Reporting on selective voices of ‘resistance’: Secularism,class and ‘Islamist’ rap

The soundtrack of the revolution

Since the 2010–11 MENA uprisings, a large number of newspaper and magazine articles have invested in stories portraying what they consider to be the voices of the revolution. Much of this coverage has placed rap in the spotlight, presenting rappers as figureheads of pro-democracy movements and explicitly pointing to rap as the music of the revolution (see Time, 15 February 2011; ³ Time Magazine, 17 February 2011; ⁴ The Nation, 27 August 2011⁵ or the online blog Muftah, 28 May 2011). ⁶ The French newspaper Le Monde (11 January 2011), in an article called ‘Le rap, porte-parole de la jeunesse Tunisienne’ ⁷ (‘Rap, the spokesperson of Tunisian youth’); The Guardian (27 February 2011), in writing ‘But it took a rapper to galvanize Tunisia’s youth …’ ⁸ and BBC News (24 July 2011), in an article called ‘Is hip hop driving the Arab Spring?’, ⁹ and academic works published after 2011 have also granted a central role to rap during the popular upheavals (see, for example, Gana, 2012: 25; Howard and Hussain, 2013: 47; Ovshieva, 2013: 37).

Commentators’ assumption of an artistic common political agenda in opposition to the state fails to capture the complexities of the region’s cultural fields. This assumption may be understood as part of what Lila Abu Lughod (1990) identifies as a tendency to look for forms of resistance and resisters. The proclivity to view rappers as rebellious young people is clear in two chapters of the edited collection Contemporary Morocco (Maddy-Weitzman and Zisenwine, 2013), where Aomar Boum and Samir Ben-Layashi respectively homogenize and categorize rappers as a uniform group of ‘new rebels’ (Boum, 2013: 174) and ‘revolutionaries and “anarchists”, and hip-hop youngsters’ (Ben-Layashi, 2013: 151). Ben-Layashi in particular articulates the image of revolutionary youth in terms of looks and language. Rap audiences are described as ‘modern and sometimes anarchist looks (black-t-shirts, sunglasses, tattoos, baseball hats)’, attributing to young Moroccans a highly complex political and philosophical consciousness solely based on their physical appearance. What Ben-Layashi sees as anarchist looks is, arguably, the triumph of capitalism, with rappers all around the world wearing Nike and Adidas clothes (Chang, 2000: 25) and emphasizing a cool lifestyle (Osumare, 2007: 150), or a desire to associate with a globalized hip hop culture.

In spite of being characterized as ‘new rebels’, some Moroccan rappers have been accused of siding with the state in times of social and political turmoil, especially during the demonstrations that took place in Morocco throughout 2011. Famed Moroccan rapper Don Bigg, who had been praised for his crude lyrics denouncing social inequalities, became in 2011 a leading voice opposing the pro-democracy 20 February movement (20F). ¹⁰ The rapper released a song and music video where he refered to the movement as the ‘Party of Donkeys’. Contrasting narratives, where rappers are praised for siding with oppositional movements, also emerged during this time. In an article published in Al-Jazeera English, ¹¹ scholar Mark LeVine relates the story of a young man from Casablanca who was jailed in 2011. The article presents this man as a rapper, praising him for his connection to the 20F movement. LeVine affirms that Mouad Belghouat – known as L7a9ed, an unknown rapper in Morocco until his arrest in September 2011 – is ‘one of the best Arab world rappers’. Other articles that take a similar slant describe L7a9ed as a ‘political rap star’ (National Public Radio, 6 January 2012) ¹² or a poet (France 24, 4 April 2012). ¹³ Similar cases of artists in the MENA region changing their political narratives have also been well documented (Kraidy, 2015; Lohman, 2009). ¹⁴

