper” Islamic image in their onstage personas and everyday interactions. More examples can be found in other Awakening artists such as the Lebanese-Swedish Maher Zain, the Egyptian-American Raef, the Turkish-Macedonian Mesut Kurtis, the Kuwaiti Humood AlKhuder, and the Libyan Ali Magrebi.

Awakening started in 2000 as a publishing house, with a biography of the Prophet Muhammad as its first project. It was founded in London by friends Sharif Banna and Wali-ur Rahman, later joined by Bara Kherigi and Wassim Malak. They were Sunni Muslim young men with a deep interest – and a couple of them with formal qualifications – in Islamic Studies. All were united by a common purpose to improve the quality of Islamic media products by publishing high-quality Islamic books. In 2003, Awakening initiated plans for its first music project and Kherigi began talking to his childhood friend – the Tehran-born Londoner Sami Yusuf.

The collaboration initially had all the intimacy of a start-up amongst friends. Yusuf’s album was recorded in a tiny studio in Manchester to which he had access through his father. Kherigi told Otterbeck that, back then, he “would be writing lyrics downstairs” while Yusuf was “recording upstairs.” The Awakening founders’ belief in Yusuf’s potential was so steadfast that to finance the video for “Al-Mu’allim,” they put in their own money, sold their possessions (including their cars), and borrowed the rest.

Everything paid off. Awakening convinced the Egyptian satellite music channel Melody Hits to air the video and Yusuf became an overnight superstar. While Yusuf would eventually have a public falling out with Awakening, the label kept expanding and catalyzed the growth of Islamic pop as a new musical genre.

Otterbeck’s own interest in Islamic pop was born out of analytical choice and chance. He is Swedish, and spent a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a tour guide in Egypt. When he started his Ph.D. in Islamic Studies in 1992, he initially focused on Islamic books and pamphlets. Then in 2008, at a conference in the Netherlands, he became curious about “a couple of hijab-wearing, teenage girls who tried out the screaming fan-girl role in an otherwise completely quiet, seated audience” during a musical performance. The audience gave them a collective death stare, and the girls slinked out of the auditorium in giggles.

The gig was by Hamza Robertson, an English convert to Islam whose first album, Something About Life, was released by Awakening in 2007. “Much to my surprise at the time,” Otterbeck writes, “the development of new devout musical expressions informed by Islam was taking place under my nose in Europe.”

Although much of Otterbeck’s book focuses on Muslim pop and consumer culture trends in Europe, he does not ignore interconnected developments elsewhere. Importantly, he acknowledges the phenomenon of Raihan, “the first Islamic boyband” from Malaysia, which achieved national stardom in the late 1990s and went on to dominate the global Islamic pop scene. In fact, Awakening’s early promotional strategy for Sami Yusuf included landing him a star-making gig as Raihan’s opening act when they toured the U.K. in the summer of 2003.

***

It might now come as a surprise that, according to many interpretations of Islam, music, musical instruments, and singing are strictly forbidden (haram). Yet the scope of this ruling remains inconclusive. Some Islamic scholars contend that drums are permissible but not wind or string instruments and that only female voices are taboo, which explains Awakening’s focus on signing only male artists so far. According to Otterbeck, the Islamic scholars whom Awakening consulted shifted the focus of permissibility from the use of instruments and singing to the underlying moral purpose of the music. To them, only “licentious music” – which encouraged free mixing of the sexes, dancing, and booze – was blameworthy, while music that facilitated religious devotion was praiseworthy.

Otterbeck’s book was personally a joy to read and to reflect on, especially since I was also part of the Malaysian pop music and theater scene during the period he discusses. I released my debut album Dilanda Cinta (Lovestruck) in 2005 and won the Best Male Vocal in an Album award the following year at the 13^th Music Industry Awards, the Malaysian equivalent of the Grammies. At the same time, I was cutting my teeth in human rights and social justice movements, including a brief stint as the executive director of the Malaysian section of Amnesty International. Through these roles, I witnessed and often responded to the many debates and controversies about politicized interpretations and impositions of Islamic morals in Malaysia, including on popular music. This is significant since, as Otterbeck notes, the country has been a major center of Islamic pop music.

In 2003, the same year Sami Yusuf signed his deal with Awakening (and I got signed to mine), another phenomenon took Malaysia by storm – the reality television competition Akademi Fantasia (AF). Based on the Mexican show La Academia, the program combined the competitive element of American Idol and the fly-on-the-wall, behind-the-scenes aspects of Big Brother. While American Idol was also popular in Malaysia at this time, cultural politics and demographic factors meant that it appealed to a smaller, English-speaking audience of diverse ethnicities. The Malay-language AF gained a much bigger fan base that was predominantly ethnic Malay.

(Akademi Fantasia album. Image source: Am CollectionZ on Facebook)

This language divide did not only map onto an ethnic division – it had religious dimensions, too. According to Malaysia’s Federal Constitution, a Malay is “a person who professes the religion of Islam, habitually speaks the Malay language, [and] conforms to Malay custom” (Article 160). The Constitution also enshrines a “special position” for Malays (Article 153) and establishes that “Islam is the religion of the Federation,” albeit “other religions can also be practiced safely and peacefully in any part of the Federation” (Article 3).

This legal fusion of Malay ethnicity and Islam is a relic of colonial British divide-and-rule policies and has had far-reaching consequences. Most significantly, several major political parties are organized solely along racial or religious lines, including the United Malays National Organization, the Malaysian Chinese Association, the Malaysian Indian Congress, and the Malaysian Islamic Party. On an interpersonal level, this has overtly politicized everyday life for Malaysia’s hugely diverse population through race or religion, or both.

