This was posted to another list I follow, and I found it fascinating. I
suspect Cheeni and Chris Kelty (among various others) will have more to
say on this.
Udhay
http://chronicle. com/weekly/ v54/i43/43b00801 .htm
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Muslim Metal
Bands crank up multiculturalism in the Islamic world
By MARK LEVINE
The first time I heard the words "heavy metal" and "Islam" in the
same sentence, I was confused, to say the least. It was around 5 p.m. on
a hot July day in the city of Fez, Morocco. I was at the bar of a
five-star hotel with a group of friends having a drink — at $25 a piece,
only one — to celebrate a birthday. The person sitting across from me
described a punk performance he had seen in Rabat not long before we had
met.
The idea of a young Moroccan with a Mohawk and a Scottish kilt
almost caused me to spill my drink.
That the possibility of a Muslim heavy-metal scene came as a total
surprise to me only underscored how much I still had to learn about
Morocco, and the Muslim world more broadly, even after a dozen years
studying it, and traveling and living across it. If there could be such
a thing as a heavy-metal Islam, I thought, then perhaps the future was
far brighter than most observers of the Muslim world imagined less than
a year after September 11, 2001.
I shouldn't have been surprised. Muslim history is full of
characters and movements that seemed far out of the mainstream in their
day but that nevertheless helped bring about far-reaching changes in
their societies. As I nursed my drink, I contemplated the various
musical, cultural, and political permutations that could be produced by
combining Islam and hard rock. I began to wonder: What could Muslim
metal artists and their fans teach us about the state of Islam today?
Their imagination, openness to the world, and the courage of their
convictions remind us that Muslim as well as Western cultures are more
heterogeneous, complex, and ultimately alike than the peddlers of the
clash of civilizations, the war on terror, and unending jihad would have
us believe. It might seem counterintuitive to Americans, whose image of
Islam and the contemporary Muslim world come largely from the Fox or CNN
cable channels, but an 18-year-old from Casablanca who loves hip-hop or
a 20-year-old from Dubai with spiked hair are as representative of the
world of Islam today as the Muslims who look and act the way we expect
them to. They can be just as radical, if not more so, in their religious
beliefs and politics as their peers who spend their days in the mosque,
madrassa, or even Al Qaeda training camp.
The University of Chicago music professor Philip Bohlman argues
that music's impact extends far beyond the cultural realm for two
reasons. First, because more than any other cultural product, music
reflects, even amplifies, the larger social, political, and economic
dynamics of a society. Second, because political and economic power
inevitably have "an aesthetic property" that mobilizes listeners into
action. The same music can be amplified in very different ways: Heavy
metal and hard-core rap are blasted by soldiers going into battle, and
bombarded at prisoners as part of "enhanced interrogation. " But when
the metal or rap is played by young people trying to resist and even
transcend oppressive governments or societies, its power and potential
are much more positive, reverberating afar.
Ever since 9/11, strategists and commentators on the Middle East
have become obsessed with Islam's demographics; namely, that young
people constitute a far higher percentage of the Muslim world's
population in the Middle East and North Africa — upward of 65 percent,
depending on the age bracket and country — than in any other region of
the world. These teenagers, twentysomethings, and thirtysomethings are
not just the future of Islam; they're ours as well. That's why it's so
important to listen to what young Muslims, and particularly those on the
cultural cutting edge, are playing and saying.
Indeed, if the wide variety of music listened to by young people
across the region is any indication, its future will be as diverse as
its rock scenes: mainstream and underground, religious and secular,
Sunni and Shiite, Christian and Jewish as well as Muslim. Governments in
the Middle East and North Africa are naturally wary of the political
potential of such hybrid cultural spaces and projects. They understand
as well as the region's metalheads and hip-hoppers that the presence of
heavy metal, other Euro-American forms of hard pop music, and other
forms of alternative culture can threaten the established order.
Talking to Muslim heavy-metal, rock, hip-hop, and even punk artists
and fans, listening to their music, and exploring their interactions
with their families, neighbors, and larger societies reveals the
Janus-faced nature of globalization. Globalization has long gotten a bad
rap in the Muslim world, and among many citizens of the West as well.
The reality is much more ambiguous: It's true that globalization has
reinforced the economic and political marginalization of most of the
Middle East and North Africa, generating various forms of negative,
resistance identities in response. But it also has enabled, in fact
encouraged, greater cultural openness, communication, and solidarity
across the region, and between Muslims and the West.