Framing rappers as co-opted state agents or revolutionary young people is, however, reductionist. Stuart Hall’s (1981) perception of popular culture as a battlefield, that is, an arena of constant and uneven struggle marked by contradictions, is helpful in breaking from simplistic views on rap in the region. As I have argued elsewhere (Moreno-Almeida, 2013, 2016), rappers in Morocco have used both co-option and rebellion in a creative amalgamation by siding at times with dominant powers but also opening and broadening networks of participation. While they praise the rapper, accounts of L7a9ed are generally limited to narrating the rapper’s personal story since his incarceration. Evidence of local audience reception of his work or the rapper’s artistry (punchlines, flow, lyrics, rhymes, etc.) is absent from these articles. The focus on stories where artists are imprisoned by oppressive regimes is in line with Claire Bishop’s (2012) claim that the social component of art is celebrated over artistic experiences. In this sense, these accounts consider the mere act of producing a rap song and being persecuted for it an act of ‘resistance’. In an attempt to describe L7a9ed’s significance, LeVine refers to his music as ‘highly politicised’. One needs to question, what does political mean in this account and why is L7a9ed exceptional? Highly problematic good versus bad debates take place without drawing on the opinions of audiences, and yet the voices of the journalist or scholar are clearly articulated. The next section addresses these questions to show how L7a9ed’s story has been decontextualized and reshaped to fit into a narrative that caters to Western media audiences and Western liberal secularism.

The good rapper

On 9 September 2011, young Mouad Belghouat was accused of attacking an organizer of an anti-20F group, detained, and imprisoned for four months. ¹⁵ While L7a9ed was unknown in Morocco’s cultural scene until then, international media headlines began referring to Mouad as a rapper, using his stage name, leading readers to believe that his detention was connected to his music production. ¹⁶ Months later, on 11 May 2012, Moroccan authorities arrested L7a9ed again. ¹⁷ This time he was accused of using images judged as offensive in a YouTube music video of his song ‘Klab Dawla’ ¹⁸ (‘Dogs of the State’, 2010), a collaboration with rapper Proof 3askri. The original video, which represented the Moroccan police as donkeys, has since been deleted ¹⁹ although another one reproducing the image for which L7a9ed was sentenced to prison is still available. ²⁰ In the track, L7a9ed and Proof 3askri denounce police abuse, describing how young people in Morocco are affected by police profiling and emphasizing the importance of socioeconomic background in these actions. Expressions of discontent with the state are allowed in Morocco as long as they do not cross any of the country’s ‘red lines’, which are criticism of the monarchy, questioning Islam, or challenging Morocco’s territorial integrity, especially regarding its sovereignty over the Western Sahara or Southern provinces. While L7a9ed has crossed these lines in other songs, this is not the case for ‘Klab Dawla’.

The fact that his arrest is not related to his music, but to his militancy in a social and political movement is well grounded. To start with, the song ‘Klab Dawla’ was originally released in 2008 ²¹ and was uploaded to YouTube and to a Skyrock blog ²² in October 2010. The song thus existed well before his arrest in May 2012. Second, L7a9ed has always insisted that he was not behind the disparaging images in the music video. ²³ Third, in Morocco moderate criticism of the police is allowed, as evidenced by songs where rappers championed by the state, like Don Bigg and H-Kayne, condemn police oppression. This criticism is also visually evident in the official music video of Don Bigg’s track ‘Mabghitch’ ²⁴ (‘I Don’t Want To’, 2011) that shows a wall bearing the message ‘Fuck the police’. None of these rappers have ever been arrested for these songs. The question is, why L7a9ed and not the others? The Moroccan French-language magazine TelQuel asked this question in an editorial dedicated to L7a9ed. ²⁵ I argue that there are two main differences: one, none of the well-known rappers by mid-2011 openly supported the 20F; and, two, in 2011 H-Kayne and Don Bigg were empowered artists with large fan bases supported by some sectors of secular civil society and by the Moroccan state. The arrest of any established artists in the midst of the 2011 social unrest could have dangerously intensified popular demonstrations, with young fans taking to the streets in support of renowned artists and hence causing even more discontent in the country. The fact that L7a9ed was detained a third time, accused of illegally scalping tickets for the Casablanca football derby, further supports the idea that the state was targeting this rapper, and thus demonstrating its persecution of members of the 20F. ²⁶

