This dissertation is an interdisciplinary project that investigates the relationship between race, music, place, and the body in the religious self-making of young American Muslims. Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic research with black, Pakistani and Palestinian American Muslim youth leaders in arts-based social activism in Chicago, Illinois, I trace the role of hip hop in the construction of Muslim cool. As a way of thinking about and being an American Muslim, I argue that through Muslim Cool these multiethnic American Muslims configure a religious identity that engages the boundaries of race and class and/in the broader project of American Islam. I argue that the religious practice of these young Chicago Muslim activists is informed by hip hop’s preoccupations with race and place, and, as a result, establishing connections to specific notions of blackness and the ‘hood become important techniques in configuring a sense of American Muslim identity. These techniques are located in the everyday performance of self, including how, by way of style and activism, the body is a site of American Muslim self-making. My project moves race from the periphery of the discourse on American Islam to the center, by identifying the ways that blackness plays a key role in Muslim identity and practice. Furthermore, my project theorizes hip hop as an epistemology that shapes the practices, sensibilities, and subjectivities of everyday life.