This can most clearly be seen in the legal sphere; the country’s laws encompass secular provisions for all Malaysians but there are also Islamic laws that apply only to Muslims. The Islamic legal system – another legacy of British colonialism – includes enactments that mean, for example, adult Muslim men can be punished for not attending congregational Friday prayers. Drinking alcohol is a crime for Muslims – punishable by a fine, incarceration, or whipping – but not for non-Muslims. Khalwat – defined as “suspicious proximity” between unmarried straight Muslim couples – is also a crime. These regulations are enforced by Islamic moral police who have the power to arrest. It is almost routine now for them to barge into cheap hotels to detain unmarried Muslim couples sharing a room together, especially on Valentine’s Day.

Within this context, the law allows concerts and other music gigs to take place, but with several constraints on Muslim performers and audiences. For example, female performers – including non-Muslims – must not show any skin between shoulders and knees, especially cleavage. Because of this, top artists who have refused to comply with these regulations, such as Beyoncé, are banned from performing in the country. Chart hits are also routinely censored, including Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” because of its queer-friendly message. At the same time, Malaysia projects itself as a “moderate” or “model” Muslim nation-state and is a U.S. ally.

Against this cultural backdrop, the initial Akademi Fantasia seasons were wildly popular and defined by anxiety about proper representations of Islamic piety within the fresh format of reality TV. The first season was particularly controversial when some contestants started hugging those who were not of the same gender during the elimination episodes, raising the specter of “suspicious proximity.” Even the deputy prime minister (and now disgraced former premier) Najib Razak put in his two cents and said, “No hugging please, we are Muslims.” The show’s producers immediately clamped down on this, a ban that applied throughout future seasons.

The third season, AF3, which aired in 2005, became a gamechanger. The show’s surge in popularity could be attributed mostly to Mawi, the season’s eventual winner. Mawi (full name Asmawi Ani) was a hit amongst viewers because of his humble background from a Malay village, and for his conservative Islamic piety. It did not matter that Mawi was not as vocally accomplished as some of the other contestants, or even that he once flubbed his lyrics. These flaws only elevated his appeal.

There was no stopping the AF juggernaut and the Tsumawi (a fan-created portmanteau of “tsunami” and “Mawi”). His popularity was described in almost mystical terms in the Malay-language press, who waxed lyrical about his irresistible “aura.”

After winning AF3, Mawi went on to straddle the non-Islamic and Islamic Malay pop scene. At the height of his popularity, he collaborated with Raihan to produce several Islamic pop hits in Malay. He embodied a variation of ethical masculinity, appealing to his fans as a devout, rural Malay boy-next-door who could never have expected to become an overnight sensation. This narrative was captured in his songs and public image, and was reinforced in Malay-language gossip columns.

This version of ethical masculinity shaped, and was shaped by, a social context steeped in racial and religious politics and intensifying state-sanctioned moral policing. In February 2005, three months before AF3 went to air, Islamic religious enforcers courted controversy when they raided a top nightclub in Kuala Lumpur. More than 100 young Muslims were detained, and the women detainees complained that they were subjected to sexual harassment by the moral police. Eyewitnesses also reported violent behavior by the morality enforcers towards non-Muslim patrons. The heavy-handedness of these Islamic anti-vice agents was not new, but they usually only targeted Muslims from less privileged backgrounds. Yet by September that year, the state of Kelantan, governed by the Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) – infamous for its lobbying to ban concerts – invited Mawi to perform at an official gig. While this stance was lambasted by PAS’s critics as hypocritical, it also echoed Awakening’s distinction between “licentious” and morally permissible music.

This is but one of several contradictions related to Islam that bookended Mawi mania in Malaysia. Several more controversies and moral panics have escalated since. The appeal of Mawi’s pious masculinity was part of a growing political trend to entrench a more conservative, assertive version of Islam in Malaysia. The fusion of racial and religious politics in Malaysia meant that his persona was qualitatively different from the Awakening artists’ ethical masculinity, which provided an idiom to resist the securitization of Islam in the West. Intentionally or not, Mawi’s down-to-earth Malay charm and Islamic piety became the softer face of a more aggressive and Islamically infused Malay nationalism.

Yet the politicized moral backdrop for Mawi’s stardom and the securitized context for the popularity of Awakening artists in the West are not distinct phenomena. They share a sense, as Otterbeck observes, that Islamic pop music empowers Muslims in diverse contexts to navigate the secular and religious aspects of their lives more confidently and less apologetically. At the same time, they are different variants of the genre’s cultivation of “ethical masculinity,” which can become a cultural resource to resist anti-Muslim agendas in some situations and to mask repressive interpretations of Islam in others. It is therefore more useful to regard them as tributaries within the larger flow of Islamic pop music.

Otterbeck is right to argue that Islamic pop music has had a profound influence on the development of contemporary expressions of Islam. I would add that this influence has different repercussions depending on each political context. Other cultural trends are also part of this development, including modest fashion, literature, television, and theater. An understanding of contemporary Islam is thus incomplete without a deeper look at how popular culture and the creative arts are transforming it from within.

Shanon Shah is the author of The Making of a Gay Muslim: Religion, Sexuality and Identity in Malaysia and Britain. He is Tutor in Islam at the University of London’s Divinity Programme, and a researcher at the Information Network Focus on Religious Movements (Inform), based at King’s College London.