The idea that this case was a warning to more established rappers with many more followers of what could happen to them if they joined the pro-democracy movement cannot be discarded. In the first weeks of February 2011, some rappers, including H-Kayne, had announced their support for the call to demonstrate on 20 February – what would be the germ of 20F movement – through their Facebook page. ²⁷ Days after the demonstration, local news websites were already reporting on other rappers from the Casablanca crew Thug Gang, Koman and Philo, as the voices of the movement because they had released the song ‘Ta3bir Chafawi’ (‘Oral Expression’) in support of the protesters. As Philo said in our interview, this was an old song denouncing social injustice that they thought would help to support the 20 February demonstrations. ²⁸ However, once Koman and Philo claimed not to speak for the movement, journalists stopped calling. While these rappers support the pro-democracy outcry of Moroccan society, they did not want their songs to be associated solely with a movement. Another rap crew called LBassline, who at the beginning had also openly declared their affiliation to the movement, later retracted. ²⁹ Rappers not wanting to be trapped within this new social movement was not surprising in a country where youth look at the political system and civil society with mistrust. Indeed, the state’s narrative demonizing the 20F also proved to be effective in convincing the population that the movement’s aim was to divide the country and, after the new Constitution was approved in July 2011, it was no longer necessary. ³⁰ In addition, by the time of L7a9ed’s first detention in September 2011, the 20F had lost much of its political momentum and was deeply affected by internal differences (Belghazi and Moudden, 2016). Scepticism about the 20F was asserted by rapper Muslim, who released a freestyle song in 2013 where he said: ‘I’m not February 20, I’m the whole year,’ pointing out that to be an activist it is not necessary to belong to any movement.

Even if L7a9ed’s discourse is class-oriented, the story is interesting because he has been targeted by the Moroccan security apparatus due to his relation to a movement that commentators have homogeneously shaped as secular. ³¹ Some academics have argued that the Arab Spring was a secular phenomenon (Hoffman and Jamal, 2014: 594), where protesters ‘displayed attributes of moral secularism’ (Khalaf and Khalaf, 2012: 7) and were ‘not dominated by unions, existing political parties, clear political ideologies, or religious fervor’ (Howard and Hussain, 2013: 28). L7a9ed’s arrest is framed by international media headlines as part of the state’s will to halt the democratic process started by young secular Arab Spring protesters: ‘Rapper’s imprisonment tests Moroccan reforms’ (National Public Radio, 6 January 2012) ³² or ‘Moroccans see limits of reform in rapper’s case’ (BBC, 25 November 2011). ³³ This language of reforms brings up the idea that the region is forever either on the road to democracy or returning to authoritarianism (Cavatorta and Durac, 2011: 1). None of these articles refer to the common resentment in the region against the way power, embodied by the ruling elites, treats the people with disdain. This class division is encapsulated in the notion of hogra, meaning contempt, a term frequently used across the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) to report abuses by the elites over lower socioeconomic groups. These commentators have focused on the language of reform as part of a democratization agenda framed within European liberal thought while marginalizing the rapper’s denunciation of hogra, which is part the local language of criticisms, not only of governance but also of class inequalities.

The politics of ‘Islamist’ rap

The number of articles on local and foreign press concerning L7a9ed has been inversely proportional to those on Muslim, one of the Moroccan rappers with the largest number of followers. While he is seen as one of the most notable and respected rappers by young audiences in Morocco, French-language Moroccan media outlets, independent documentaries on the Moroccan rap scene and, until recently, state-funded music festivals have all systematically marginalized rapper Muslim (Moreno-Almeida, 2013). Part of the disregard for Muslim as a symbol of resistance is related to the fact that some consider him to be an ‘Islamist’ rapper.

