Last night, New Muslim Cool premiered on the PBS documentary series “POV.” Directed by Jennifer Maytorena Taylor and co-produced by Taylor and Kauthar Umar, the 90-minute piece focuses on Jason “Hamza” Perez, a Puerto Rican rapper and social worker who tries to live an ascetic Muslim life while dealing with discrimination and other obstacles. Check the “POV” website for future airings.
With modest and elegant camerawork, Taylor pivots New Muslim Cool on a few key elements. Hamza and his brother Suliman make up Mujahideen Team, a Pittsburgh-based rap group that mixes spiritual messages with political rhetoric. (An early scene captures Mujuhaideen Team at a show freestyling to Immortal Technique’s “Bin Laden.”) As a former drug dealer, Hamza struggles to reconcile his aggressive street instincts and his Sunni faith. He marries a black single mother after meeting her through a Muslim dating site. He amiably jokes that they’ll need to serve “macaroni & cheese” and “rice and beans” at the wedding: “The blacks always go for the Spanish food and the Spanish always go for the black food.” But their newlywed bliss is disturbed when Hamza is arrested during a raid of his Pittsburgh mosque by FBI agents for suspiciously vague reasons. Meanwhile, his s work at a local prison ends when the warden abruptly takes away his security clearance. When Hamza hires a lawyer and contacts the ACLU, the prison chaplain reveals that the warden became concerned after reading an old M-Team interview online; in the interview, M-Team refers to the U.S. government as a “snake” that needs to be beheaded.
