The Message
A Brooklyn rapper speaks volumes about women in Islam
Tavasha Shannon remembers it well: A dimly lit housing project stairwell in Sheepshead Bay filled with spectators, watching her poised for battle. She stood tall in spite of her five feet two inches, ready for combat. Only 18, she sported a tight hair weave and even tighter jeans.
Her tongue was quick and her blows heavy, aggressive and self-assured, as she took down her opponent with ease. But they weren’t throwing punches. These stairwell battles are freestyle competitions in which the blows are verbal. Here, opposing rappers duke it out to determine who has the best rhythm, flow, and lyrical mastery.
“Sometimes people give you problems,” Shannon explains. “You gotta battle to get respect.”
She got plenty of it. While attending Kingsboro Community College in 2003 she became the first female Battle Champion, a high honor for hip-hoppers in the New York City area.
Less than five years ago, this hip-hop artist spent many weekend nights like this, pruning her image as a streetwise young rap artist, and working hard to break into the industry as one of the few female rap artists with any sort of recognition at all. While in school, she kept going to rap battle and worked on the street team for Roc-a-fella records, rap artist Jay-Z’s record label.
Today at 23, Shannon is more likely to cite Qur’an lyrics than brag about bling and Ferraris. She performs charity shows for inmates in prisons across the country, and will proudly tell you that she hasn’t performed in a club that serves alcohol since she embraced her Muslim identity in 2001. The hair weave has been displaced by a cloth head cover. At 18, Shannon became inspired to use her rap as a way to spread the word of Islam. She called herself Misunderstood Muslimeena and is now known to her fans internationally as Miss Undastood. She has been carrying out her mission ever since.
“One day I had writer’s block, and then everything I started writing just had an Islamic theme to it,” she says, explaining that her convergence to religious music and lifestyle is a bit of a mystery even to her.
She didn’t expect to take this path, in life or in music. Shannon found her way into the hip hop scene after matriculating at Kingsboro Community College, in Brooklyn. “One semester someone told me to enter a battle at school, and I won it,” she says. Shannon took on the name “Flawless” and built street cred rapping with such underground hip-hop sensations as Papoose, and as one-half of a duo with another lady rapper named Kharisma. She fielded interest from Epic Records and other industry players. She rocked poetry slams at Bowery Poetry Club and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. With their tight lyrics about men, money and fast cars, and their even tighter jeans, Miss Undastood and Kharisma were quickly becoming known as the hottest duo since Salt-n-Pepa
Then she traded in her alias and her jeans for a hijab, and Miss Undastood now rhymes with a different rhythm. At 24, she has taken her music to new, spiritual heights. These days, Miss Undastood’s rhyme schemes are more likely to cite the Qur’an than brag about bling and Ferraris. And no longer does she perform in crowded, sweaty hot spots and back-alley street battles. Today, she is much more likely to perform at an all-female “sisters only” event in London as she did a few years ago in 2003. The doe-eyed beauty will proudly tell you that she hasn’t performed in a club that serves alcohol since she first started embracing her Muslim identity a few years ago.
Miss Undastood is one of a growing number of traditional Islamic artists using rap music — since its beginnings an outlet for social and political commentary — as a forum to discuss Islam and problems within the Islamic community. Her lyrics, which tend to be more inflammatory than those of other popular Muslim artists, such as Native Deen, focus on topical issues like the hijab, being a Muslim woman in a modern-day society, and the jealousy that sometimes comes into play between co-wives. Just as urban African Americans created a voice for themselves in hip-hop in the seventies, in a post 9-11 country stricken by Islamophobia, Islam, and Miss Undastood, have found in hip-hop a voice of their own.
Miss Undastood says that she can’t even possibly begin to define the moment she started writing with a religious message in mind. “When you give someone a mic, they have to have something to say,” she says, “I think that what I have to say is something all people are going to realize they want to hear.” And she has a lot to say. In “Hijab is the One Thing,” she discusses not only the misconception that the hijab is oppressive, but the right of a Muslim woman to wear her hijab anywhere and the right for women to choose whether or not they want to wear it. Through lyrics like “Just because I cover doesn’t mean I’m all righteous/ Just because you don’t doesn’t mean you’re less pious,” she emphasizes that religious devotion comes in many forms. And all this to the tune of a funky drum beat.
When Shannon was 10 her father brought Islam into their home, restricting pork from the family diet, praying five times a day, and putting Miss Undastood in a strict Islamic school. She was in the midst of an Army brat childhood all over the East Coast that eventually arrived in Jackson Heights, Queens with her, her mother and army father.
At 11, Miss Undastood started trying her hand at writing rap as a way, she says, to “escape” from her strict school life. By the time she was 18, she had what she describes as writer’s block. The only lyrics that came to her were about Islam. She ditched her traditional rap image for a voice both more conservative and more outspoken.
“The main difference between my image now and then,” she says, “is street cred. I think I lost that.”