French academic Dominique Caubet (2013), in an article in the French magazine L’Express International, claims that Mohamed Mezouri aka Muslim is the main figurehead of a wave of Islamist rappers. Although Caubet identifies this category as a trend, she does not offer further examples of its followers or details about this subgenre or group. Momo, one of the founders of the music festival L’Boulevard, refers to Muslim using this same term in an article for the Huffington Post (5 May 2015): ‘il y a le rap islamiste, le rap de Muslim’ (‘there is Islamist rap, the rap of Muslim’). ³⁴ In this regard, on his online blog, scholar Yves Gonzalez-Quijano employs the term rap islamiste (Islamist rap), also expressed in French, to argue that it is the meeting point of rap and political Islam. ³⁵ This idea is reproduced by Aidi, when arguing against the idea that hip hop culture and Islamism are opposites: ‘Islamists listen to hip-hop, and rappers with Islamist – even jihadi – sympathies abound’ (2011: 260). Scholars have questioned the validity of such broad terms ‘Islamism’ and ‘Islamist’ (Martin and Barzegar’s 2010 edited collection is a good example of this), challenging their connection with political Islam, another problematic term in itself. Despite the wide range of meanings, ‘Islamism’ and ‘Islamist’ are used loosely, frequently as synonyms of ‘fundamentalism’, ‘Jihadism’ or ‘Islamic extremism’ (Martin and Barzegar, 2010: 2). Even if commentators do not define Islamist rap in these particular terms, local ideologies within the political and cultural field suggest the particular connotations of using such a term, as Muslim is regarded as Islamist but not as an engaged rapper.

The need for these academics and cultural stakeholders to categorize rappers as Islamists reveals the fascination with categorizing and bestowing a political consciousness on young Muslim artists rather than providing any understanding of local and global social, political, cultural, and religious contexts. This definition of Islamist rap may fit in neatly with the idea of some rappers aligning with self-declared Islamist political groups, as is the case of Tunisian rapper Psyco M according to Aidi (2011: 260). However, including in this group rappers who have never associated themselves with any form of political group that refers to itself as Islamist is highly problematic, particularly in Morocco, where political parties are generally discredited and perceived as weak (Cavatorta, 2006: 208; Cohen and Jaidi, 2006: 72). As stated above, rappers have rarely publicly supported political parties or civil society associations with a political agenda.

In fact, Muslim sees his music as part of his identity and not as part of a political agenda. When I asked him whether he sees himself as an Islamist rapper, he responded by saying:

Muslim: [Laughing] I am not an Islamist rapper. I mean, who talks about Islamic topics and all that, Islam is in many things in life. If I say in my songs, don’t steal don’t do drugs respect your mom and all these things. That’s what Islam says, but I don’t go deeper than that. I am not a preacher [Da3iya]. But we still have that Islamic part of our identity. We say for example ‘Dounia Fania’ (The World is Ending) and we only run for money and there’s a day when we all die and this and that, but no deeper than that, like go to pray or do similar things [laughing]. ³⁶

Muslims songs and much of Morocco’s music production mostly reflects the significance of Islam in Moroccan society and does not necessarily indicate a political agenda. In using the term ‘Islamist rap’, the fact that many other rappers and music genres like fusion, Gnawa, Aissawa and Andalusi, to name a few, often use religion in their songs is overlooked.

Islamic faith and Arabic terms have been part of hip hop since the early 1970s, as they are also related to the American racial discourse (Aidi, 2011; Marable and Aidi, 2009) with, for example, the conversion to Islam of Civil Rights Movement leader Malcolm X or the creation of the Nation of Islam. Explicit references to Islam including salat (prayer) or zakat (alms) are in the work of American rappers such as Lupe Fiasco or Busta Rhymes, or French rappers like Médine. However, these rappers are not referred to as Islamist rappers (although Médine is often banned by the French media who prefer to promote Sufi rapper Abd El Malik, more in accordance with the idea of France as country of freedom as opposed to what some see as ‘third world oppressed countries’). God is very present in US rap, as Tricia Rose (2008) claims rappers to be rather conservative despite the way they have been framed as rebellious. Juan Flores (2004: 82) cites lyrics that reference God in Puerto Rican rap: ‘and at night I prayed to God and the holy mother’. Yet Flores does not categorize this as Christian, nor fundamentalist rap. Therefore, while the argument can be made that Muslim’s ethos is religious, labelling him as Islamist suggests a biased perception of his music, in tune with secular liberal narratives that demonize Islam and depoliticize cultural production that liberals perceive as too religious.

