On Dunya, Mustafa wants to be remembered correctly

Mustafa's 2021 debut project, When Smoke Rises, is a collection of songs that immortalizes the lives of the friends he's lost to gang violence. The Juno-winning and Polaris Music Prize -shortlisted album is heavy with grief and pathos, heart-stirring folk music for a community whose stories hadn't been told in that way before.

Now, Mustafa's first full-length album, Dunya, finds him grappling with the aftermath of all that weight.

"The EP that I made was about death, [Dunya] is kind of about the world that's still living around me," the Toronto artist told CBC Music in an interview. 

Mustafa holds many contentious and contradicting feelings about that world, which he begins to explore on his moving and tender new album. He has painstakingly rendered his innermost insecurities, heartbreaks and dreams into song. Much of Dunya feels like a goodbye to a past self, as horizons expand around Mustafa and he reaches for refuge outside of his home city. 

Writing through turmoil

Mustafa grew up in Regent Park, one of the oldest public-housing neighbourhoods in North America. It has historically been home to many immigrant populations upon arrival in Canada, but its demographic makeup is shifting as gentrification sweeps through its streets. 

From a young age, Mustafa had a natural penchant for poetry, which led him to opportunities outside of Regent Park. (He was poet laureate of the 2015 Pan Am Games.) He began songwriting in his late teens, and under the wing of pop powerhouse Frank Dukes he ended up writing for artists including Majid Jordan, the Weeknd and Camila Cabello. 

While the credits rolled in and Mustafa's life shifted around him, the pervasive violence in his hood remained constant. As When Smoke Rises makes clear, the city has taken countless friends and loved ones from him, and more recently, his older brother Mohammed Ahmed, who was killed in 2023. "Toronto turned its back on my brother, it eventually led to the death of him," he said. 

Over the phone from London, Mustafa imagines a visual representation of what it felt like to write Dunya: his hands are full of many things, and everything keeps slipping through his fingers. "It's me trying to do everything in my power to uphold the world that's actively, kind of falling apart around me." 

Whether it was his friends, God, family or his ideas of love and connection — he felt them all slipping away.

"Dunya is me trying to etch it somewhere, so at least I have evidence that they were mine at some point." 

A different kind of folk

The new album mixes traditional American folk stylings with the sounds of Mustafa's homeland. Lilting guitar meets the Sudanese oud; straightforward piano melodies meet polyrhythmic Arabic chanting. The result is a bedrock upon which Mustafa can tell his own particular kind of folk tales, produced primarily by his frequent collaborator, Swedish producer and songwriter Simon Hessman.  

The album's first single, "Name of God," was released almost a year ago, in October 2023. It was an introduction to one of the questions Mustafa is asking now: what role does religion play in a life that has seen such grief?

The second song on the record, "What Happened, Mohammed?," is addressed to a former friend who became a rival amid the politics of the hood ("And I was right where you are/ but this hood tore us apart"). It's a sentiment that is echoed on "Old Life," the fourth single in the album rollout. 

"Leaving Toronto" is one of the most poignant and direct messages Mustafa shares on the record. The song simultaneously holds so much pain and love; his reverence for the city is clear, but so is his resentment. It was the only song on the album he was able to write in Toronto, while the rest of them were written in Egypt, Sweden, New York and London. Mustafa hasn't been based in Toronto for a few years, as reminders of what he's lost flood in when he's on home turf.

Still, I'm leaving Toronto 
If it ever lets me go 
And if they ever kill me 
Make sure they bury me next to my brother 
Make sure my killer has money for a lawyer.

"As fragmented as my childhood was, I loved Toronto at a point in time. It informs me when I move through the world," he said. "Now, I feel a particular disdain for the city, for the way that it's treated me, for how the policing system and the healthcare systems treated me and my family. For how often my brother tried to make a life for himself and how often Toronto turned its back on him."

"I grew up advocating for everybody, bro, like everybody in the hood," he continued. "I was at all the funerals. I was at all the crisis response meetings. And in the face of the most devastating murder of my life, I just wanted more from the city."

"Leaving Toronto," and the rest of the songs on the album, were written before his brother's passing, but Mustafa sees that as indicative of feelings that were simmering below the surface for a long time. 

Tight-knit collaborations

The seeds of Dunya took root in 2021, while Mustafa was in Egypt. He wrote "I'll Go Anywhere," the heart of the album, interpolating an Arabic melody his parents used to sing to him when he was young. The rest of the album was written and recorded by early 2023.

Many artists enjoy working with their friends, but for Mustafa it was imperative. He couldn't see himself sharing these songs with strangers.

"I never really had a desire to work with anyone that I didn't know," he said. "My manager had an idea about someone he thought would be perfect, and it wasn't even my ego as much as it was like, 'Man, these songs are so personal, I can't be working with people that don't know who I am.'"

So he enlisted the help of his longtime friend Daniel Caesar, who sings the harmonies on "Leaving Toronto," as well as Spanish pop singer Rosalía (back before they were friends, she was a champion of his breakout single "Stay Alive," and shared it with her millions of fans), who sings background vocals throughout the album and plays bass on "I'll Go Anywhere," and American singer-songwriter Clairo, who produced, plays piano, and sings on "Hope Is a Knife." 

Love and faith

Another overarching theme on Dunya is Mustafa's relationship with his faith, and how it has guided him through everything. The album opens with the aforementioned "Name of God," a song that questions how people use religion for absolution, and on "Imaan" he explores the differing ways people practice Islam. On "I'll Go Anywhere" he speaks directly to God, and on "What Good is a Heart?" he comes to terms with the fractures in his own faith. 

"[That] was one of the first songs that kind of captured so much of what I was believing, around my faith flailing," he said. "There's something about it that's also really hopeful to me. When I was writing it, I was able to dream up a way to discuss the hood or reimagine the hood that didn't feel so literal."  

The chorus asks: "What good is a heart that does not break?" It's an arrival for Mustafa, at the realization that as much as the hood has hardened him as a means of survival, he needed to let himself feel everything rather than repress. 

"In writing about God, I was writing about the entire world, the world that I was trying to escape, and then also the world I was running towards," he said.

There's an ample amount of love on this record, but when Mustafa sings about relationships, they're rarely romantic in nature. At an album listening session in Toronto on Sept. 6, he told the crowd his greatest love is "currently my relationship with my faith." Because of his circumstances, Mustafa's thoughts on God, the afterlife and where love goes when a life ends are what wander through his young mind more than romance.

"Much of my life has been a tussle with grief, loss and burial, and I had no other choice but to think about where my people were going, you know, beyond here. I just don't think that I was even emotionally equipped to have love in the way that other people have it."

Dunya feels both like a welcoming and a farewell, where Mustafa is opening himself to a deeper understanding of  his place in the world, but also closing himself to what has brought him pain for so long. It's not a simple feat to allow so much of yourself to be examined by the public but he does it because he feels called to. 

"I don't care about being forgotten. The more important thing for me is being remembered correctly," he explained.

Growing up, Mustafa never felt that he or his neighbourhood were properly represented in the media. And so, the onus is on him. He feels responsible to the families like his, who don't have the ears of millions of listeners, to tell their stories in all their multitudes. 

"I just want to make sure that, when you look back at a particular period, the period of our living or the period of our doom, that there is evidence of what it really was, from the authors themselves."