A Quest For Community with Ali Shaheed Muhammad

Courtney E. Martin: Ali, you grew up in Brooklyn in the ’70s and ’80s. Take us back to the first time you were ever aware of death. What was your first experience?

Ali Shaheed Muhammad: My first experience with death, actually, you just asked me that, and there are two memories.

The first was an older great-aunt who had passed away. She had helped raise my grandmother in North Carolina. So we got on Amtrak. I was eight years old, I think, at the time, and left New York and went to North Carolina for the funeral.

At that age, it was just, I guess, a reunion of people I had never met before, seeing my grandmother in her old stomping grounds and engaging with people from her past. That was really the most of it.

I remember the viewing of the body and not really wanting to be part of that. Then there was a train ride back to New York City, where I met this little girl on the train. She was cute, blah, blah, blah. We exchanged numbers and never kept in touch.

The next experience was with a salamander that I was given care of within the same year, for the summer. It was the class pet, and I was given the responsibility of caring for the pet over the summer and bringing it back.

But my mom decided there was a little unexpected vacation that was going to happen, and I didn’t know about this. We flew to Virginia to visit grandparents, and the salamander got out on the airplane. Someone stepped on it and broke its tail.

I completely forgot about that. So now you guys are taking me all the way back to ’88.

Anyway, the guy who stepped on it was spooked by it, and he gave it to me. I think the salamander lived maybe three days. I did my best to take care of it, and I had to bury the salamander because it passed. I buried him in my grandfather’s yard, and that was it.

Courtney E. Martin: It’s interesting you bring that up because I think a lot of people’s first experience of death is a pet, right? As a child, some sort of beloved pet that you take care of. We’re going to talk about education and children and death later, but I think it’s such an important point.

Now, you mentioned being worried about seeing the body of your aunt.

Ali Shaheed Muhammad: Yeah.

Courtney E. Martin: I want you to talk a little bit about your faith. I know that you feel very strongly about the body as a sacred vessel. Were you raised Muslim? Did you become Muslim? Just educate us a little bit about how you think about the body.

Ali Shaheed Muhammad: So, yeah, I did not see the body because, I don’t know, something within me did not want to. One beautiful thing about my mother is that she pays attention. She paid attention to my sister and me, our emotions and our feelings, and she was wholly supportive of them.

So when I said I didn’t want to do it, she was like, “Okay,” and she respected that.

But I was born and raised as a Muslim. One thing I want to say in answering, or sharing about me, is I want to preface it by saying that the depth of context sometimes outweighs the detail of what you’re trying to speak to.

I say that because I’m born Muslim, and that therefore is the context of my entire being and how it is for me as a person, from boy to man, as an artist, as a creative person, as someone who wholly and consciously, when I make music, feels that it has to serve a purpose.

A purpose to serve my own desire to know more, but more importantly, to serve humanity and to enshroud it in love. So that’s my interaction with music as a producer, as a songwriter, as an artist. When people come into my world, they get that bigger context of my faith.

So I had to preface everything with that.

Through Islam, it teaches a great many things, things that aren’t spoken about, especially in this political climate. It is about knowing that everyone will pass on.

When it comes to those who are there and you’re leaving them in their final resting place, death, based on Islam, is about those who walk away, because you can do what that person cannot do. You have to make a difference, to change, whether it’s an internal transformation or something on a communal basis.

With that comes a whole bunch of other things. It’s knowing that you’re going to pass and preparing for it, literally by buying your own grave plot, bringing families and friends together as one is transitioning. There are just so many different things, and I don’t want to go into the depth of that context, but it definitely helped shape me.

My father, who introduced my life to Islam, had a stroke. It was a second stroke, and it was the one that took him out, as I say, took him out of the game.

Just to give you a little background, my father was an imam and chaplain in the New York State prison system. He did that for 20 years, making sure that prisoners were cared for and treated with humanity and respect.

The funny thing about him was he could go into any room and have a conversation, whereas I cannot. I’m extremely shy and introverted.

Something someone said earlier made me think about my father. When he would talk about Islam, it wasn’t to indoctrinate. It was just to educate people about the beauty of the faith.