Rapper Muslim’s lyrics are varied, often drawing on the troubles of the nation’s poor, such as unemployment and drug and alcohol abuse. In this sense, his songs are not always political but also deal with ethics and morality. One example is his song ‘Dounia Fania’ ³⁷ (‘The World is Ending’, 2011) that revolves around the idea of people leaving aside the correct path and the need for religion to save the world from ending, a common trope in Moroccan popular imagery. As Muslim states in the second verse:

People aren’t satisfied, nothing is enough

we ate each other, blessing is an old word

we lost everything good when living became expensive

we were defeated by the devil

we don’t stay and listen to those who cry

we don’t sympathize with those who suffer

we construct around us tall walls

Muslim ends by affirming:

because it hasn’t finished, there is still an opportunity

we have to go back to religion and learn the sacred letter.

In this song of despair, Muslim depicts the hardship of a life where people have lost the right way; the rapper believes lack of morals is part of the problem. This is the rapper’s most intimate song, as he told me in our interview. ³⁸ Contrary to ‘Dounia Fania’, however, in the song ‘Law Kan Lwa9i3 Law7a’ (‘If Reality was a Canvas’, 2011), Muslim elaborates on specific political ideas by which he would rebuild Morocco. Muslim suggests getting rid of bars and casinos, keeping mosques open and encourages women to wear a veil:

I would paint a long corniche without casinos or bars

Paint many mosques open night and day

Paint the girl of my country covering her hair with the veil

Despite the fact that these lines directly reference Islamic precepts against alcohol and gambling, references to the evils of alcohol are not unique to Muslim’s narrative.

It is important here to highlight that while this verse has been controversial, criticisms of Muslim have missed that in the same song the rapper also denounces the practice of bringing illiterate women from villages to work as maids in the cities for very little or no money at all:

I would paint the last girl who was working in houses

And now she has books in her hand and is going to study,

full of dignity.

Though here Muslim shows his social awareness of the suffering of the poor by claiming the right to an education for illiterate women, thus urging an end to their exploitation as he does in many other songs, Muslim is depicted only as an Islamist and not as a politically engaged rapper denouncing social malaise and class inequalities.

The demonization of Islamists in Morocco is a response to the challenge that the rise of a party like the Party of Justice and Development (PJD) and the Justice and Charity group over the past 20 years poses to Moroccan ruling elites, including secular liberal groups (Cavatorta, 2006: 216–17). While narratives that place Islam in contention with Western values of freedom, democracy and tolerance have been widely challenged (Brown, 2012; Mahmood, 2009; Massad, 2015; Nussbaum, 2012), existing reports reveal that Islam continues to be framed in such a manner. Scholars such as Cavatorta (2006), Gutkowski (2013) and Massad (2015) continue to denounce the hegemony of European liberalism in shaping secularism as democratic, liberal, progressive and tolerant, in opposition to Islam considered as undemocratic, uncivil, immoral and extremist. ³⁹ Muslim’s condemnation of female exploitation is therefore not portrayed as progressive because he is already framed as Islamist and thus backward and uncivil. Because powerful secular women rights’ groups believe that Islamists are an obstacle to gain equal rights (Pratt, 2006: 138), the veil proves to be more powerful in determining Muslim’s politics than denouncing social inequalities.

