Becoming Wise is supported by the Fetzer Institute.

I've had hundreds of big conversations, and my conversation partners share wisdom I carry with me wherever I go.

Raminash Ashibi fills me with hope about how art can make humans visible to each

other. He brings a new energy to Islam's core commitment to beauty and humanity and to the power

of stories to heal and electrify us across geography and generation, culture, and faith. He founded the Inner City Muslim Action Network on Chicago's South Side,

where he also lives with his family.

This is Becoming Wise. I'm Krista Tippett.

Music wise. I'm Krista Tippett. Talk to me about how you bring the arts into what you do.

I mean, like, here's one of the big defining sentences on your website that

iman works for social justice delivers a range of social services and cultivates the arts in urban communities.

So I want to hear a little bit about how spiritually and practically the arts and justice work together for you?

Well, you know, for me, that tradition, and while now we host artists from the subcontinent

who are performing Kowali alongside an opera singer, along a spoken word poet, alongside a traditional

hip-hop artists, a lot of that honestly started with hip hop.

You're really critical of people who condemn hip hop as part of the decay of culture.

Oh, absolutely.

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah, I mean, because I think hip hop's origins have been extraordinary,

and I think hip hop,

and that's because there is an aspect of hip hop culture that was extraordinary in bringing together

the most disconnected, the most marginalized and disempowered sectors of urban young people, both in

the Bronx and then in other urban centers, and found just extraordinarily

...