Syrian-American Muslim rapper Mona Haydar’s “songs come from her intersectional identity and sensibilities,” noted a 2022 profile by Northeastern University’s Asian American Center. Indeed, review of her Twitter account and her starring role in the recent PBS documentary series Great Muslim American Road Trip reveals that she affirms numerous, hackneyed “intersectional” beliefs.
“Each of her songs tackles issues of power, race and gender,” wrote Paper magazine about Haydar in a 2018 profile. Her tweet about her song “Barbarians” exemplifies these themes, in which she writes about idealized “BEAUTIFUL BARBARIANS,” who, according to leftist mythology, “lived in harmony w/ Earth.” In the linked music video, she and similarly stylishly dressed women in bright, pastel outfits sing of how they “keep it joyful and Bedouin,” for the “feminist planet is imminent.” In the video, hijab body coverings, an element of an Islamic civilization that colonized the Middle East and beyond, supposedly represent, not religious misogyny, but her desire to “decolonize” various body parts. By contrast, Western countries “start war over oilfields.”
Fittingly, Haydar completed a graduate degree in Christian Ethics at New York City’s Union Theological Seminary, “focusing on Empire, Colonization, White Supremacy and Ecology,” Paper noted. Upon her 2018 graduation, Haydar tweeted that “White Supremacy, Poverty, Ecocide, Capitalism, et al [sic] better WATCH OUT,” for she would “use this knowledge for LOVE & JUSTICE.” One of her graduate school professors was the radical black nationalist James Cone, hailed by her upon his death as a “giant,” whose repetitive screeds incessantly focused on “satanic whiteness.”
Many of Haydar’s other tweets are drearily predictable. For example, she referenced discredited sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his 2018 confirmation hearings. On this basis she concluded that “hell is for” Kavanaugh as being among “men who prey on the weak.”
In other tweets, Haydar has wondered why “Canadians seem nicer than Americans” and “HOW DO I GET MONEY WITHOUT SELLING OUT TO CORPORATE CAPITALIST EVIL?” Humans, she has also unoriginally tweeted, “are the only species which actively destroys its own habitat.” Yet precisely free markets, so reviled by her, develop the wealth and new technologies necessary for advanced environmental protection.
Racism, naturally, looms large in Haydar’s consciousness, such as with respect to her hyperbolic denunciations of President Donald Trump’s “MuslimBan.” “The spirit of The constitution is meant to protect while men [sic],” she tweeted in 2018 after the Supreme Court upheld President Donald Trump’s temporary anti-terrorist travel restrictions on global terrorist hotspots. “America has a problem with brown and black people,” she tweeted that same year, without any indication that America could redeem itself from racist sins.
Racial themes accordingly are prominent in Great Muslim American Road Trip, as in the third episode when Haydar and her husband traveling down America’s historic Route 66 reach Tulsa, Oklahoma. Here the couple learns, among other things, about the extensive influence of Islam in postwar America upon black jazz musicians such as John Coltrane. Due in part as a reaction to racism, many, including Art Blakey, converted, although ironically often to the heterodox Ahmadiyya sect, which faces bitter persecution worldwide from mainstream Muslims as a renegade cult.
The couple later takes a detour to Las Vegas, Nevada, where they visit a local Sin City mosque, Masjid as-Sabur (Mosque of the Timeless One), which had its roots in the radical Black Muslim cult of the Nation of Islam (NOI). It operates charity programs for needy individuals and ex-convicts recently released from prison in conjunction with Islamic Relief, an innocuous sounding entity linked worldwide to jihadist extremism. “This gift of giving has always been a part of Africa,” says as-Sabur’s black imam Mustafa Yusuf Richards. His fellow as-Sabur imam, Fateen Seifullah, meanwhile, discussed in a recent webinar how “Africa has long-established slave systems.”
Richards in his film interview mentions how Malcolm X, the militant black nationalist leader assassinated in 1965 who also was once a prominent NOI member, and Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdul Nasser, influenced blacks including himself. All of this “steered us in the direction of Islam,” Richards says. Yet critical observers might wonder why Malcolm X, who shared with Nasser a vicious hatred of Jews and Israel, would garner such admiration.
Disturbing as well are Richards’ own views. In a 2020 interview, he entertained conspiracy theories about various assassinations of American political figures in the 1960s such as President John F. Kennedy. Richards also promoted the 1954 book Stolen Legacy, in which historian George G. M. James argued that ancient Greeks such as Plato owed their philosophical ideas to ancient Egyptian sources. Wellesley College Classics professor Mary Lefkowitz has debunked this thesis as “extreme Afrocentricism,” yet Richards maintained that “this Western world, this white world, has stolen the knowledge and put its stamp on it.”
As implied by the title, the Great Muslim American Road Trip aims for an all-American feel. However, the underlying realities of Haydar and other participants in the documentary series are far more controversial than her fun-filled cruising down one of America’s iconic byways suggests. Moreover, as the final article in this series will discuss, Haydar is not just far to the left politically in America, but also vehemently anti-Israel.