The fact that Muslim’s politics critically share the values of the Islamist ruling party, PJD, was confirmed when he declared in an interview in 2014 that he had voted for the PJD in order to bring some change to the country; however, he claimed to have been deceived by this party as nothing has changed. ⁴⁰ His feeling of deception is expressed in his last album Al-Rissala (‘The Letter’, 2014), especially in the song ‘Ntouma Ghir Kathadro’ ⁴¹ (‘You Are Only Talk’), where Muslim openly criticizes Morocco’s Prime Minister Abdelillah Benkirane from the PJD party. Muslim accuses Benkirane of being an actor and washing his hands of the country’s problems:

We switched on the TV and found a play of the artist Benkirane

One-man show in the parliament

We didn’t understand anything except that nothing is in his hands

While Muslim’s lyrics and political ideas may be in tune with the PJD’s project, the rapper remains as independent critical voice without blindly bolstering any political group.

The poetics of Muslim’s rap

Proof of Muslim’s popularity may be found by looking at social media. While rappers favoured by the state, such as H-Kayne and Don Bigg, have barely 40,000 and half a million followers respectively on Facebook, Muslim has 1.5 million. His videos on YouTube easily reach millions of views, and he is the Moroccan rapper with most views of his YouTube channel. During my time in Morocco (2011–15), young rap fans I engaged with in conversations at concerts or other informal gatherings often referred to Muslim as a poet, suggesting the aesthetic significance of his music for the audience. In 2012 I was at his first concert at Mawazine, a well-known festival with the largest audience and budget in the country. He performed after the rap group Fnaïre, also pioneers of the Moroccan rap scene. The audience on the beach of Salé, a neighbouring city of the capital Rabat, kept on shouting his name during Fnaïre’s performance. When Muslim came out to perform, the audience engaged in singing all his songs, proving their devotion to this rapper. Further, even Caubet is forced to admit, ‘his [Muslim’s] discourse … is without a doubt the most appealing to the vast majority of the Moroccan society’ (2013: 51).

Muslim’s artistry and powerful message is supported by his language use, rhyming in Moroccan Darija, occasionally rescuing words from standard Arabic. This choice sets him apart from other rappers, who prefer to draw on tougher street language varieties. He can make rhymes that they cannot. But Muslim has also used vulgar language, especially in earlier songs, as a way of reflecting young people’s jargon. He has used swear words such as m9awwed, which can translate as dope, cool, pimped or fucked up, frequently employed by Moroccan youth to express something they either regard with favour or, on the contrary, something they dislike. The word appears in an early track from rapper Muslim, ‘Zna9i Tanja’ ⁴² (‘Streets of Tangiers’, 2005), in which he says ‘With no ups and downs I know my luck is fucked up (m9awwed)’. Despite the different meanings, the word is considered a swear word and not appropriate for use in public or in family contexts. In this sense, Catherine Miller (2012: 179) claims, the use of vulgar language in the public arena transgresses the unspoken code of politeness and often causes indignation and embarrassment. Furthermore, when swear words are employed, almost exclusively by men, it confers on the rapper an aura of masculinity and toughness.

The idea that swearing and cursing in the public sphere is offensive is not unique to Morocco. When discussing the rap scene in Tanzania, Alex Perullo (2005: 96) suggests that rappers, fans and radio announcers discourage cursing in both Kiswahili and English, as swearing is unacceptable in public. The Turkish rap scene, on the contrary, employs swear words both in Turkish and English, though they are not tolerated for marketing purposes since they are banned by the Turkish Ministry of Culture (Solomon, 2006: 5–6). In Turkey, this ban acts as a mark of distinction between the underground and the commercial scenes. Where those who do not include swear words are viable commercially, rappers who include swear words in their lyrics do not get their music commercially released and only have recourse to alternative means of distributing their music, such as websites or informal record companies (Solomon, 2006: 5–6).

