A Muslim-American from a Puerto Rican family, Hamza Perez grew up in the hood. Now he’s an artist and makes rap music about jihad, the Arabic word for struggle.
Sounds like America’s worst nightmare, as one radio disc jockey put it while interviewing Hamza in his studio.
But Hamza (born Jason Perez) is no ordinary Muslim, nor is he your everyday rapper. Having grown up surrounded by crime, he’s a recent convert to Islam and the focus of Jennifer Maytorena Taylor’s latest documentary, “New Muslim Cool.”
The film illuminates a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West in post-9/11 America and provides a unique look into the life of the young Puerto Rican-American rapper, whose conversion to Islam leads him down some very unconventional paths as he struggles to better himself and his community through his faith and his music.
What began as an ensemble piece about the “phenomenon” of religious minorities in the San Francisco Bay Area who use hip-hop to express themselves and bring together their faiths with pop culture, Taylor’s new film grew into a longitudinal, character-based documentary about American Muslim practices and current youth culture with Hamza at its center.
“I realized this could be a really good portal into a much larger, deeper story about American Muslim practices and culture today and was certainly a good way to look critically at the kind of ‘clash of civilizations’ paradigm that was really gaining a lot of ground right after 9/11,” Taylor said in an interview at AU before attending a Master’s lecture where she educated aspiring filmmakers on the nuances of documentary creation.
As her research drew on, hip-hop culture became less the focus of the film and more the context. Hamza and his wife Rafiah’s day-to-day and spiritual lives became the real heart of the film, which Taylor called a “coming-of-age story.”
The first scene introduces viewers to Hamza, a former drug dealer, who explains how, years ago, he was sure his future would lead to only two things: prison and an untimely death.
He was delighted when both came true.
Hamza’s life of crime ended abruptly with his conversion to Islam. Hamza fondly recalled how his discovery of Allah led to the spiritual death of Jason Perez and his rebirth as Hamza.
He began volunteering his time, helping inner-city youths engrossed in the drug scene move on and find safer means of income. He also worked at a local prison to preach the benefits of a spiritual approach to life, holding a special prayer session afterwards for the Muslims.
Throughout the course of production, Taylor said she became more familiar with the interior life of the spirit and just how integral a role faith can play in people’s lives.
Following Hamza and his wife Rafiah sporadically for more than three years, Taylor and her crew documented how the newlyweds confronted everyday challenges. In addition to meeting in-laws and dealing with Rafiah’s cesarean section, they were forced to deal with some not-so-typical ones as well, like when the FBI raided Hamza’s local mosque and put him and his family under surveillance.
“In the space of two minutes during an interview, Rafiah would wonder about a mysterious panel van parked outside her house and then ask who forgot to put the lid on the peanut butter,” Taylor said.
Equally bizarre was the community’s reaction to the FBI raid. Rather than taking immediate legal action and “marching on city hall,” as Taylor expected, the mosque’s members held a barbecue for the neighborhood, thanking their neighbors for not vilifying them or caving to post-9/11, ‘Islamophobic’ stigmas.
“The character and his community responded in a way that one might consider kind of counterintuitive to this news event,” Taylor said. “I actually had to struggle to find the thread of the story, because it didn’t conform to what I thought they should do.”
The FBI’s actions are illuminative of a big disconnect in the levels of law enforcement that has become more apparent after 9/11. Once many domestic law enforcement agencies were federalized, the country saw an onset of joint terrorism task forces that didn’t always pay attention to what local authorities knew about the situation on the ground.
“That was probably a factor in this case — that the local cops knew ‘Oh, these guys aren’t doing anything,’ but the Feds didn’t,” she said.
Because the level of scrutiny that Hamza’s community faced might be intrinsic to a climate of post-9/11 fear, Taylor said the FBI’s actions were understandable, noting there is a big difference between understanding these actions and thinking they were justified.
Taylor said she never anticipated how deeply she would end up “exploring the most elemental processes that make us human” — namely a search for a higher purpose, hope and forgiveness.
“New Muslim Cool” allowed for a tremendous communication of emotionsfv with which its characters could have been humanized or dehumanized.
Taylor tried to humanize Hamza, but didn’t want to leave the impression that he was one of a kind.
“Hamza’s not the only hero of this story,” she said. “There’s a lot of people who I think had the same kind of heart.”
You can reach this staff writer at ccottrell@theeagleonline.com.
