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There is a video of Mustafa at 14 years old reciting a poem he’d written titled I Walk. Like most of his work as a poet, the piece speaks to the experiences of his community in Regent Park — the Toronto neighborhood he grew up in — bearing testimony to the lives he feels Canada has always treated as an afterthought.
Sincerity drips from every word he speaks, brows furrowed as he talks about the “filthy, impure” city that raised him. He’s wearing a striped sweater that’s far too serious for a boy his age, and nobody can take their eyes off him. In a room full of adults, everyone is looking to him to move them. It doesn’t seem to matter that he’s the only child present, he’s there to articulate what even they cannot. A few years prior, a different poem of his titled A Single Rose was shown at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and served, in many ways, as the introduction of Mustafa the Poet to the country’s cultural zeitgeist.
It’s a video that has made me uncomfortable every time I’ve watched it. He should be outside with his friends, I’d think. He should be blissfully unaware of the cruelty he speaks of. It made me uncomfortable the same way watching him accept the 2022 Juno Award for Best Alternative Album of the Year did. He won for his debut EP When Smoke Rises, painfully aware that he was the first Black Muslim to win the category in the history of the award show. “I think that being the first of anything should now be critiqued more than celebrated,” he said in his acceptance speech. And he’s right.
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Mustafa has carried these unique burdens — of being the first, of being a voice of morality even as a child — and consistently used them to indict our culture rather than tout them as markers of excellence. After the widespread success of When Smoke Rises, the world has watched him maneuver his platform as a solitary figure taking on the task of voicing the starkest truths.
Now, at 28, Mustafa is still expected to speak up on behalf of his people. Much has changed: the spoken word that made him famous as a teen has over time morphed into the critically acclaimed folk music he’s known for, those impassioned pleas he was making in dimly lit community centers swapped out for raspy meditations on love, faith, and friendship over sensuous guitar riffs on stages the world over.
When we sit over Zoom, me in Leicester, him in Los Angeles, to discuss the release of his debut studio album Dunya, he is just as eloquent and thoughtful as you’d expect him to be. Just as unwilling to ignore what’s happening in the world as he was at 14. There is a famous James Baldwin quote from The Cross of Redemption: “Every bombed village is my hometown.” Speaking to Mustafa, it feels like those words have been tattooed on his heart.
For the next hour, we share a conversation that touches on Palestine, faith, the story behind the “Gaza Is Calling” visual, that viral Umrah trip with Anwar Hadid, Dunya — a word that means life in Arabic but also speaks to the Muslim struggle with all that is worldly and of earth — and the quest to find hope at a time where it feels like the whole world is on fire.
Mustafa: Definitely, I feel a lot of things. I do feel a deep sense of gratitude. Last [release] it was the middle of the pandemic… I was really anxious about basically making a statement as an artist and not feeling like an artist in a lot of ways. I think now — at least among my community — I've been established as such so it's not so much of a shock. I had a lot of resistance from maybe the more conservative Salafi Muslim community [about making music], and I grew up in a Salafi masjid, so I was aware that that was going to come on, but now I think it's either the community either embraced me or they wrote me off.
I do feel a sense of calm around the release of this record that I didn't feel [at the time of When Smoke Rises], but… it's impossible because all music spaces have been decentralized. There isn't a kind of platform or springboard or situation that I think can serve as a catalyst in the way that it once did, so I am actually really leaving it to fate, I'm leaving it to God, and I'm just putting it out in the air.
I tried to make maybe the purest thing that I can make, and all that I could do is hope that it finds legs. I never imagined that this record, especially considering where I recorded it and just the gravity of it, that people were going to have an instant connection to it. All that I knew is that, eventually in time, it'll find its cornerstone in the culture that I love.
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M: I think I did because my brother passed by the time the record was already completed. I think my entire writing process would've been overtaken by his passing and by the grieving of him. The thing is that it was already finished.
If When Smoke Rises was about the burial place, [Dunya is] about the moments leading up to people's deaths… exploring the space before that. Which unfortunately felt like a really short space, but it was a space that I had to explore on the record. I think every single song was about someone that was alive. I think it's just so important. We've become accustomed to conversations with the dead where I'm from… conversations with the dead seem to happen in a more fruitful manner than conversations with the living.