Nowhere is globalization' s positive potential more evident than in
the media and popular culture of the region today. Globalization may
have brought Baywatch, late-night German soft-core porn, and Britney
Spears to the Middle East; but it also brought Al-Jazeera, Iron Maiden,
and Tupac Shakur. If the region functions as the primary global source
of petroleum, arms purchases, and jihadis, it is also home to some of
the most innovative cultural products and political discourses of the
global era. And most of the people I've met are as discriminating in
what they pick and choose from the innumerable cultural and political
choices offered by globalization as the average American. In fact, they
are often more open to new ideas or products that challenge their
identities and sensibilities. They have to be; the cultural and
political chauvinism that has been the source of so much of America's
troubles since 9/11 is not a luxury they can afford.
Metalheads and rappers were among the first Middle Eastern
communities to plug into the globalized cultural networks that emerged
in the late 1980s. From the start, some have been fanatical about
replicating the sound and styles of the American and European
progenitors of metal or rap. Others gleefully violate the boundaries
separating the global from the local, the religiously appropriate from
the secularly profane, the exotic from the mundane, and the hip from
what those in the know deride as hopelessly outdated.
Cultural sophistication and musical innovation are not traits
normally associated with heavy metal. Indeed, say "heavy metal" to the
average American or European, and you are likely to conjure up an image
of slightly deranged-looking white guys with long, crimped blond hair
and leather outfits, whose primary talents are sleeping with underage
girls and destroying hotel rooms. Certainly there were plenty of bands
like that, especially in the inglorious days of 1980s glam metal. But to
define a genre as rich and varied as heavy metal by its MTV-lite version
is equivalent to defining 1.5 billion Muslims by a few thousand turban-
and djellaba-wearing jihadis running around Pakistan's North-West
Frontier Province hunting infidels and apostates. Both have given their
respective cultures a very bad name, and deservedly so. But each
constitutes only a small minority of believers.
The term "heavy metal" was coined in an early 1970s Rolling Stone
interview by Alice Cooper, the patron saint of extreme rock. Metal was
influenced by a range of musical styles, from the counterpoint of Johann
Sebastian Bach and the modern classical repertoire he helped to create
to the riff-driven, often equally virtuosic blues rock of Led Zeppelin,
Cream, Jimi Hendrix, and Deep Purple. But if there's one band that is
most responsible for the sound of heavy metal, it's Black Sabbath. In
the early 1970s, Sabbath produced a series of albums that literally
defined a new genre. The band's combination of relatively slow tempos,
heavily distorted guitar riffs in various minor modes, halftone and even
tritone modulations (known since the Renaissance as the diabolus in
musica because of the immoral, even lustful feelings it was thought to
encourage), and morbid, death-inspired lyrics spoke to disaffected
American and European youth. As guitarist Tony Iommi said about the
blighted working-class landscape of his youth, "It made [the music] more
mean."
By 1975 a new style of metal emerged, dubbed the New Wave of
British Heavy Metal. Led by bands like Judas Priest, Motorhead, Venom,
and Iron Maiden, the genre was distinguished by the increased speed and
musical complexity of the songs, and also by an explicitly working-class
image that fitted the painful process of deindustrialization and
economic adjustment experienced by working-class communities in Britain
and the United States in the mid-to late 1970s. Some of the bands,
particularly Def Leppard, played up their sexuality, starting a trend
that would become central to 1980s glam or hair metal.
When you hang out with metalheads in Casablanca or Lahore, however,
you'll rarely hear names like Motley Crüe, Warrant, Poison, or other MTV
hair-metal icons. Instead, bands like Metallica, Slayer, Deicide,
Cannibal Corpse, Possessed, Angel, and other American and Scandinavian
inheritors of British metal's New Wave captured the ears and
imaginations of musicians and fans alike. Those bands created a style of
music that was faster and far more intense, powerful, distorted, and
technically difficult than any form of rock 'n' roll before it. Their
music arrived in the region via flight attendants who spent their
layovers trolling alternative- record shops, expats home for visits from
the United States or Europe, local record stores that sold illegal music
under the counter, and the occasional courageous radio DJ.
Together, death metal and its sister subgenres of black metal
(which in contrast to death metal features screamed rather than growled
vocals and often deals with explicitly Satanic themes), goth, doom,
grind, grind-core, progressive, and ultimately nu-metal reshaped the
musical landscape of the Middle East and North Africa. Uniting all those
genres was the discipline it took to play them correctly at super-fast
tempos, and the violent, war-laden themes that dominated their lyrics.
As one Israeli black-metal artist put it, "You play black metal like a
warrior." Many bands, most notably Iron Maiden, designed their album
covers and stage shows around the warrior image, although their warriors
looked more like orks from The Lord of the Rings than the clean-shaven
and telegenic young soldiers appearing in commercials for the U.S. armed
forces.
Indeed, the warrior allusion is a bit ironic, since with the
exception of Satanic metal, most of the violence in heavy metal is
depicted as part of a critique of the violence of society at large,
especially its warlike propensities. It might be hard to imagine when
watching Ozzy Osbourne stumble around semi-incoherently in his pajamas
on his MTV reality show, but in its early days his band Black Sabbath
could be a very political band, exemplified by its seminal song "War
Pigs," which railed against "Generals gathered in their masses/just like
witches at black masses."