He would say, “Well, I just start a conversation by saying, ‘Hey, what do you think is going to happen to you when you die?’”

Courtney E. Martin: Yeah.

Ali Shaheed Muhammad: It would always start a conversation like that. As a child, I thought that was insane.

And I see now, 12 years after his death, the wisdom in that. It’s such an icebreaker.

Courtney E. Martin: He would love that.

Ali Shaheed Muhammad: You know, and then that would allow him to get into other conversations because, based on what the answers were, then he could talk about his belief and his faith and so on and so forth.

But the beauty of that is that the faith talks about being mindful every day that one day we won’t be here. So how do you manage your life to prepare for that point in time?

Courtney E. Martin: Right. And the details are so important. I think it’s actually really profound what you said about buying the burial plot, because that’s a logistical moment when you have to consider your mortality.

Are you saying that’s actually part of Muslim practice?

Ali Shaheed Muhammad: It’s part of it. There’s a whole lot that comes with the lifestyle, but yeah, it’s part of being mindful. It’s clearing your debt, making sure that, at all times possible, you have no debt.

Especially if you feel that your days are near, or you get information that time is not on your side, you clear your debts.

Courtney E. Martin: Does that mean financial and relational?

Ali Shaheed Muhammad: More financial. It’s actually spoken to because of the burden that’s left behind when someone has debt and then the family has to deal with that.

Courtney E. Martin: That’s the thing that’s heaviest on people’s minds, which we’ve heard many speakers this morning talk about. That’s interesting.

Ali Shaheed Muhammad: The will is enforced, that you make your will. It’s something that people put off.

And making sure that you put money aside, at least. Even if you have not gone to physically purchase the plot, put money aside for it. Just little, small things.

Courtney E. Martin: Yeah, but moments that allow for that deeper consideration of what’s coming.

Now, you talked quite beautifully about this idea that when someone else dies, it’s a moment for the living to say, “Okay, I have to do more. I have to live up to what I’m put here to do on this earth.”

You experienced death, obviously the death of your father, but more recently the death of your beloved collaborator, Malik Izaak Taylor, known as Phife Dawg.

Tell us a little bit about what his death motivated in you. What did it inspire for you?

Ali Shaheed Muhammad: I can tell you that at his memorial, there was not one bad word said about him. That’s because he engaged very deeply with the people who came into his life.

He was in touch. If he came into town and knew he only had 10 minutes, he gave you 12 minutes. He constantly checked up on people.

He was a little five-foot-two person. He says that in his lyrics. But he had a heart like a monster. He was always considered the underdog, and we like to root for the underdog.

There are people I’ve worked with whose lives might not have shiny endings. You may hear whispers about them because people may be kind when the lights are on, but in the darkness, the truth comes out.

His truth was nothing but love and beauty. So that made me feel at peace with his transitioning.

Just to give you a little information, Phife was diabetic and had been battling with it. He spoke about it a lot in his music. He was an advocate for diabetes and finding cures. It’s the thing that ended him.

This summer, we tried to go on tour to promote the record that we have, his last record, and it was extremely difficult.

What helps me is actually seeing the strength of his wife, someone who gave him a kidney to give him another few years of life. Her strength, and her saying that he was okay, that he died happy.

Courtney E. Martin: Yeah.

Ali Shaheed Muhammad: He died happy because she was there, and the environment was very supportive of him as a person and gave him love.

So I’m still dealing with that. As we all know, some passings can be harder on you than others, and that one was tough for me.

Courtney E. Martin: Yeah. Thank you.

I want to talk a little bit about hip-hop because, in some ways, one could argue that hip-hop artists have talked about death more readily than most other artists. A lot of artists within hip-hop make death a central part of their lyrics.

In one sense, that could be healthy. In another sense, sometimes you feel like death is glorified, right? There’s a cheapening of what it actually means.

How do you feel about that, grappling with hip-hop and how it deals with death?

Ali Shaheed Muhammad: I think it’s foolish not to take life seriously, even with artistic license.

I’m an artist who believes there are boundaries. Some of my friends and contemporaries feel that they should be able to say anything under the sun without any consequences. I don’t believe that.

