His brother and friends were murdered. Now he only sings to remember them

In Islamic traditions, Dunya is this place, the temporal world. Its Koranic reading contains multitudes, but put simply it says earthly life is fleeting, desire is trivial and only God is eternal. The Canadian-Sudanese poet and folk singer Mustafa Ahmed named his new album Dunya too – after the plane of existence too many of his loved ones have left.

“I honestly don’t think I have any desire to sing about anything else. In my lifetime I won’t be able to arrive at a perfect account of any of the deaths I’ve experienced, and I want to give myself a fair shot of crystallising some of these memories,” says Ahmed, who at just 28 has lost more people to gun violence than most Australians could fathom. “That might take my entire life, and probably more.”

Ahmed’s older sister Namarig introduced him to poetry. You can watch him recite online, age 12: “I’m here/To raise awareness/For those who care/About the injustices/Everywhere”. He’s in Toronto’s Regent Park, where he grew up – a working-class neighbourhood of deep community ties nonetheless inflicted with violence seeded by poverty and marginalisation.

He came to prominence in the hip-hop collective Halal Gang, formed in 2014, two days before their friend Yusuf “Ano” Ali, 18, was shot and killed. In 2016 another friend, Julian “Santana” Weekes, was shot dead at 28; in 2017 Ali “NSK” Rizeig, 18, was also shot dead. In 2018 Ahmed’s fellow Halal Gang member, the rapper Jahvante “Smoke Dawg” Smart, 21, and the hip-hop industry manager Ernest “Koba Prime” Modekwe, 28, were murdered in a shooting outside a Toronto nightclub.

Ahmed’s first album, When Smoke Rises, released after Smart’s death, won a Juno Award; and he has written for the Weeknd, Camila Cabello and Justin Bieber. But awards and adulation are noise in the face of profound loss and public scrutiny. The Canadian tabloid press shamelessly exploited the deaths.

Ahmed, a devout Muslim, needed respite from claustrophobic Western cities. He was born in Canada to Sudanese parents belonging to the Nubian ethnic group indigenous to northern Sudan and southern Egypt, where he decamped in 2021 to reconnect with family, envelop himself in faith and begin writing Dunya. One of the first tracks written, I’ll Go Anywhere, interpolates a childhood melody sung by his parents and features a lush oud arrangement.

“I wanted to go to another world where I was made anew, where everything that I explored felt like the beginning again. Everything that I looked at, everywhere that I turned, it felt like someone’s world was ending,” Ahmed says. “Egypt appeared to me as a place where I might hear the call to prayer sifting through the streets at 5am. When I was a child I would only ever hear it in my living room.”

Egypt gave Ahmed distance from traumatic geography, space to practise his faith and start rebuilding. Previously indigestible books on grieving he’d been given began making sense. “It begs the question: what use is all this theorisation on mourning, on violence, on the toll it takes on our bodies, when you are in the midst of the very war that caused it?” he says.

Dunya follows Mustafa’s acclaimed 2021 breakout When Smoke Rises.Credit:

Dunya is a continuation of Ahmed’s grieving process, but also contains a heart-rending premonition: “Make sure they bury me next to my brother,” he sings on Leaving Toronto.

“[Because] every kind of person, every kind of innocence, every kind of culprit has succumbed to this violence; I knew that my brother could as well,” Ahmed says. “When I was writing, the music was no longer about the people that I lost, [rather] my paranoia around the people that I felt I was going to lose.”

Last year, following the album’s recording, Ahmed’s older brother Mohamed was shot dead in his car, aged just 36. The Toronto Sun tabloid painted the crime in the grisly strokes of mafia dramas and labelled him a “rapper” – weaponising his art against him through pejorative inaccuracy.

“Whose lord are you naming/When you start to break things?/It’s my only life you hold,” he sings on the album’s staggeringly beautiful opening track Name of God.

“They used language to demonise him, to make him feel as though he’s not deserving of mourning,” Ahmed says. “That kind of unjust and insincere journalism is an oblivion of its own, but it’s a reminder to me of the responsibility to humanise all of the people that I’ve known my entire life, including my own brother.”

Muslims believe one’s time in Dunya should be spent pursuing closeness to God through prayer and good deeds, on the way to Akhirah, the afterlife. Ahmed has staged benefit concerts to raise funds for people displaced by the Palestinian genocide and Sudanese civil war – proceeds from the track Gaza Is Calling will, too – and his 2021 documentary short Remember Me, Toronto explored gun violence through the self-conceptions of Regent Park youth.

“Some days, my only concept of the Akhirah is justice, that it’s the only playing field where people will be held accountable. It helps energise a lot of my efforts here on the ground because I know that even if I don’t see justice in this life I’ll see it in the next one,” he says.

Faith and community have again guided Ahmed through his newest grief, for a brother to whom he’d only recently grown close. He tells me about burial rites and the Janazah funeral prayer; about how the deeds of the living extend the lives of the dead; and the mercy of belief. Ahmed’s life has been filled with tragedy, but from Dunya’s delicately strummed guitars and poetic verses rises the undeniable sensation of hope.

“That’s why the album is called Dunya,” he says. “As much as it’s a way to mention the material world, speak about its fleeting nature and its illusion, to me it’s also a liberating thing. Where my brother went, what my brother has passed through, is only a passageway to a life that is longer, to an actual infinity that we don’t have access to here.

“[Islam] helped contextualise my brother’s passing and every single death that I’ve ever experienced, in a way that I don’t think I would have been able to do otherwise.”

Mustafa’s Dunya is out now.

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