A mystical cosmopolitanism: Sufi Hip Hop and the aesthetics of Islam in Dakar

Abstract

For many, any alliance between ‘Islam’ and ‘Hip Hop’ is an unholy one, whether for bringing Hip Hop into Islam or vice versa. Yet many of Senegal’s prominent rappers today are committed adherents of the Fayḍa Tijāniyya Sufi (mystical Islamic) movement who rap about religious knowledge. Even the Fayḍa’s senior, classically trained authorities tend to accept Hip Hop as an effective tool to promulgate religious principles and recruit new disciples. The line between rapper and Islamic preacher has become blurred, and several rappers are even formally appointed spiritual guides with their own disciples. This article attributes the success of Sufi Hip Hop to aesthetic resonances between global Hip Hop culture and the Fayḍa’s self-imagination as an increasingly urban and global esoteric movement. I illustrate with the persona and art of Daddy Bibson, the first and most influential Fayḍa rapper to rap about Sufi knowledge.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.