Institute History
Description
New Muslim Cool follows three years in the life of Jason "Hamza" Perez, a Puerto Rican American Muslim convert and ex-gang member, as he works to build a new religious community, and seizes the chance for happiness in a second marriage. Hamza left life as a drug dealer for Islam ten years ago. Now, after a devastating break-up with his first wife, he moves to Pittsburgh's tough North Side.
In a rundown building surrounded by crack and crime, he helps start a new community for African American and Latino Muslims.
Like Hamza, many are ex-gang members who use hip-hop culture to take their religious message to the streets, slums, and jail cells of urban America. And like Hamza some find themselves under what appears to be government surveillance, but shrug off the attention as a fact of Muslim life in post-9/11 America.
Raising his two kids as a single dad and longing for companionship, Hamza finds love on a Muslim networking website and seizes the chance for happiness in a second marriage. But when the FBI raids their mosque, Hamza and his community come face to face with a whole new set of challenges, and have to choose how they respond. Hamza finds himself reaching out to new Christian and Jewish allies –– all the while continuing his MySpace.com-fueled rise as part of the hip-hop group
Mujahideen Team, provocative new stars of American Muslim youth culture.
Setting Hamza's story in the context of young American Muslims' emergence among the deep dividing lines of the post-9/11 world, New Muslim Cool gives audiences an authentic, intimate, and fresh view of life in one of the world's most rapidly growing and least-understood communities.