Abd Al Malik: saved by sufism

[From the French language press]:
Avec son album “Gibraltar”, cet ancien délinquant, licencié en philosophie et disciple du cheikh Hamza, a bouleversé le paysage du hip-hop français. Portrait d'un artiste iconoclaste.

Tel Quel - Morocco - par Youssef Aït Akdim - Vendredi 5 Janvier 2007

With his album “Gibraltar”, this former delinquent, with a degree in philosophy and disciple of Sheikh Hamza, upset the landscape of the French hip-hop. Portrait of an iconoclast artist.

In an autobiographical book published in 2004, Q' Allah bénisse la France, [May Allah bless France] Abd Al Malik tells his astonishing course.

His chance, he says, is to have met Sufism. Randomly from its readings, he fell on a text from Al Ghazali. It was a revelation! Conquered by this ethics of search for oneself, he went to Morocco, and to Sidi Hamza, the chief of the brotherhood Boutchichie.

The discovery of Sufism alleviated the need for spirituality without attacking the creativity of the singer. If he changed, it is also after his voyage to Morocco, where he “found an Islam moving, which wants to progress".

"There is in this country something that should inspire Moslem from the rest of the world , and which proves that Islam is neither fixed nor antiquated, but open and universal”, he said recently in an interview to Jeune Afrique.

The last album of Abd Al Malik, Gibraltar, issued in June 2006, already imposed itself like the revelation of the musical re-entry in the Hexagon [an epithet of France], with more than 50.000 specimens sold in a few months.