The Brothahood: “Australia’s Mine Too”

Previous chapters reveal the extensive challenges that have faced Australian-born Muslims, including widespread exclusion from the governmental and Muslim institutional political fields. Some young Muslim men have sought alternative avenues of self-expression and fields through which they could have a larger political impact. This first exemplar focuses on one such group of men and aims to reveal the manner in which social influences interact to shape their political action. The Brothahood are a group of young Australian Muslim men from a wide variety of backgrounds who have formed a common bond through hip-hop, an inherently political style of music that through its very form encourages a vocalization of identity and views. The group has become a pioneer of Muslim hip-hop in Australia and played around the country whilst developing a following in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation and other Muslim majority nations in Asia. The Brothahood’s music fuses Muslim perspectives and experiences with a Western cultural form to challenge negative representations of Islam in Australia and simultaneously promote self-esteem and pride amongst Muslim listeners. This chapter aims to understand the type of identity displayed by the group and through the application of Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice , how social influences have interacted to shape the group’s political action. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.