Khadija Magardie talks to an artist who is using music to take religion to the youth
When Shaheed GC embraced the Islamic faith at the age of 16, he thought he had firmly closed the door on a singing career that began in his early teens. At the time, he says, he felt that music, in virtually all its forms, was incompatible with the “simple lifestyle” he wanted to lead. Now, nearly five years later, he is releasing a new CD called The Call – a musical tribute to the faith that “keeps him sane” – and a move that is bound to be met by disapproval from Muslim traditionalists.
GC’s musical rebirth is very much akin to that of singer Cat Stevens who, after embracing Islam in 1979 and changing his name to Yusuf Islam, renounced a legendary music career in favour of an unadorned Islamic lifestyle. Also realising that his vocal abilities could be used in the service of the faith, Islam released a CD on the life of the Prophet Muhammad, called The Life of the Last Prophet, and another one about the Bosnian war called I Have No Cannons that Roar – decades after turning his back on mainstream music.
The Call is a collection of songs with a range of sounds, from rock to reggae to R&B, with a distinctly Islamic flavour. The lyrics, however, are strictly confined to common Islamic themes. Sweet Release is about prayer, or salat. The Fast is concerned with the Muslim month of abstinence and fasting, Ramadan.
The release is bound to raise eyebrows in conservative Islamic circles – music is still regarded as taboo by many Muslims -but GC is unperturbed. “The youngsters, and not the oldies, are my target audience,” he says, although he hopes the music will reach all Muslim ears.
Adapting scriptures to contemporary tunes is nothing new -award-winning American gospel artist Kirk Franklin, among others, has been a major success in the field. But to attempt to address Islamic issues by using so-called “Western-style” implements is still shaky ground. Traditional religious scholarship still regards music, in nearly all its forms, as haraam, or forbidden.
In Blood from a Rock, GC cheekily taunts this view. “They say my music is haraam; yet I speak from the Holy Qur’an,” he sings. He elaborates: “Don’t go changing our Islam, they say. But I say let’s communicate in the language of the day.”
Among what he calls “young Western Muslims”, GC feels there is a blossoming market for his type of music. These youths, he says, are born and raised in non-Muslim countries, and therefore relate differently to music than do their counterparts in the Middle East, for instance. Yet even in Muslim countries, he says – having recently returned from studies in the Middle East – there is a need for his type of music.
The problem with the forms of Islamic music available today, he says, is that they are the results of Arab, Indian, Pakistani or Persian influence, having little if anything in common with the experiences of young Muslims living in countries such as South Africa.
Because the music available is often in Arabic or Urdu, many youngsters are unable to understand what they are listening to. The music then becomes ritualistic, and even distasteful. Islam, in turn, becomes equated with something archaic and unreachable.
The Call, says its creator, “speaks in a language that youngsters understand”, without lyrics that contravene Islamic principles and standards. It is certainly better, he asserts, to have young Muslims listening to modern music with Islamic lyrics than to listen to music which contains sexual and other themes that are far more damaging to Islamic values.
The point of his music, according to GC, is “to get youngsters involved in the Islam of the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad”, instead of chasing them away.
The range of vocal talent on the compilation is astounding; with the exception of a duet done with a female artist, all the back-up vocals, a capella and background sound was done by the artist himself.
He admits that a lot of the songs on The Call are autobiographical -We Need to Heal, for example, is a conversation between a non-Muslim and a newly converted youngster named Shane (his former name).
But his inspiration is not so much his life and experiences as is Islam’s holy book, the Qur’an. From Catholic schoolboy to Islamic messenger, as he prefers to be described, he says the most common theme throughout his music is to make people question the reason for their beliefs. One song carries the question, “Am I just a product of society, a baby trained to be like his family?”
This multi-talented artist feels it would be expected but naive for traditionalists to slam his music as un- Islamic, because the misuse of music, not music itself, is what Islam forbids. Those who condemn Islamic rock would be throwing the baby out with the bath water.
The song Blood from a Rock sums up his justifications for his controversial style of dawah, or propagation: “Open yourself, take the Book off the shelf; the generations change but the message stays the same.”