UA professor believes in rap

When Ted Swedenburg left the U.S. for Cairo, his love for rap music traveled with him.

Now it’s something he can’t seem to escape.

“I’ve kind of made this little detour,” said Swedenburg, an anthropology professor at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, describing his unlikely path to the witness stand in federal courtrooms.

In 1997, he posted an article online about rap music’s relation to teachings of the Nation of Gods and Earths, an offshoot of the Nation of Islam formed in 1960s New York.

His scholarly approach stood out to attorneys engaged in legal fights about how far prisons should go to accommodate the beliefs of inmates. In the case of the Five Percenters, as adherents are sometimes known, prison administrators often label the group a street gang and deny requests to assemble and access to printed materials related to the group.

Swedenburg testified that the group is a religion in two federal civil cases and has submitted expert reports in a few others. Despite courtroom arguments far removed from his original research, Swedenburg’s testimony has been cited in judicial orders in New York, Michigan and Virginia.

“I don’t think I’m the best or most appropriate — I think there’s some other people that know more,” Swedenburg said about explaining Nation of Gods and Earths beliefs. A core tenet is that black men are the embodiment of God, with teachings that refer to “white devils.”

“But I do kind of have a rap, which is that anthropologists would consider this a religion,” said Swedenburg, adamant that “we wouldn’t think of classifying it any other way.”

Affinity for rap

A few months removed from testifying in Virginia, Swedenburg vacillates between embracing his role as witness and questioning whether to continue this unplanned — and almost uncompensated — role in the judicial system.

“It’s time consuming and tiring and a diversion, but it is, I guess, civic duty,” said Swedenburg, an affable man who prefaced the statement with a short laugh.

Music and culture drive him.

Early in his academic career, politicized songs such as those from the New York rap group Public Enemy “really moved me a lot,” leading to a scholarly article on rap published in 1992, though the article had little to do with his training in Middle East studies, Swedenburg said.

“I’m interested in thinking about some other things besides what I’m supposed to be focusing on,” he said, chuckling.

The same year his rap article came out, he traveled to Cairo to do field research. He never stopped listening to American rap, however, and found an unexpected synergy linking his interests.

“It was studying lyrics and sort of realizing, ‘Oh, there’s a lot more Islamic kind of stuff here referenced than I had imagined,’” Swedenburg said. The references came from East Coast rappers referencing Five Percenters’ ideology in their songs, like “Praises are due to Allah, that’s me,” a lyric by the group Poor Righteous Teachers. It’s not uncommon for adherents to adopt new names, with several of the inmates identified in court cases choosing the surname Allah.

As Swedenburg noted in his 1997 article, published a year after he joined the UA faculty, few rappers belong to orthodox strands of Islam. The Nation of Gods and Earths retains references to Nation of Islam teachings — itself far apart from traditional Islam — but has its own reworked ideology.

Swedenburg said he doesn’t see the race-based teachings as the main focus for adherents.

His sympathetic views clash with those of prison officials however.

The state’s closing argument submitted in the recent Virginia case cited gang expert Gary Clore. “Based on his education and training, his extensive experience with monitoring, tracking and identifying gang members, and his personal dealing with [Nation of Gods and Earths], Mr. Clore opined that [Nation of Gods and Earths] is a ‘black separatist hate group’ and that they are ‘without a question’ a gang,” the statement said.

Cited in decision

Lawsuits have sought accommodations for prisoners under a law known as the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, passed by Congress in 2000.

The law states that when inmates make religious-practice requests, prisons must show why accommodations should not be approved. Such cases have skyrocketed in recent years, with 1,388 such cases filed in federal court from 2011 through early May, according to the National Institute of Corrections.

Swedenburg he doesn’t remember exactly when — 2001 or 2002 — he first got a call from an attorney looking for an expert witness in a prisoners’ rights case.

“I tried to convince them that there were better people,” Swedenburg said.

In 2003, a judge sided with an inmate known as Intelligent Tarref Allah, citing Swedenburg’s testimony in her opinion.

Swedenburg, in a 2005 article titled “White Devil as Expert Witness,” described the nine-page expert report he put together for the case as “probably written with as much care and heavy editing as anything” he had done previously.

Still, he downplays the influence he had on the judge’s final decision.

After the ruling, “I thought, ‘Oh, this is precedent. They’ll just cite this precedent,’” Swedenburg said. But he learned that one New York case didn’t settle all the conflicts, and that some states fight more aggressively than others in the courtroom.

Law enforcement groups have frequently categorized Five Percenters as involved with crimes like drug dealing. At the recent Virginia trial, one prison official introduced himself to Swedenburg to impress on him the seriousness of security concerns involving the group.

“The fact that some people use it as a cover for dealing drugs or violent activity, it doesn’t make me change my mind about what I know,” said Swedenburg.

win one, lose one

A 2009 order in a Michigan case relied heavily on Swedenburg’s expert report in siding with an inmate wanting to possess Five Percenters printed materials.

“First, in opining that [Nation of Gods and Earths] is a ‘religion,’ Dr. Swedenburg applies an objective, case-neutral definition of the term, and makes a persuasive comparison between the beliefs and practices of [Nation of Gods and Earths] and those of other heterodox religions,” wrote U.S. Magistrate Judge Steven Whalen.

He went on to address the topic of Nation of Gods and Earths adherents describing their beliefs as a “way of life.”

“The Nation also wants to assert its distinction from ‘religions’ which have been the cause of sectarian strife and conflict. From an anthropological point of view, this claim in no way negates the Nation’s essential religious character,” the judge’s order states, quoting directly from Swedenburg’s affidavit in the case.

However, the federal judge’s order in the Virginia case where Swedenburg testified didn’t address religion in siding with prison officials.

“After careful consideration of the evidence at trial, I do not find it necessary to determine whether [Nation of Gods and Earths] is in fact a bona fide religion,” wrote Judge James Jones of the U.S. Western District of Virginia.

Instead, he ruled in April that correction officials’ “policies and procedures pertaining to [Nation of Gods and Earths] at issue in this case are the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling state interest in prison safety.”

Howard Friedman, an emeritus professor of law with the University of Toledo, keeps tabs on similar prison religion cases for his blog.

“A lot of courts tend to give a lot of leeway to prison officials on security issues,” Friedman said. Each case calls into consideration its own set of facts, Friedman noted.

Swedenburg said he was disappointed by the Virginia ruling.

Over the years, cases have been filed by incarcerated Five Percenters in a variety of states. (In Arkansas, only one or two adherents are known to be in the state prison system, said Shea Wilson, spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Correction.)

More broadly, cases based on the same sorts of conflict include an Arkansas inmate seeking the right to wear a short beard in accordance with his Muslim beliefs, with state prison officials blocking it based on concerns that dangerous contraband could be hidden beneath the facial hair. The case will be heard by the U. S. Supreme Court in its next term, which begins Oct. 1.

Swedenburg’s main focus now is on writing a book about popular music in the Middle East. Asked if he would testify in a similar case if asked, Swedenburg said, “I think it’s a losing case if you just have me as your expert witness,” as he said he thought was what happened in the Virginia case.

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