Sultan bin Fahad’s Supreme turns a jazz room into a beaded, two-dimensional stage, with a grand piano on the left, a five-piece drum kit facing it, and bass and horn sections set in the foreground. Each band section sits on an eight-pointed star, the Rub el-Hizb, a shape pulled from Islamic design. The work sits inside Blue Note, Bin Fahad’s exhibition at Leila Heller Gallery, where the artist traces a history that runs through music, faith, race, and the long habit of people making meaning outside official scripts.
Music, Faith, and the People Between
The exhibition spotlights an overlooked part of jazz history: its associations with Islam. At the center of Supreme, a circular design carries the words A Love Supreme, the title of John Coltrane’s 1965 album. Islamic faith and philosophy were known to have influenced the record. Its title was famously chanted at the end of the opening track, and many believe “Allah supreme” is being said in some repetitions. Coltrane was also surrounded by jazz musicians who had converted to Islam, and his first wife, Juanita Naima Grubbs, was Muslim.
Text runs along the borders of the work in beads, using a font that bears a passing, superficial resemblance to Arabic. The words read: “He went to Makkah a black Muslim and there he became only a Muslim.” The quote is by Betty Shabazz and refers to El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, better known as Malcolm X, during his visit to the Holy City in 1964. His pilgrimage marked his break away from the black separatist ideology of the Nation of Islam, embracing instead the inclusive nature of Sunni Islam. That shift, at least in the account presented here, sits less like a tidy conversion story than a reminder that identity, politics, and belief were all being fought over in public.
Coltrane attended a speech by Malcolm X at Birmingham University in the summer of 1964, just after Malcolm X performed Hajj in Makkah, and was reportedly “quite impressed” by the civil rights activist, according to a 1966 interview with the musician by historian Frank Kofsky. Bin Fahad said, “It started with a question. One of my friends was talking about jazz being linked with Islam. This was very interesting because I never thought about music and the religion going together. I asked my friend to elaborate, and we found the links going back to Africa.”
What the Archive Holds
Bin Fahad said he was particularly interested in how those influences merged with Islam in the US around the mid-20th century. He said the era was significant because the American Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum and many saw the faith as a communal and spiritual force that promoted equality against racism and white supremacy. “I researched and became quite familiar with jazz,” he said. “If you look at the famous concerts and songs, something interesting was happening. If you read the cover of A Love Supreme, for instance, you’d think a Muslim was writing those words.”
Bin Fahad was referring to the poem that Coltrane included in the sleeve notes of the 1965 album. The poem includes lines such as “He is gracious and merciful,” which can be considered a translation of Ar-Rahman and Ar-Raheem, two of Allah’s names. Bin Fahad said, “Coltrane never converted to Islam but he was an admirer. I think if he had more time, if he didn’t die suddenly, he would have converted.”
Many others did convert. Those figures included Yusef Lateef, Art Blakey and Ahmed Abdul-Malik, all of whom are depicted in oil paintings shown in Blue Note. Bin Fahad’s signature touch abstracts their facial features, giving them a larger-than-life quality. The artworks, oil paintings and beads-on-canvas alike, all obliquely refer to the historical connections between jazz and Islam. The point isn’t a state-approved lesson. It’s a record of people building culture, identity, and solidarity through their own networks, while official histories usually arrive late and polished.
Bin Fahad said, “I wanted to tell a story. My medium is really storytelling. It starts with a spark, during a conversation or when I learn something new. I don’t pretend to be teaching but I am sharing a piece of knowledge that I came across through art.” That’s the whole trick, really: knowledge moving sideways, not down from some authority with a seal and a podium.
The Room of Documents
An installation featured within Blue Note is more explicit in these links. The room is built on one side of the exhibition and brings together materials that Bin Fahad researched while producing these works. Records by Dizzy Gillespie, Blakey and Coltrane line the shelves, alongside books on jazz and the Civil Rights Movement. The arrangement reads like a small archive assembled by hand, not a grand institution pretending to own the story.
Also featured is the six-page letter Malcolm X sent to a friend from prison in 1950. “As Salaam Alaikum, your brother, Malcolm X,” it reads at the end, marking the first time the activist signed his last name with the letter X to represent his lost ancestral African family name. The letter is also considered one of the first times that Malcolm X announced his conversion to Islam. In it, he writes about the faith’s spiritual power: “My brother, Allah is most beneficent,” he writes, “it is so good to have life, and to know that death has been conquered. We have been in darkness for so long, stumbling blindly along, wondering why this and why that, knowing something was wrong, but not knowing what.”
He also expresses his fondness for jazz. “Music, brother, is ours,” he writes. “It is us and like us it is always here, surrounding us, like the infinite particles that make up life, it cannot be seen, but can only be felt. Like Life!” Blue Note is running at Leila Heller Gallery until September 13. The exhibition doesn’t hand out easy answers. It shows how artists, musicians, and activists made their own meanings under pressure, and how those meanings kept slipping past the people who like to manage culture from above.