Beginning in the mid-90s, these allusions were broadcast around the world as hip-hop went mainstream, transforming cultures and identities. Through rap, Muslim youth were exposed to black history and non-Muslims were introduced to Islam. Just as reggae disseminated Rastafarianism in the 1970s, hip-hop showcased African-American Islam in all its variants. Muslim youth abroad are keenly aware that, as popular wisdom has it, “Islam is hip-hop’s official religion,” and that Muslims like Busta Rhymes and Mos Def are some of rap’s biggest players. Not only has hip-hop absorbed Islamic and Arabic references, but it’s also adopted some Salafi styles—the mustache-less beard and calf-length pants, for example.

The 9/11 attacks brought a new dimension to the relationship between Islam and hip-hop. In December 2001, John Walker Lindh, a young American, was found behind enemy lines in Afghanistan. Just how did this middle-class boy from Marin County end up joining the Taliban? His online postings, analysts argued, offered a clue: in hip-hop chat rooms, Lindh often posed as black, adopting the name Doodoo or Prof J. “Our blackness does not make white people hate us, it is THEIR racism that causes the hate,” he once wrote. Experts traced Lindh’s path to Afghanistan back to his mother taking him, at age 12, to see Spike Lee’s film Malcolm X, after which he read Alex Haley’s Autobiography of Malcolm X and began listening to hip-hop. After this episode, American and European officials began to speak of rap’s potential to radicalize.

In the mid-2000s, amid the Abu Ghraib scandal and the resurgence of the Taliban, the State Department recast hip-hop as a tool rather than just a threat. Karen Hughes, then undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, launched an initiative called Rhythm Road and sent “hip-hop envoys”—rappers, dancers, DJs—abroad. The tours have since covered the broad arc of the Muslim world, stretching from Senegal and Ivory Coast, across North Africa and the Middle East, to Mongolia, Pakistan, and Indonesia. As part of a campaign costing $1.5 million per year, the artists stage performances and hold workshops; those who are Muslim speak to local media about what it’s like to practice Islam in the U.S. The trips aim not only to exhibit the integration of American Muslims, but also, according to planners, to promote democracy and foster dissent. In 2010, after one such performance in Damascus, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described hip-hop as a “chess piece” in the “multi-dimensional chess” game that is “cultural diplomacy.”

The State Department’s program is modeled on the jazz diplomacy that the U.S. government conducted during the Cold War by sending integrated bands led by Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to counter Soviet propaganda and instead promote “the American way of life.” A 2008 Brookings report authored by the program's intellectual architects and titled “Mightier Than the Sword: Arts and Culture in the U.S.-Muslim World Relationship” notes that hip-hop began as “outsiders’ protest” against the U.S. system and now resonates among marginalized Muslim youth worldwide. From the Parisian banlieues to Palestinian cities, “hip-hop music reflects the struggle against authority”—a message that transcends language barriers. Moreover, note the authors, hip-hop’s pioneers were inner-city Muslims who “carry on an African American Muslim tradition of protest against authority, most powerfully represented by Malcolm X.” The study concludes by calling for “greater exploitation of this natural connector to the Muslim world.”