"In the years before all of the rhetoric and the violence it created started to hit their current peak in America, I was a boy — a Muslim teenager, born to parents who had never been outside of the country. I had a proximity to American popular culture that some of the other Muslim teenagers I knew didn’t have. My parents, reluctantly, allowed me and my siblings to listen to rap. We could have name-brand sneakers. I could walk into the mosque for Friday prayer and show off basketball cards or talk about television shows. Or I could do the thing that pulled the most excitement out of my peers: I could bring my hand-me-down Sony Discman, put in the latest rap or pop CD, press play, and pass my headphones around, giving everyone a taste of another world...
The work Zayn does, as I see it, is more in service to the young Muslims reveling in the pleasures of their non-Muslim peers, and the guilt that can come with that. Zayn is an unmistakable sex symbol, covered in tattoos, who sings about love and intimacy. There is a video of him smoking weed, one that I watched and that made me laugh, knowing what it is to be young and reckless, despite the faith you were born into. I root for Zayn to be himself, because I know that he is still a Muslim, standing in the face of all of these things the world does not associate with Muslims. This, too, is powerful. It isn’t an erasing or muting of his identity. It’s a stretching of what that identity can represent in the minds of people like him."
No comments:
Post a Comment