Episode: 49 · Guest: Muslim Hdeib · Full Episode #49
Muslim Hdeib, a Palestinian-Jordanian rapper, wrote a track built around the talbiyah — the prayer "Labbayk Allahumma Labbayk" (لبيك اللهم لبيك, "Here I am, O God, here I am") recited by pilgrims during Hajj. The track emerged from a personal reconciliation with faith after a period of atheism.
The crisis began after September 11, 2001. The global scrutiny of Islam, the suspicion directed at Muslims, and the collapse of nuance in public discourse pushed Muslim away from the religion he had been raised in. He described the departure not as an intellectual conclusion — a considered rejection of theology — but as a reactive withdrawal. Faith became untenable under the weight of what was being done in its name and what was being done to those who professed it.
The return was not a return to the same place. Muslim described a reconciliation with God that was personal rather than institutional. He did not rejoin a mosque community or adopt a particular school of Islamic thought. He arrived at a private relationship with the divine that existed outside the structures that had, in his experience, failed to protect or represent him.
The talbiyah track is the artistic expression of that reconciliation. The prayer is one of the most sacred phrases in Islam — spoken by millions of pilgrims approaching Mecca, its cadence recognisable to any Muslim regardless of sect or language. To frame it as a rap track is itself a statement: that faith and art are not separate domains, that the sacred can be approached through the vernacular, and that a rapper in Moscow has as much right to the talbiyah as a pilgrim in Mecca.
The track does not treat the prayer as material to be sampled or repurposed for aesthetic effect. It treats it as a genuine expression of arrival — the same arrival the prayer has always described, reimagined through a contemporary form.