'I did question God': How Mustafa kept his faith through devastating loss
The first time Mustafa sat down with Q 's Tom Power in 2022, he had just won a Juno Award for his critically acclaimed EP, When Smoke Rises, which chronicled his grief over losing friends and loved ones from his community of Regent Park in Toronto.
In that conversation, the multidisciplinary artist (formerly known as Mustafa the Poet) told Power he was looking forward to exploring new themes on his next record. But then, in 2023, his older brother was shot and killed — and grief found its way back into his music once again.
"The themes of grief are so redundant, not only in the recording of my first record, but in my life in general: in every conversation, every text message, every meeting, every gathering," Mustafa says in a new interview about his latest album, Dunya.
"When my brother passed, when he was killed, it was impossible for me to look outside of that and explore a different thing, because I'd be doing a disservice to the year and to the memory. And so the record was rearranged after his passing because I had to be true to what these years were."
WATCH | Mustafa's full interview with Tom Power:
Now based in Los Angeles, Mustafa says he no longer feels safe in Toronto, despite his enduring love for the city and his desire to be connected to it.
"I can't walk in Toronto," he tells Power. "Not because I'm famous and people are going to chase me down … it's just that I'm not safe in this city, you know? And I think saying it in such a naked way, it even makes me uncomfortable because it's taboo. It is taboo amongst my dogs and amongst the people in the hood to even question our own safety because so much of our life was about protecting ourselves and relying on each other to be safe."
There are people in this city that don't want to see me live. - Mustafa
Regent Park, as Mustafa puts it, is a "community that's deeply complicated." He estimates that he's lost at least 20 friends to gun violence, including his brother. He says only two of those murders resulted in convictions.
"There are people in this city that don't want to see me live," Mustafa says. "If I was still in the arms of Regent Park and in the arms of Toronto, then maybe … I'd be carrying the same kind of rage that some of my boys and boys from other communities carry. I think I'm growing more and more and more empathy for boys from all of these communities."
WATCH | Official video for Leaving Toronto:
To confront his feelings of resentment and anger, Mustafa has leaned heavily on his faith to find forgiveness.
"Faith fluctuates and it's a thing that is acknowledged in Islam: that you're always having to revive your spirit as a believer because it's being tried and it is being tested," he says. "It's only then that you understand your distance from God or your closeness to God. But I did question God and I questioned the kind of suffering that I was experiencing, especially in relation to murder. I just wanted to lose someone differently."
While Mustafa says forgiveness is "a universe on its own and there is no beauty like it," he maintains that he's not absolving any individual of accountability for the harm they've caused.
"I know all too well what happens when a body is washed, or when a case is opened like a casket and closed like one, when an investigator is attached to a family and you get the bureaucratic shrug in relation to a universe that you lost," he says.
Mustafa's debut album, Dunya, is out everywhere now.
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