Mustafa: ‘Music is not a shield, it is not a healing’

On a rainy Wednesday night in late September, hundreds of people are waiting outside EartH in Dalston. The queue wraps around several corners, winding up in the middle of a residential street where the crowd, myself included, are waiting to attend a ‘Kitaba Listening’ session hosted by Mustafa, formerly known as Mustafa the Poet, in conversation with Dua Lipa. The same event is set to be held in different cities over the following weeks, with Daniel Caesar, Ramy Youssef, Anok Yai and Angelina Jolie.

A month after the event in London, after several fruitless attempts to speak, I finally manage to get on a call with the man himself. “Sorry, I’m in the middle of a month-long road trip,” he says over Zoom. Over the past few weeks, Mustafa has travelled between Toronto, Los Angeles, Paris, London, New York and Washington DC. The day after our call, he is set to land in Riyadh. “I am just taking it day by day,” he says calmly. “Rolling with the punches.” Despite the varying timezones, he is present and engaged, expressing himself with the honest, sometimes heart-rending, sensitivity you’d expect from a poet. 

Mustafa was raised by Sudanese parents in Regent Park, Toronto, famously known as one of Canada’s most populated and oldest housing projects. At age 12, he began to garner attention for his poetry after he was featured in the Toronto Star with his poem “A Single Rose”, which detailed the realities of living in his community. Throughout his late teens and early twenties, his poetry opened another door as he began working as a songwriter, lending his knack for smooth wordplay to the likes of Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, The Jonas Brothers and Shawn Mendes. In 2021, he released his first project When Smoke Rises, unpacked the grief of losing friends to violence.

Now, three years later, he is welcoming listeners into another part of his world. Released last month, his debut full-length album Dunya – which translates from Arabic as “the material world in all its flaws” – was made with collaborators including Rosalía, Clairo, and Aaron Dessner. The album blends traditional Arabic and African instruments with indie-folk melodies, and is lyrically infused with profound reflections on many topics surrounding love, loss, faith and violence. At the end of the album’s lead single “Name of God”, there’s an excerpt of a conversation with Mustafa’s younger cousin Mahmoud, in which the young boy says in Arabic, “I’m just a human and a Muslim.” In many ways, that is the exact sentiment Dunya expresses. While faith can act as a powerful anchor for hope, Mustafa, like everyone else, is not immune to the trauma and turmoil that comes from merely existing, especially when every part of your identity is heavily politicised. Despite that, Dunya reminds us that there is an alternative to sorrow, where pain can co-exist with the beauty within dark moments.

Below, Mustafa speaks to us about his debut album, Faith, grief and advocating for Palestine and Sudan.

When did you start working on this album? How different did the process feel for you, working on this album versus your first project, When Smoke Rises?

Mustafa: I first started working on the record at the end of 2021. The parallel between this record and the last is that both processes were deeply tumultuous because they were on the backs of heavy-set grief that I was not only feeling personally, but communally. With this record, it reached a kind of global resonance: people are feeling things internationally now. I am from Sudan, and I think I have always been privy to the kind of political landscape that I am writing in. It feels like it is always taking a considerable toll on the way I’m making music.

I love the album cover especially because wearing kohl is sunnah (the way of the prophet). How did you come up with it?

Mustafa: I think there are sunnahs and practices in Islam that are maybe more foreign to the average Muslim and the West. I feel a responsibility to try to expand the horizons of fellow believers, and because so much of the record is centred around faith, I wanted to focus on a practice of the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) that felt like it was in line with everything else on the record. Kohl would be used prior to people going to war, and so much of the record is about violence. I was able to represent a practice of faith and a practice of preparation for violence, which are maybe the two large themes of the record.

The album title made me think of the phrase ‘deen over dunya’, which means prioritising faith over matters in this material world. I feel like it is a phrase that is said so much within our communities, and maybe sometimes it loses its meaning. How do you balance your faith and what feels good to you, with any external criticism about how you decide to practice your faith?

Mustafa: It is funny that that has been the most common language used among the diaspora, the "deen over dunya". The balance for me is in community. There are people that are so in the world and that are struggling, I think I am in community with both. I have friends who have such a devotional connection to God that they struggle to be in any kind of space that I am in because they just feel like it is diverting them. I think with those extremities, and oscillating between those communities, is what helps me establish the balance. It is so important for me to be connected to people on the fringes of disbelief and misunderstanding. So much of my practice is trying to move in all those spaces with the hope that I could develop a language that serves as a bridge for people who do not recognise the kind of depth that some of the people in the faith carry.

I believe that nothing is built for a young Black Muslim to live in comfortably, but I still have to live in that contradiction  – Mustafa

Do you find songwriting any different from writing poetry? Or do you think you approach the two in the same way?

