The music video of star singer Maher Zain's latest single "Antassalam," released for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, has been viewed nearly 3 million times on YouTube. I hope you like it.
Please remember me and my family in your prayers. View all similar artists. View all trending tracks. Loading player…. Scrobble from Spotify? Connect to Spotify Dismiss. Search Search. View version history. Zain is displaying his compassion and humanity here, but he is also invoking a story told about the Prophet Muhammad. For years a woman dumped garbage on his home until one day it stopped. The Prophet sought to see what had happened to the woman and offered to help her when he realized that she was sick.
Throughout, Zain delivers handwritten notes marked in Arabic "sala ala al-Habib" peace be upon the Prophet Muhammad to Muslims of different races and ethnicities in Chicago, Illinois, the third-largest American city and home of President Obama. Throughout the video, we see the diversity and the remarkable integration of Muslims into America: Asian Muslims playing a violin next to a Chinese temple, a black firefighter, a veiled florist, an unveiled female cook, and young men playing soccer.
In the final scene, we even see Zain's note reaching a white, blue-eyed Muslim astronaut circling the earth above Chicago. Here it is worth noting that the inclusion of the firefighter and the astronaut is extremely significant.
Astronauts have been American icons and symbols of selfless patriotism for decades, while firefighters attained similarly heroic status after the September 11, terrorist attacks. By choosing a city that is one of the centers of the nation's politics and showing Muslims occupying such important professions, Zain is implying that Muslims are patriotic, productive citizens whose faith has something tangible to contribute to the foremost Western nation.
In effect, if you can be pious and Muslim in the heart of modernity—middle America—you can be pious and modern anywhere in the world. Nor is Zain's vision of a modern Muslim cultural identity limited to the West. In the video "Palestine will be Free," he shows that such an identity and its principles are equally applicable to an apocalyptic urban landscape torn apart by Arab-Israeli violence.
In the penultimate scene of the video, we see a young school girl holding a stone in front of an Israeli tank. The image is meant to invoke a clash between David and Goliath or might versus right.
But it also has specific meaning for many Arabs: It is a reminder of the famous picture from the First Palestinian Intifada of a Palestinian child holding a rock above his head to throw at a nearby Israeli tank.
But in Zain's video the girl drops the rock, stands defenseless in front of the Israeli tank, and implicitly puts her faith in Allah that her personal will is stronger than the mighty Israeli tank. Her faith is rewarded. As she moves forward, the tank withdraws.
We also see that Zain's notion of modern cultural identity can be applied in still another setting in what remains Zain's most popular video, "Inshah Allah. But as Zain sings that one should never lose hope or despair because Allah is always is on your side, we see each of these individuals gaining hope and changing their behavior for the better. Strikingly, we even see the torturer removing his foot from the back of the young man to walk away.
These revolts employed strategies similar to those used by Zain to promote both his music and his characters in his songs, and drew hope for a better future from Islam. Through enormous, peaceful demonstrations, protestors challenged Arab governments to withdraw in a manner recalling the way the little girl forced the withdrawal of the Israeli tank in the video "Palestine Will Be Free.
The most important days of protesting corresponded with the most holy day of the week for Muslims—Friday—and included women and pious Muslim parties.
The role of these two groups was sufficiently important that the Nobel Committee justified awarding the Peace Prize to a female Yemeni Islamic Activist, Tawakkal Karman. In an interview with the Associated Press in October, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Thorbjorn Jagland, noted that Karman's award was meant to signal that both women and Islam have played an important part in the Arab uprisings. These remarks are not meant to suggest that Maher Zain caused demonstrations or is an Islamic activist in the mold of Karman.
But Zain's songs clearly reflect a wide-spread feeling of discontent and a desire for a different future among Islamic and secular activists in the Arab world. His awareness of that discontent and of the need for hope is an element of his popularity—epitomized by an Egyptian fan who stated at his Cairo concert in March that she loved the "revolutionary" feel of his music, which was neither materialistic nor in line with classical religious sermons.
Zain tapped into this same feeling of discontent and the need for hope in the first song he released after the start of the Arab Spring, "Freedom. The song thanks God for giving friends and neighbors the strength to hold hands and demand an end to oppression.
It presents a vision for a new Arab Muslim society in which people will no longer be prisoners in their homes or afraid to voice their opinions in public. While Zain acknowledges that the dream of a new Arab society has yet to be fulfilled, he promises his listeners that they are on the verge of achieving it, that God is with them, and that he will not let them fail.
In the background as Zain sings, there are images of Arab flags and protestors of all ages peacefully challenging their governments in the Arab World. More than eight months after the debut of "Freedom" in Malaysia, Zain continues to grow in popularity and his vision has struck a powerful chord among Muslims in Southeast Asia and beyond.
He and his record label, Awakening Records, understand that Western music is a powerful vehicle to promote a modern Muslim cultural identity built around wasatiyya and to resolve a decades-old dilemma: how can Muslims remain true to their faith's principles and make a positive impact in a world still dominated by Western modernity? Maher Zain. MusicBrainz artist ID. GND ID. Library of Congress authority ID.
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