Today the aggressive nature of extreme rock and rap have won fans
across the Middle East and North Africa, where young people are facing
economic conditions not very different from those endured by their
counterparts in America and Britain a generation or two ago — except
that they have the added burden of facing political oppression. Against
both, the metal and rap fans are converting their musical communities
into spaces where they can carve out a bit of autonomy, if not freedom,
within which they can imagine alternatives to the status quo.
Metal or hip-hop musicians are at the center of the anxieties and
hopes of what could be called "Islam's generations X through Next":
Muslims in their teenage years through their late 30s. As a percentage
of the population of most Muslim countries, that demographic,
particularly its younger members, is close to twice as large as its
counterparts in the United States or Europe. Its musicians tend to be
more educated, informed, and socially active than their Western
counterparts.
During the last decade of traveling across the Muslim world, I have
met musicians, activists, scholars, Islamists, and ordinary people in
more than a dozen countries, including Morocco, Egypt, Israel,
Palestine, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, countries in the Persian Gulf,
and Pakistan. That is a wide swath, home to upward of 500 million
people; but that's still only a third of the Muslim world. Muslim metal,
hip-hop, and other forms of pop music continue all the way to Indonesia.
Like heavy metal, hip-hop, and other macho forms of music in the
West, in the Muslim world these genres tend to be dominated by men,
whether musicians or fans. The problem is so acute that the brochure for
a 2006 rock and hip-hop festival in Morocco included an open letter from
one of the female organizers titled "Girls Wanted." But as one female
artist lamented to me, as long as it's considered immoral, or at least
unsafe, for young women to go out on their own to concerts, let alone to
be on the stage playing "Satanic music," it will be men who make up the
majority of metal musicians and fans in the Muslim world.
Extreme-music scenes also reveal a thriving secular Islam. Contrary
to what most Westerners and conservative Muslims think, there are plenty
of secular Muslims, even in Saudi Arabia and Iran. Some are in fact
atheists, or at least agnostic. Most, however, prefer to separate their
religious beliefs from their music or their politics; a few use their
music to deepen their personal faith (as opposed to a Christian metal
artist who uses the music to evangelize publicly). All consider
themselves no-less-legitimate members of their faith than do secular
American Jews or British Anglicans.
As important, those who identify themselves as religious are often
followers of various Sufi, or mystical, forms of Islam. Their style of
faith and practice goes against the grain of the Saudi-inspired orthodox
vision of Islam that, thanks to decades of missionizing by
ultraconservative Saudis made possible by the kingdom's vast post-1973
oil wealth, is assumed by most non-Muslims to have always defined the
religion. In fact, however, until the last 40 years or so, Sufism was
the Islam of the vast majority of the world's Muslims, including in
Taliban-controlled northwest Pakistan, and in Afghanistan.
All that still leaves the question of why heavy metal has become
increasingly popular in the Muslim world — popular enough so that the
Moroccan government, which has cracked down on homegrown metalheads,
sponsored a metal festival organized by American evangelical Christians
with ties to the Bush administration. (Lots of kids came; hardly anyone
understood or paid much attention to the evangelizing lyrics.) The
answer is quite simple. As one of the founders of the Moroccan metal
scene, Reda Zine, explained to me, "We play heavy metal because our
lives are heavy metal." That is, the various aesthetic qualities of
heavy metal — its harshness, angry tone, and lyrical content — are
embedded within the quality of life in contemporary Muslim societies.
Even for well-educated and relatively prosperous Moroccans, the level of
corruption, government repression, economic stagnation, and intolerance
makes it extremely hard to imagine a positive future.
The metal life is not limited just to metalheads. Young people who
don't like metal can still do metal, as I learned when I brought Reda
together at a conference with a young Shiite sheik from Baghdad, Sheik
Anwar al-Ethari (known to his people as the "Elastic Sheik" because of
his willingness to blend Western and Muslim ideas and practices). After
listening to Reda describe why he plays metal, Anwar responded: "I don't
like heavy metal. Not because it's irreligious or against Islam, but
because I prefer other styles of music. But you know what? When we get
together and pray loudly, with the drums beating fiercely, chanting and
pumping our arms in the air, we're doing heavy metal too." In other
words, whether chanting for Ozzy, Osama, or Moktada al-Sadr, youth
culture is crucial to the larger identity formation and debates within
the Muslim world.
Figuring out how to categorize the relationship to orthodox Islam
of the two forms of metal — playing and praying — can be hard work. The
same problem is faced by metalheads, who, in addition to being arrested,
jailed, and even tortured for being "Satan worshipers," have become the
butt of national jokes and a foil for comedians, preachers, and
talk-show hosts looking to assure mainstream Muslims of their moral and
cultural superiority.