My own mother and father, they speak to Allah about my brother more than maybe they spoke to him when he was alive. They spoke to [my brother] all the time, but there's a dynamic spirited conversation that's happening with the dead that I wish people would afford to the living. I'm also a victim of that, as well. We are all kind of death workers in a lot of ways. I think I even titled it Dunya because it is about the people that have not departed from it yet, all of our ailments and troubles and triumphs with the dunya itself.
M: I'm obsessed with community, and I think if you'd ask any of my close friends, the thing that they would pride me on the most is connecting with the community. I do it kind of selfishly because I don't know how to live without it. For instance, with the [viral] Umrah trip [in March 2024]...I find myself [so isolated] in Los Angeles. I do an Eid celebration every single year, me and [actor] Omar Sy and the reason that I do so is because there were so many Muslims who were [also] isolated who had no place to engage with faith or explore it.
I think so much of faith is about community. That's why we pray in congregations, that's why our halaqas are in circles. There's so much of it that just doesn't happen. I remember calling Chunkz and being like, "Bro, do you want to go to Umrah? You haven't been before. Let me try to facilitate a way for us all to go." I called Omar and Anwar [Hadid] and we called Sharky… I didn't even know who Harry [Pinero] was. Chunkz invited him.
Forming that group… We call it this iman rush, this faith rush that I'm able to carry forward with me, because in a lot of ways, I'm in a lot of godless environments where people have no connection to the source, people have no connection to Allah. That honestly makes me feel maybe even more grounded, but I need to make sure that I have that kind of [faith] resurgence.
M: I don't have faith in any of these artists and anyone in my particular industry, or performance industries, [to speak out] because it is an inherently narcissistic path. The kind of narcissism, ego, and self-centeredness that we're interfacing with is maybe unprecedented in history, especially with all the ways in which fame is amplified now. It's relentless. There's nobody that you could see me be mutuals with, no famous person that I have not held accountable. There's no one.
If you look at the benefit concerts [I organized], people are like, "Oh, those are really great bills." Imagine who had to say no for me to land there. It's not like… every single artist that I asked agreed. Of course, there's at least another 10 artists [I wanted] on each of those bills that declined coming forward and taking part in the performance. I was just doing my civil— literally doing the bare minimum. Even with the amount that I've done, to me wallahi, it's still the absolute minimum. I've lost a colossal amount of respect and connection to so many artists and so many people that I felt had kind of an empathy that they really just couldn't reveal, or they showed no evidence of, when we are in the face of the most brutal genocide of [the 21st century].
M: The difficulty about making that song is that I wrote it in 2020, at the end of 2020. I wrote it about someone that is alive — because it was about someone that is in this famous struggle with the dunya that we're exploring here — someone that I grew up with from when I was nine years old. I've been wearing one ring on my hand since I was 12, because this boy Ali brought it for me from Gaza. I [had given] him a G-Shock watch and I said, "Could you bring me something from someone in your family?" This was before, of course, it became the active open-air prison that it is now.
By the time he came back, he brought me this ring from his cousin. I wear the ring now and I still wear it even though Ali and I kind of drifted, for many reasons. When I wrote the song, I sat with it and I thought maybe it was a little political even then. Not to say that I don't want to be a political artist, but I just didn't want to feel like I was leaning into something for the sake of it. I sat in that for a little bit.
Eventually my manager was like, "What is this song about? I think it's really beautiful." I was like, "Really? I wrote it about my friend." We started to explore it more, and then I sent it to Bella [Hadid] at the end of 2021. I said, "Hey, I had this idea. I want to explore the song, and I think that it could be really beautiful if we explored this story." I presented the idea to her and I wrote it out and she was like, "Man, this is gorgeous. I'd love to take part in it. Let's do it." I was scavenging for the young boy that would play opposite her, that would play this [character inspired by a] kid from my hood.
When I was going to shoot it, I had a meeting with Bella and Hiam Abbass who was directing it, and with [executive producer of the video] Ramy [Youssef], the morning — subhanallah, this is actually my first time recalling this — it was the morning that my brother passed. We were having a Zoom call and we were scheduling. Later on that day, that happened. I ended up flying to Toronto, and then I obviously went off the grid for a few months.