In Morocco, the Audio Visual Communication Law approved by the parliament in 2005 regulates the public broadcasting service. It forbids the use of vulgar language. Therefore, when songs are broadcast on public media, rappers must supply clean versions, where swear words and vulgar language have been eliminated. In this respect, Hicham Abkari, director of the Mohammed VI Theatre in Casablanca, has stated that ‘nowadays, singers sanitize their speech to make it exploitable on the radio, on television during sponsored programs’ (Cestor, 2008). This is the case for well-known groups favoured by the state such as H-Kayne and Fnaïre, as discussed, but also Muslim’s output. Muslim’s new mostly sanitized language is related to increasing his access to different social groups and to reach a wider audiences, as he told me:

Look, before, when we were young, we used to rap and from time to time we used to drop a few swear words. But then, when, you see, you figure that your music is only heard by one generation, but doesn’t touch other people, your rap is only heard in headphones you can’t hear it loud in your house or something, but to me this was not to my advantage. I want to be heard by everybody, so if I want everybody to listen to me I won’t lose anything. If by using this word it means only 10 people hear me, I’ll change it and then 20 or 30 people will, old and young, in the house and wherever else. It only requires me to change a word. ⁴³

Though Muslim’s change in the use of swear words can be read in these lines and as connected to the Moroccan Islamist party’s conception of clean art, ⁴⁴ his answer indicates otherwise.

Evidence to support this argument is that Muslim has not only shaped his language, restricting vulgar words, but also altered his northern Moroccan dialect into a kind of koine – or common language – easier to understand by Moroccans from across country. Some linguists consider the Darija variant of Casablanca and Rabat as the new urban koine, and see it as spreading to the rest of the country (Miller, 2007: 11; Moscoso García, 2002: 2), though in a later work, Miller (2012: 180) found that this is not necessarily the case. In this respect, while early songs such as the above mentioned ‘Zna9i Tanja’ (2005) used more variations of the northern region dialect, a later song like ‘Dounia Fania’ (2011) is closer to this koine. A listen to the first song shows that it contains words found only in the north, like mdakham meaning great or good. Also signifying his regional heritage, Muslim uses the word pobre, meaning poor in Spanish, in some of his songs, tagging him as a resident of the regions that were once under Spanish control. This sort of usage of Spanish is absent in the songs of rappers from other parts of Morocco. The change from vulgar to clean language, from dialect to koine and Modern Standard Arabic shows the willingness of Muslim to broaden his audience. Reaching a larger number of people has allowed Muslim to survive as an artist and become a central figure of the Moroccan rap scene, despite the lack of interest of media, academics, and state-funded events.

Conclusion

Reporting on voices of opposition requires a deep understanding of local power dynamics within the political and cultural fields. Overlooking rappers young people relate means that those artists need to fight harder to be heard; but it also means that young people’s stories, especially those of the urban poor, remain unimportant. Promoting only certain rappers – those who fit into certain epistemologies – while neglecting other popular ones does not square with the message of power of the people or giving a voice that many journalists, academics and members of the civil society say they promote. In this endeavour, commentators have marginalized both L7a9ed and Muslim’s emphasis on class issues and hogra that resonate more with young people that ongoing global debates on governance and religion. While secular liberal elites in Morocco cling to fighting forms of what they consider as political Islam, meanings of ‘resistance’ which place European liberal secularism as the good and Islamism as the bad fail to consider the long tradition of narratives of opposition connected to Islam. Moreover, the epistemological stance whereby criticisms of poverty and inequality are not regarded as resistance, while critiques of governance are shaped as political and conscious, needs to be challenged as it obscures signs of politically engaged youth. Ultimately, placing Muslim as an Islamist rapper neglects powerful criticisms that speak to Morocco’s unprivileged youth by tapping into fears of an Islamist nation and, therefore, demonstrating how fighting poverty and inequality are only compelling when, or rather, if, they are packaged within a European liberal secular frame. Further, more studies that challenge widespread normalized definitions of ‘resistance’ and critical analyses of terms such as Islamist rap need to engage with the role of class. Accounts of non-Western rap music need to break out of the straitjacket of governance and such music should be studied for its artistry – flow, punchlines, beats etc. – as well as its ability to shape local languages, and its role in initiating and voicing local and global conversations on class, gender, ‘race’ and so on.