A French rapper, Mélanie Georgiades (also known as Diam’s) has converted to Islam and showed up on television wearing a hijab. According to Alarabiya:
Amid a nationwide debate in France surrounding attitudes towards the Islamic veil, or hijab, a French rapper has surprised fans by announcing her conversion to Islam and choosing to wear a headscarf.
Mélanie Georgiades, known as Diam’s, has gone through what onlookers have described as a “complete transformation” from an image she had prior to 2009.
Since 2009, Diam’s had been unusually absent from the mainstream rap scene, prompting more than three years of controversy over her whereabouts, despite making the odd public appearance with her scarf.
But recently the French rapper made her first television appearance with her new image.
Diam’s appeared in an exclusive TV interview with French TV station TF1, to talk about a past experience with drugs, including hallucinating narcotics, and being in a mental asylum until she discovered the “serenity of Islam.” The rapper said the religion was introduced to her by coincidence, when she saw a Muslim friend praying.
Diam’s, said she has been married for over a year and is a now a new mother, moving far away from her drug-relate past.
The article goes on to say that her conversion was the result of personal conviction. To me, it looks like she had reached the bottom of depravity, found herself void of meaning in her life and embraced the only up-and-coming spirituality she knew: Islam, which some would argue is only a more organized form of depravity. Europe’s hostile elite have nurtured a culture where Christianity is for old people and belongs to the past – while Islam is for young people and belongs to the future. It’s no wonder so many young Europeans, especially women, consider Islam the natural answer to their spiritual emptiness. For those who wallow in rap “culture” Islam can certainly be a step up, just as it is for American blacks who find comfort in the Nation of Islam.
Christianity probably would not have taken root in the Roman world had the masses not already given up their belief in the old Pantheon. In a world where the wealthy lived lives of shameless hedonism, and the poor desperately sought meaning for their short and wretched lives, Christianity was the right thing at the right time.
Like Islam, Christianity came from the Middle East. But Europeans made it their own. They replaced their old pagan beliefs with their own brands of Christianity – but they did not replace themselves. In contrast, the current transformation is much more sinister. Europeans are replacing themselves. Also, with current conditions, it’s hard to imagine a new, European-style, Islam taking root on any large scale.
Even if the bulk of Europeans remain secular, having Islam as the default religion will still cause tremendous damage to culture and freedom. Even as more and more Americans rejected traditional religion, Christianity remained the basis of many laws. So too does Islam serve as the legal foundation even in mostly secular Muslim countries.
Is it possible for a people to exist, for any appreciable amount of time, with no religion? Perhaps in pre-industrial times it would have been possible, with natural barriers to protect it from invasion. But in today’s world I highly doubt it. It would be ironic if the only way to preserve ones nation is to ensure that an undercurrent of patently false beliefs survives.
There’s a lot more that could be written about the French rapper turned Muslim; the above are just thoughts off the top of my head. Perhaps some European readers could provide deeper perspectives.
The very words “French rapper” should tell us that something’s seriously wrong with France.
“To me, it looks like she had reached the bottom of depravity, found herself void of meaning in her life and embraced the only up-and-coming spirituality she knew: Islam, which some would argue is only a more organized form of depravity.”
Agreed, JAY. She sounds like a person who has always struggled for control over her own life. She lacked self-control growing up, she lost control her drug habit, and then lost control of life when admitted to a mental asylum. So it’s unsurprising that she turned to a religion whose very foundation – especially for women – is a complete submission to the will of somebody else. By handing over control of her life to her god, she shows that her state of mind hasn’t actually changed much at all these last three years.
Even if her newfound religiosity brings her “peace”, if she’d looked within herself for the control and will-power she so desperately needed, and desired to do something more with her life, I doubt she would have ever needed to turn to the religion of submission.
Strange. I thought fundamentalist Islam was opposed to music.
Reminds me of Cat Stevens 25 years ago. For those who are too young, he was an extremely popular British pop singer in the 1960s to the 1980s. He converted to Islam, I recall going to a talk that he gave at my university, and it was pretty obvious that he’d reached rock bottom, to borrow Jew’s phrase, in some sense, and was searching for something. He quit singing because he thought Islam forbade it, but recently I came across an article saying he had since learned that Islam actually allows him to perform. I guess that was 25 years or so of great talent that were wasted.
And, by the way, I am not in any way comparing Cat Steves with a rap “singer”, the former being one of the greats and the latter being a bunch of misogynistic, talentless, depraved freaks.
Mélanie Georgiades was born in Nicosia, Cyprus. Cat Stevens (born Steven Demetre Georgiou) (in London) of a Greek Cypriot father. Co-incidence?
I wouldn’t call Islam depraved. It represented quite the moral advance in sixth-century Arabia (no more random muggings of travellers, only four wives instead of unlimited), and does quite well at providing a moral fabric to those Arabic countries that have it.
They’ve yet to come up with a version suitable for the twenty-first century, but that’s another story.
I suppose it depends on the context. I agree with you that it beats the barbarity that the Arabs used to practice prior to Islam. But, for modern day Europeans, there should be better options. For them, Islam represents conquest by foreigners and I do think it also comes with a lot of depravity, at least when compared to modern Western ideals.
” I agree with you that it beats the barbarity that the Arabs used to practice prior to Islam.”
I’m not certain Arabs practiced barbarity during what Muslims call “jahiliyyah” or the “age of ignorance before Islam”. I think a lot of that is just propaganda to make it look like their prophet improved things.