‘Ik dien mijn God met het instrument van de duivel’

Een verkenning van de productieve spanning tussen islam en Nederlandstalige straatrap

Samenvatting

Dutch language street rappers who are Muslim frequently experience a double tension. On the one hand, the street life they describe in their lyrics often refers to matters like crime and violence, which their religion and they themselves condemn as sinful. Simultaneously, many rappers harbour strong doubts about the permissibility of instrumental music in general. Nonetheless, they express their Islamic faith through regular references in lyrics, often in direct contrast to the sinful ‘streets’ and music. This article fills a void in current literature about hip-hop and Islam by taking this tension seriously, building on recent efforts probing the role of Islam in wider street culture. Taking on Derrida’s ‘Faith and Knowledge’ (1998), I will argue that streetrap and streetculture function by the logic of the tele-techno-scientific capitalism, which both harms and enables the spread of religion in late modernity. I thus make sense of the presented tension by arguing that it can channel, strengthen or ground the religious experience despite uprooting it simultaneously.