Mustafa: I think poetry and songwriting are two completely different animals. Whenever anyone asks me how to transition from poetry to songwriting, I always say to consider songwriting an entirely new world from the beginning. The moment that a songwriter who is coming from poetry transitions into songwriting and believes that they are anywhere further than at the bottom of the mountain, they are doing themselves a disservice. Some of what you learn from poetry will arrive, but the climb is from the beginning for sure.

You have such powerful reflections on grief. As a writer and an artist, how do you find making art while dealing with such heavy emotions? Do you find it possible to heal through creation?

Mustafa: Writing is not a shield. Music is not a shield. It is not a covering, it is not a healing. If anything, it just feels like we have an avenue to express grief. It is a gift in itself but the grieving process, the mourning, happens separately from the writing process, the studio and the performance. The moment we begin to conflate those two ideas is when we witness true, irreparable damage. Some of the most intentional, most canonical artists in the world have been victims and have succumbed to their grieving. And what’s to say they were able to reflect and memorialise their people and their grief and their hearts in a way that no one has done before them, but that did not prevent them from driving themselves to the end. I know that we want to live healthy lives. We also want to have the kind of mess and chaos that produces great work, but it is a push and pull. Our hands always have to be on the rope and I do not know if the music is an assist in keeping my hands on the rope.

You said at your Kitaba listening session in London that it is the responsibility of artists to hold up a mirror to the world and act as journalists. I feel like you’ve done that with the benefit concerts for Sudan and Palestine and with your single “Gaza is Calling”. Why is it important to you to do this?

Mustafa: I have a deep responsibility to my community and I will continue in that way. This to me is more important than the work of music. It is paramount. If I die without anyone having heard anything that I have made because I have dedicated my life to this work then I honestly have done myself a true truth. I have lived a life that is worthy of recounting, but if I have done the opposite then I do not know how I would ever live. I do not know how I would ever be in any graveyard and be able to stand myself. I feel it goes without thinking. I know a lot of artists who have had to drive them from strangeness to contemplation and then action. I do not remember the last time I ever had to contemplate any of these things. Action has always been the first thought for me and I have never hesitated. I just want people to move into that because we are connected to all suffering and we are responsible.

So many times when we experience violence, sorrow, or depression, it becomes difficult for us to separate it from our character, and we end up dependent on it – Mustafa

I think the way you speak about Toronto and the song ‘Leaving Toronto’ is so interesting. It almost reminds me of this James Baldwin quote from Giovanni’s Room where they are talking about leaving a hometown and he says, ‘You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.’ How do you reconcile leaving somewhere that is so intrinsically tied to who you are, but feels like somewhere you can no longer be?

Mustafa: I feel like home is one of the great questions of this life. Home is a moving target, and a moving goalpost. Depending on where our heart lies, where love lies and who we fall out of love with, it transforms. I think Toronto, because of the deaths, the grief [and] the visibility, it always transforms. I wrote this song now because this is the form that it has taken for me. I do not underestimate what it will become for me a year or two from now, but I am open to the world being a bed for me. I try my best to think of every place as a potential for living. 

The thing is, all at once, I believe that nothing is built for a young Black Muslim to live in comfortably, but I still have to live in that contradiction and be in that space and affect that comfort. So much of living has become a kind of war for me and I think home signifies a kind of war in itself. Home changes so often and I just try to give myself as much grace as possible for when it changes for myself again.

When did you start wearing and performing in the thawb and bulletproof poet vest? 

Mustafa: The reason I started wearing it, if I am being honest, is because I had these shows and I struggled to know what to wear. Of course, in Sudan, we wear [the thawb] so often or casually. The last time that I was on Twitter, four or five years ago, I remember tens of thousands of people berating, shaming and praying against me for wearing the thawb. It was the first time feeling alien in my expression of faith or in my expression of self and culture. I remember thinking, I am never going to take this off because I am Sudani and I am Muslim. After that, it became a thing that I just could not separate from because it felt like so much of what I am.

Is there one key message that you hope people take away from listening to this album?

Mustafa: We should not feel subjected to the sorrow that we grew up in. I think so many times when we experience violence, sorrow, or depression, it becomes difficult for us to separate it from our character, and we end up dependent on it. It becomes a part of our symbolism because it is also the way that people view us. People are viewing us in that sorrow. They are viewing us in our lived experience. What I was attempting here was a beauty that I do not think I was deserving of, or that I did not think fit into the canon of what people have seen in me. So for whatever kind of deep depression or sorrow or bleakness that people are living in, they are still allowing and inviting a light inside. It is so easy to just lean on that sorrow and stay in it and I just hope that there is a window to a hope that people can feel amidst the kind of depth of whatever despair they are feeling. That is what I was trying to reach when I was making the record, and I hope people can feel that when they are listening to it.

Revisit Mustafa's 2022 cover story in the gallery above and watch Dazed's exclusive BTS of Gaza is Calling above.

Dunya is out now.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.