Though Bey’s work has often moved in experimental tangents, one thing that’s remained consistent is his devotion to his religion. In the midst of worldwide Islamophobia, Bey has proudly put his Muslim faith on display, starting each of his albums by reciting the Arabic phrase “Bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim” — which loosely translates as “In the name of Allah, the beneficent, the merciful” — and speaking extensively about his beliefs in speeches and interviews.

In 2011, seven years after The New Danger, he underlined his commitment by officially dropping his Mos Def moniker for Yasiin Bey, the name his friends and family had been calling him since the late ‘90s. While Bey has never explicitly stated why he chose Yasiin, its connection to Yāʾ-Sīn, the 36th surah of the Qur’an, is apt. In this chapter, three divine prophets are sent to a village to teach non-believers about the significance of God. But the townspeople scoff at their message, calling the prophets liars. As Muhammad Asad states in his 1980 book The Message of The Qur’an, one of the surah’s primary lessons is “the problem of man’s moral responsibility.”

Like the prophets, Bey considers all of his work a conduit for change, and himself a moral arbiter who warns the masses, not of God, but of the world’s many injustices. For example, in this 2013 video he voluntarily goes through a Guantanamo Bay force-feeding procedure. Earlier still, in an appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher in 2009 — one that he was later mocked for — he said, “The nuclear club should be disbanded because America has proven that there’s no country who’s really going to be responsible with this shit. You can’t get on Iran’s back and say, ‘You can’t have nuclear arms, but we can.’ Oppenheimer was right: we should have never built this shit to begin with.”