“I’m a Muslim, but first I’m human,” stated Syrian-American rapper Mona Haydar in a 2016 People magazine interview; “Love is my religion.” She has achieved new prominence traveling America’s fabled Route 66 in the recent PBS documentary series Great Muslim American Road Trip, but behind her hip, telegenic appearance lies a more confused and disturbing reality.
Born 1988 in Saudi Arabia to Syrian parents who immigrated to the United States in 1971, Haydar is one of eight children. She “grew up amongst the African American community in Flint, Michigan,” Fatemeh Hosseinzadeh noted in 2020 at the bohemian Living Life Fearless website. “Early on in her life, she realized that her heart resided in spoken word poetry and hip hop, and it was in the black community where her voice was loved and embraced,” the website adds.
Yet Haydar has not been music to all Muslim ears. As NPR noted in 2018, “Haydar has drawn criticism before for being proudly pious while also being critical of religion. She has been called too Muslim by some and not Muslim enough by others.” She told the BBC in 2017 that she had “gotten a lot of backlash from my own community,” for Muslims can correctly argue that “in Islam music is forbidden.”
Facing such accusations that her music is “haram” and “sinful,” Haydar remained committed to Hip-hop in a 2021 interview. For her, both Hip-hop and Islam are a “social tool for liberation” and “go hand in hand,” she dubiously asserted. She rightfully added that among Muslims there is “some serious anti-blackness in our communities.”
Befitting such progressive sentiments, Haydar decried that in religion, the “gatekeepers are the patriarchy,” even as she conforms to Islamic modesty norms of hijab, often denounced as misogynistic by feminists. As Hosseinzadeh observed, “Haydar believes that global patriarchy is a weapon of mass destruction and oppression, especially against women. She condemns men’s historical entitlement to oblige women to dress according to patriarchal values.” Thus, for her the “hijab can be problematic in patriarchy because it gets used to oppress women, but for her, it is all about autonomy and an act of liberation from the beauty industrial complex in the US.”
Hosseinzadeh noted Haydar’s own shifting, sometimes conflicting feelings about hijab. As a “15-year-old high school student in Saudi Arabia…she was forced to follow the strict dress code in public.” While “she was into punk and goth culture,” the “hijab disgusted her because it was something that she was told to do.”
“It was one of the strangest times of my life…in a place like Saudi Arabia where patriarchy is so rampant, I felt like my hijab was not mine,” Haydar said. The Quran “specifically says there is no compulsion in religion, you cannot tell a woman to wear the hijab or not,” she dubiously claimed with reference to a common Islamic apologetic in Quran 2:256.
Self-criticism similarly marked Haydar in a 2017 interview with the glossy fashion magazine Marie Claire. “We can’t say that we’re going to protect ourselves by not airing our dirty laundry,” Haydar said. “No one is interested in the narrative that ‘Islam means peace, Islam means love’ because obviously it’s not real. We do more harm when we don’t speak up about violence against women.”
Despite such caveats, Haydar ultimately embraced hijab for herself, as she declared in another 2017 interview with the Hardcore Humanism website. “Hijab is an interesting spiritual practice. It’s definitely not for everybody,” she stated, but for her, “it is definitely a feminist tool. It’s a tool of liberation and is not oppressive.” “Muslim women are not all oppressed. And Muslim women don’t need saviors,” she optimistically added.
Sebastian Robins, Haydar’s husband, agreed in a 2016 interview that hijab “is a symbol of freedom” during the couple’s internationally famous “Ask a Muslim” project begun in 2015. As one media report noted, the couple for several years regularly stood outside Cambridge, Massachusetts’ public library “offering free donuts in exchange for dialogue and questions in the wake of the Paris and San Bernardino extremist attacks.” The couple met in 2011 while Haydar was interning at New Mexico’s Lama Foundation, an “inter-spiritual retreat center,” and married the next year. Robbins, who describes himself in the first episode of the three-part Great Muslim American Road Trip as a spiritual “seeker” who never fully identified with either the faith of his Jewish father or Christian mother, converted to Islam before marrying Haydar.
Contrary to what the couple’s signboards suggested, Haydar indicated in a 2016 interview that she “can’t actually educate the world about what Islam is.” She rather is more interested in “talking to humans about being human,” a friendly sentiment emphasized by the offer to “Take a flower” on their signs. As she told Hosseinzadeh, for many orthodox Muslims “I am only a liberal puppet and not even a real Muslim destroying their communities and negatively influencing their kids.”
Hosseinzadeh particularly noted that the heterodox Haydar “is very vocal about the LGBTQ+ and Native American rights.” Haydar displayed such social liberality in a 2015 NPR interview about the “Ask a Muslim” project, noting that a “gay couple” had approached Haydar and Robbins at the Cambridge library. “They’ve been married 22 years. Me and my husband, we’ve only been together four,” she said admiringly, and “one of the men ended up being Muslim.”
On Twitter, Haydar has displayed her pro-LGBT advocacy as well. In an August 13, 2018, tweet, she complained that the “same people who rally and protest against anti-Muslim policies…also wrongly believe that queer Muslims don’t exist.” In an immediately following second tweet she denounced that her husband “Sebastian just attended an event with a mainstream Muslim American leader who waited for applause and was applauded every time he said something homophobic onstage during his talk.”
Rather than doctrinally devout Muslim, Haydar is more of a postmodern “faithful God-enthusiast,” as Northeastern University’s Asian American Center described her in a 2022 profile. As she explained to Hardcore Humanism with unitarian universalist sentiments:
I think all of us in the world we live in are required to be more loving. And to open our hearts to people who aren’t like us. It’s certainly the message of Jesus. It’s certainly the message of Mohammed. It’s certainly the message of the Buddha and of all the world’s paths to enlightenment.
However, the devil is in the details with Haydar’s “enlightenment.” Along with her superficial religious relativism, her political ideas are hardly original. Rather, they reflect stale woke nostrums, as a forthcoming article will examine.
