Napoleon Born: Outlawz Rapper Turned Faith Advocate

Mutah Wassin Shabazz Beale was born in New York City on October 11, 1977, though some sources give the date as October 26. He grew up in New Jersey in circumstances marked by violence from an early age: his mother was murdered when he was three years old. He was raised by relatives and found stability through music, eventually coming to the attention of Tupac Shakur, who took the fifteen-year-old into his inner circle and gave him the stage name Napoleon as a member of the Outlawz rap group. Beale appeared on two of the most significant albums in hip-hop history: All Eyez on Me and The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory. On September 7, 1996, he was traveling in the convoy of vehicles behind Shakur's BMW when gunfire struck the lead car at a Las Vegas intersection. Shakur died six days later. Beale was eighteen. He continued recording and performing with the Outlawz for nearly a decade, releasing multiple albums and maintaining the group's presence in a rap landscape that was rapidly changing around them. Then, in 2005, he converted to Islam, took the name Mutah Beale, stepped away from music, and moved to Saudi Arabia. He reinvented himself as an international speaker on faith, grief, and redemption, traveling to dozens of countries to address audiences about the violence he had witnessed and the spiritual transformation that followed. His trajectory from a child who lost his mother to murder, to a teenager in the orbit of one of rap's greatest figures, to a devout Muslim living abroad represents one of the most dramatic personal arcs in hip-hop history.