I isolated for those few months, and when I came back, we explored the idea all over again. Everything was already written, the shots were written, so by the time we completed it, of course, the genocide was always underway, but it took the height that it's at now. After October 7th, November came and December came, and everyone's like, "What are you going to do with this video?" In my heart, I didn't want to try and maximize the attention on myself, so I didn't release it in the height of what was happening. It just didn't feel right to me. I was like, "I'm not Palestinian." I know Bella is, Hiam's Palestinian, but I [thought], "What is my intention?" Although I know that I'd made this a long time ago, I wouldn't want people to think that I believe my music is the thing that people should draw their attention to in this moment in time. I was spending so much of my time trying to focus people towards—
M: Yeah. Palestinian voices, and things that would help them have clarity and understanding of why it's so important to support Palestinian liberation. Helping people understand occupation and helping people understand apartheid as a concept, and helping raise funds by other means, by way of other voices. I held it for a long time until... I said I was going to wait until there was a ceasefire. The thing is, month after month after month after month, a ceasefire never came, and eventually Bella reached out to me and she said, "I think it's almost time for us to release this. I think people need it."
I think I just needed to hear a Palestinian person tell me, being that she's at the center of it. The moment I heard her say that, I felt like I was in service of her and I said, "Okay." I'm like, "Bella wants to release it. It's time for us to mobilize around that, at once." We did, which made me feel really good. It could've came out in October. Also, I'm not critiquing other people's efforts. Anybody that makes music in the midst of the genocide, I'm not here to try to pick apart their intention. There's no [right] time.
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M: Wow. Man, you know what? It actually breaks my heart to hear that kind of question, only because you don't really hear it very often. Not really. I think that I feel increasingly hopeless about the kind of grief that I feel. Bro, I literally have nightmares every single night. I am sleep-deprived, and I am always holding on to this rope. I think that in a lot of ways, when I think about the state of the ummah [community] and then the state of my own family, for so many of us, we feel like we're carried by being of service to other people.
When you asked me this question, all that I could think about is the fact that I'm still here because of my family. I lost my oldest sibling, but then I have a little brother. I'm like, "He can't lose me." For the sake of my brother, I make sure that I'm still present for my younger sibling — in the face of so many people that are lost in this one genocide. How many families wiped off registries? Okay, now this family has survived them. We are still present for those families. It breaks my heart, man. It really does. It breaks my heart that I don't know if I'm in a position to be entirely above water and have this conversation about self-care. I have to [go for a] run, I have to release in every possible way that I can. Sometimes I feel like it's how to remember the people that I lost or how to remember the violence. We're talking about memorabilia, how to preserve people's memories. In some ways, being an artist and being a writer, we're just constantly—
M: Yeah. We're returning to it. I want to be able to grant myself more mercy, and more space to be able to feel what it is that I... to grieve even the days that I'm further away from the people that I love that are no longer [here], or the people that are still here that are no longer as well. I sometimes don't know if art is the avenue for me to do that. I used to think that it was, and I think that I got manipulated by its form and its presence, lured into this fantasy about preservation and what it would mean for me.
I think in a lot of ways, that is a form of protest for a lot of us, staying here [in this dunya]... Even my own family [feels] that their staying is their protest and their staying is their service to the community. I feel the same way. I think hopefully one day we can come back to that question and I can have a fuller and clearer and maybe more substantial answer that I feel better about. As of right now, it's really scattered.
M: Yeah. [Laughing]
M: Yeah. I feel like in a lot of ways, I like the idea of tawakkul that says you treat this life as a wayfarer and you take only what you need. I've always subscribed to that, and I do feel like a wayfarer, I don't feel like I'm connected to any one thing. When I think about music as a concept, and popularity, the truth is, the thing that makes me feel powerful is the fact that I don't feel entirely connected to the dunya, I really don't. I think that that's what gives me the liberty or the agency to say no to a lot of things that could've resulted in maybe more money or more visibility for me.
I think that I could easily make decisions because I know there's a larger thing waiting for me. The thing is that I actually have a hard time confronting the grief, confronting my sorrows, or confronting any kind of conversation. When the tension rises, I always just find a way to go somewhere else. I'm constantly moving, and then moving makes me feel like I'm in rhythm with how I want to live this life and how I want to be in this dunya. I want to settle down at some point, for sure.
M: Inshallah that conversation comes.
Dunya is now available on all digital streaming platforms.
