New Muslim Cool by Jennifer Maytorena Taylor

Jason Perez dreamed he would die before he turned 21. His dream came true. A former drug dealer on the streets on New York, Perez says "Jason" died when he became Muslim. Now known as Hamza, the Nuyorican rapper and family man spreads the message of Islam through his music.

The movie New Muslim Cool documents Hamza's journey: moving from New York to Pittsburgh, educating his family about his new-found faith and raising his children Muslim in post-9/11 America.

We hooked up with the director of New Muslim Cool, Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, to chat about the film.

Hamza and Suliman said they learned to make Puerto Rican halal food. What did they eat?

The meal they were cooking in that scene was arroz con pollo with halal chicken. There’s a grocery store in Pittsburgh where they can get halal meat but in a pinch they – like many Muslims – will also use kosher meat. I think they’ve figured out to make lots of traditional boricua dishes halal-style, even mofongo with halal chicken. And for them fish is all okay, so fortunately that means Hamza’s mom Gladys can cook her famous bacalao, which I always hope and pray she’ll be making when we are visiting.

Hamza grew up in NY with a large Latino community. Was there a comparable Latino community in Pittsburgh? Did he seek to find one?

Yes, Hamza and Suliman were born in Sunset Park in Brooklyn and then moved to Worcester, Massachusetts as kids. Both of those towns have huge Puerto Rican populations so they always had their own culture around them.

But Pittsburgh does not have that many Latinos yet, that has been a little hard for them on a cultural level, although that is beginning to change. As a matter of fact, when Hamza and Rafiah’s son was born last year they joked that they just doubled the Puerto Rican population of Pittsburgh!

When you set out to shoot this film, did you want to focus on Muslim life in America or Muslim music in America?

I was really interested in examining Muslim life in America through the music. It seemed to me that hip-hop culture would be a great metaphor for who we are as a nation and a world, where there is lots of mixing and re-mixing of elements that come from different places to form a coherent whole.

How did you meet Hamza? When did you decide you wanted to center your film around him?

I had met Hamza and Suliman in the research phase of the film but I really connected with them on the first round of filming, when we were in Chicago to shoot a Muslim festival on the South Side called "Takin' It To The Streets." It’s held every two years and always features lots of Muslim hip-hop performers. So we filmed Hamza and his brother performing as M-Team with their flaming machetes, and then the next day did an interview with them.

In the interview they both impressed me hugely with their wit and sophistication and warmth, and I asked if we could film them at a later time in Pittsburgh. A few months later we went to Pittsburgh and met their community and it was just so obvious at that moment that the story was there – with the chance to dig more deeply into a universal story about family, faith, and coming of age in America today.

Why did Hamza convert to Islam?

Hamza says that he kept searching for happiness as a young person but he couldn’t find it. He tried the life of the streets and drugs but that just made him more depressed. His roommate and fellow drug dealer disappeared for a few months, and when he came back Hamza saw how changed he was and how happy he seemed. So he made the decision right then and there to change his own life.

Did Hamza make an effort to teach his kids about his Puerto Rican roots?

Hamza and all of his extended family are very close to their Puerto Rican roots and they all teach the kids about their culture and heritage. His grandmother and several cousins still live in Puerto Rico, so they come to visit a lot and bring reminders all the time of their roots. And his wife Rafiah is learning more and more Spanish and how to cook with adobo!

Did your notions about Islam/Muslims change after shooting this film?

Oh for sure. I didn’t know anything about Islam before making this film, and like most Americans really only started thinking about Muslims after 9/11 happened. So I think I had to learn that a lot of the labels that we use about Muslims, like categorizing them simply as “moderate vs radical” or “Muslim vs American,” really are overly simple or just inaccurate, and strip people of their humanity. I also learned to have a lot more respect and understanding for people who choose to follow organized religion, whether it’s Islam or Christianity or Judaism (or another path).

And we all definitely changed by working so closely together for three years, learning to accept more and more that we can all be so different and yet have so much in common. All of us on the crew and production team – Muslim, Jewish, Christian, atheist, Latino, black, white, South Asian – gained new friendships and deep new levels of trust for each other. Maybe that can be on some microcosmic level what we could do as a society or even a world, if we could just be able to see each other as fully and completely human despite coming from different religions or cultures or economic classes.

New Muslim Cool airs this Tuesday, June 23, on PBS.