One of the highlights of this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival was the documentary New Muslim Cool, by director Jennifer Maytorena Taylor. It’s about Hamza (Jason) Perez, pictured above at left, an extraordinary person whose life evolved from that of a drug dealer to that of a rapper and spiritual leader.
The film can still be watched in full at the PBS POV site for now, although it was supposed to be taken down July 24th. I’ve written some words about it after the jump.
Hamza likes to tell new people his narrative like this: “I always had a dream that I was going to be in jail, and that I was going to die at the age of twenty-one.” He knows what you’re thinking, and he turns it around on you when he says that both visions came true: he “died” when he converted to Islam at that age, and he ended up in jail when he began leading spiritual sessions for prisoners at the Allegheny County Jail.
The film charts a year and a half in Hamza’s life, including many turbulent and emotional moments: during Friday prayers, the FBI raided the recently-established mosque he had joined, and his security clearance to teach in the jail was mysteriously revoked, along with that of three other imams teaching in the Pennsylvania jails.
But over the same period, he studies, he works on the hip-hop recordings he makes with his brother, he works on an anthology of poems from Jewish and Muslim contributors, and he got married and had a child with his new wife. (Incidentally, the film is also a fascinating portrait of a community that is mixed ethnically but united by faith: his wife is part of Chicago’s large African-American Muslim community.)
Through all the rough moments, Hamza never loses his head or becomes fanatical. As I watched it, I kept wishing that all religious leaders had his kind of humility and wisdom.
Perez’s main project in life is rehabilitating drug dealers and prisoners, and he takes his message to them by using the language of the street, without proselytizing too much: some of the incongruities in his background is exemplified by his lecture titled “Pimps & Hos,” in which he appeals to the self-respect of his listeners by describing doing jail time and paying fines as “ho’in’ for the system, you’re being a ho to the court!” It’s amusing in a certain way, but it directly connects with his listeners.
Over the course of the film, Hamza also experiences spiritual growth, becoming a more peaceful person. Early on, he preaches the doctrine of an eye for an eye, but when life presents a violation that is impossible to strike back at (the FBI raid), he goes into a period of intensive reflection and study, and near the end, he says to an acquaintance: “any time a reading of the Qu’ran takes you into violence and away from love, you’re reading it wrong.”