The variety of voices in Middle Eastern metal, rock, and rap, as
well as the difficulties and rewards of bringing them together, became
apparent when I wrote and recorded a song titled "Marhaba," with Reda
Zine, at the Beirut studio of Moe Hamzeh, lead singer of the Lebanese
hard-rock band the Kordz. The song, whose title means "welcome" in
Arabic, blends together hard-rock and funk guitar riffs with a Gnawa
(Moroccan blues-style Sufi music) bass line and vocals,
Lebanese-inflected melodies, and a hip-hop beat.
"Marhaba" was written only a few hours after Reda and I had met
Moe, on the first night of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. After a day
of fasting, Reda was clearly inspired as he began playing his gimbri (a
traditional Moroccan fretless instrument similar to, but tonally lower
than, a guitar), over which his bandmate Amine Hamma and I started
jamming on guitars. Amine played the supposedly Western-style funk line,
and I added an Arabized melody. Sitting at his dual-hard-drive Power Mac
G5, Moe came up with a drum track that mixed hip-hop and a bit of Arab
percussion.
It took two years to finish the song. Blending together the subtle
but important differences in intonation, melody, and rhythm between
North African and Middle Eastern music, not to mention the significant
difference between the Arabic of the two regions, was the first issue.
But more challenging were the technological and logistical issues:
moving back and forth among various recording systems in Beirut, Paris,
Casablanca, and Los Angeles, finding engineers and producers who could
capture a sound that blended styles in the song.
"Marhaba's" lyrics are equally as important. In essence, it is a
deeply religious song, calling out to welcome a Sufi saint into the
presence of the gathered devotees. Yet Reda's lyrics are also quite
political. Mixing Moroccan Arabic, French, and a smattering of English,
recorded in a half-sung, half-rapped style that has come to define
Southern rap in America, they describe the numerous problems faced by
Reda's society, particularly those that prevent any true democracy,
before calling out to welcome the Sufi saint in the refrain.
What "Marhaba" is ultimately about, Reda reflected during a long
night in the studio, is how collaborations such as the one we were
engaged in can help forge what he describes as a 21st-century "virtual
agora," or public sphere, in which communication among musicians across
cultures, whether in the studio, on stage, or through the Internet,
becomes a model for communication and cooperation in situations where
creating a physical agora, of the kind that was the cornerstone of
ancient Greek democracy, isn't possible.
Such an agora is not just a concern for musicians. Egyptian
bloggers and Moroccan religious activists alike have become expert at
using the Web to disseminate information, precisely because governments
block other channels of communication. The kind of globalized agora that
needs no permanent, physical location to prosper is an antidote to the
"seduction by Internet" that has become the preferred modus operandi for
jihadi groups seeking to exploit impressionable young Muslims, for whom
"hanging around the Internet" has become the equivalent of "hanging out
on the street corner" a generation ago.
The collaborative building of an agora addresses one of the most
important issues facing the Muslim world today — an acute sense of
humiliation that is strong enough to turn young Muslims, in the West as
well as in the Muslim-majority world, into extremists and even
terrorists. The Moroccan scholar and activist Mahdi Elmandjra coined the
term humiliocratie to describe the continued sense of powerlessness and
institutionalized "daily humiliation" felt by so many Muslims at the
hands of the West, and the United States in particular. For Muslim rock
and rap artists and activists, the treatment they receive at the hands
of their governments and from many members of their societies adds
another layer of humiliation, whose sting is often worse.
Not everyone can be a fan of death metal or hard-core rap. But
appreciating how the people who are dancing, rapping, playing, and
praying at the seeming edges of their cultures are transforming Islam
and the Muslim world points us toward a deeper understanding of the
past, present, and future of Islam. It might be hard to imagine a Muslim
Martin Luther King Jr. sharing the stage with a Middle Eastern Ozzy
Osbourne — the way Bob Dylan and Joan Baez joined King on the steps of
the Lincoln Memorial at the pivotal moment of the civil-rights era — and
inspiring an audience of idealistic young Muslims to dream of and work
toward a hopeful and better future. But it's not so far-fetched.
The real question is whether they can reach a large enough
audience, and find a big enough stage to play on, before the toxic
combination of government oppression, media manipulation, and violence,
intolerance, and war drown out the rowdy, liberating new soundtrack of
the Muslim world in a sea of hatred and blood.
In the end, inshallah (God willing), it will be the kids with the
long hair and black T-shirts who'll have the last laugh.
Mark LeVine is a professor of Middle Eastern history at the
University of California at Irvine. This essay is adapted from his book
Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of
Islam, published this month by Three Rivers Press. Copyright 2008 by
Mark LeVine.
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((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