I think there are a lot of rappers who sensationalize or romanticize the idea of dying as a way to maybe immortalize who they were, if they can die a magnificent death.

Unfortunately, the way it comes out is very destructive and not constructive.

It’s one of those things where, when people come into my studio, I challenge their lyrics. What’s your purpose? What’s the end result of these words and this feeling that will live on maybe another hundred years beyond you? What value do you think they have now? What value do you think they will have then?

People who come into my studio with that sort of approach hate when I ask those questions because it’s challenging their artistic whatever and this delusion of grandeur given by, “I’m an artist.”

We’re human beings, and we’re a community. These buildings one day will crumble and dust will cover them. Someone will uncover them and want to know something about the past to understand how they can move on as a society and grow.

So to sensationalize and take death for granted in that way, there’s nothing to be learned from that, I think, other than, “You guys were foolish in 1990 or 2017.”

I make an effort to challenge that. Because I’m older, when the 19-year-olds come in with that green, fearless, “I don’t care about anyone else” expression, I try to educate and challenge them in a healthy way so that they can value life and speak about the idea of dying in a different way.

Courtney E. Martin: That’s amazing.

One of the things we’re talking about here today is how we get people who are afraid of talking about death to talk about it.

You mentioned that if we could get rappers to do psychedelics, it would become very popular.

From your perspective as an artist who has spoken to millions and millions and millions of people, who has had a message for a popular audience beyond healthcare and beyond all the folks in this room, what’s your advice to us about how to get regular people to talk more about death and dying?

Ali Shaheed Muhammad: Rap as a genre was a young genre. Now, though, the original, what we call the foundation of hip-hop rappers, are close to 60.

Courtney E. Martin: It’s true. We’re all getting old.

Ali Shaheed Muhammad: We’re getting older. So if not through parents, then at least through personal experience.

There aren’t any 60-year-old rappers from the old school making records right now, but the relationship between the older generation and the younger generation is close enough that, as you hear stories of someone passing, having cancer or having a heart attack, I think it will begin a conversation.

At some point, someone will stop glorifying death or speaking about things that are quite ridiculous and frivolous and begin to speak about the real aspects of life. I think that conversation is going to happen now, especially with Phife passing.

He was young. He was 45.

And my own personal experience with my father, having to watch him fade as he was in hospice for 10 days, and we had to decide to take the feeding tube out. Who talks about that?

You talk about keeping it real. That’s keeping it real.

As more artists begin to have those sorts of experiences, I think it will then be woven into the fabric of their music and their artistry.

Courtney E. Martin: Yeah. It’s interesting, striking that balance between the glorification and the sense of invincibility. When people see Phife or other people dying, they have to reflect on their own vulnerability to all of that.

Give us a final word about your father, because he just sounds so special. I think he would be so proud of who you are and the way you’re talking about these things today. What is his legacy in your life?

Ali Shaheed Muhammad: Wow.

The funny thing is that my parents were divorced when I was two years old, so I didn’t spend a lot of time with him. It wasn’t until later on in my life, in my 20s. I would see him maybe one to three times a year from the divorce until adulthood.

There was a period where my mom, I hate to put this out there publicly, I’m sorry, Mom, was like, “He owes child support.” Real talk.

But my father was an activist. One of the reasons they split was because he was always in the community. My mother loved that about him and respected that about him. She was like, “You should go do that because the family thing, we need you, but you’re not going to shift that.”

He had a calling. He fulfilled it.

One can look at his not paying child support as a way that he was not supportive. But I’ll say this: My father prayed for me every day.

The fruits of his prayer have manifested because of what I’ve been able to do. He not only prayed for me, he prayed for everyone else.

It was the same with my great-grandmother, who lived to be 106. When there are certain people in your life and your family who you know, from a spiritual basis, vibrate high, when they’re no longer there, that beacon is gone. It’s darkness.

What isn’t given in financial means is given in something else. It isn’t tangible. You can’t feel it, but it’s here, and it transcends in other ways.

I know that about him. He knows how I feel about him. The legacy is just in me and in my abilities as an artist, and as a quiet and shy artist, to find a way to say, “So, what do you think is going to happen to you when you die?”