Heavy Metal Islam (3 page)

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 soon after the guitars and bass locked into a groove.

What makes the experience of “Marhaba” relevant here is not merely the first night of recording, but all the complexities and interactions that followed during the two years it took to finish the song. How to blend 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 that had to be confronted. But more challenging were the technological and logistical issues that arose from moving back and forth among various recording systems in Beirut, Paris, Casablanca, and Los Angeles, and finding engineers and producers who would understand how to capture a sound that would honor the different styles in the song.

The lyrics to “Marhaba” 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 the United States (epitomized by the platinum-selling artist Outkast). They describe the numerous problems faced by his society, particularly the “many problems” that prevent the realization of any true democracy, before calling out, in true Gnawa style, to welcome the Sufi saint in the refrain.

What “Marhaba” was ultimately about, Reda reflected during a long night in the studio, was how collaborations such as the one we were engaged in could help forge what he described as a twenty-first-century “virtual agora”: a public space in which communication among musicians across different 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 crucial in an environment of political oppression, and it’s 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. As the webmaster of Morocco’s semi-outlawed Justice and Spirituality Association explained with a grin, “We’re still better than the government at the Web, so they haven’t been able to shut us down even after years of trying.” Equally important, 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 streetcorner 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 the 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 than that of their former (and, in a few cases, present) occupiers. These artists, secular and religious alike, are devoting their lives to creating an alternative system that builds an open and democratic culture from the ground up, against the interests of both the political, economic, and religious elites of their countries and, many believe, of the United States and other global powers as well.

Not everyone can be a fan of death metal or hardcore 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 the original MLK on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the pivotal moment of the civil rights era, inspiring an audience of tens or hundreds of thousands of idealistic young Muslims to dream of and work toward a hopeful and better future. But it’s not so far-fetched; I have seen the various forces in play, in safe houses in Casablanca, in Palestinian ghettos inside Israel, in basements in Tehran, in middle-class neighborhoods in Peshawar, and on stadium-sized festival stages in Dubai and Istanbul. They are growing stronger and more vocal with each passing year.

The real question is not whether such a group can come together, but whether it can reach a large enough audience, and find a big enough stage to play on, before the toxic combination of government oppression, media manipulation, economic restructuring, 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,
insha’Allah
(God willing), let’s hope that it will be the kids with the long hair and black T-shirts who’ll have the last laugh.

MOROCCO

When the Music Is Banned, the Real Satanism Will Begin

I
t’s not easy being a headbanger in Morocco. If it’s not the police arresting you for Satan worship, it’s your guitar being stolen at a performance for high-schoolers, a flash-in-the-pan all-girl thrash metal band stealing the attention of the foreign press, or the corporate sponsor of the festival you created replacing your silhouette with a cell phone as the official logo.

But some nights make it worth all the trouble. This was one of them. It was the opening night of the eighth annual Boulevard des jeunes musiciens, the Boulevard of Young Musicians Festival, in 2006. The Stade du COC—Club Olympique de Casablanca—normally a rugby stadium where the national team plays, was packed with upward of 20,000 metal fans. Backstage, located on the grounds of the adjoining tennis club, were musicians, journalists, the odd filmmaker, the entire Ugandan national rugby team, and a diverse crew of young, good-looking, and well-off Moroccans partying with great enthusiasm. It was definitely
l’événement
of the summer season.

Located a couple of kilometers from the sea, the Stade du COC sits in a border zone between several working- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods. To one side are rows of gated villas, some appearing to date back to the colonial era, with palm trees swaying in the sea breeze. If you walk just a block or two in the other direction, however, you’ll arrive at a busy commercial street and the edge of a less affluent, working-class neighborhood. Early each June, when the festival takes place, the kids from the working-class neighborhoods, joined by tens of thousands of fans from all over Casablanca, Morocco, and even Europe, invade the streets around the stadium, hanging out in front of people’s houses, drinking and smoking dope, and occasionally causing a bit of trouble.

Moroccans have coined a term for the kids who invade the Stade du COC each June:
khush pish
(or
bish
). The term is a Moroccan bastardization of the French phrase
les indigenes,
used to describe the native peoples of the countries colonized by France; it became popular in the 1990s to describe lower-class young people who engage in random acts of violence during soccer, other sporting events, and public gatherings. Their begging, harassment, and random attacks on middle-and upper-class Moroccans reflect the anger and nihilism that have driven extreme metal and rap since their emergence, and which are a major reason for their global popularity. This is no doubt why the
khush pish
turn out in force for the metal and hip-hop nights of the Boulevard, and become so rowdy during the shows.

Between the
khush pish
and their middle-class peers, bohemian artists and wannabes, and a sprinkling of hipsters and hippies from Europe, the atmosphere at the Boulevard is part Phish show and part NWA. And whether they come from Sidi Moumen or other slums of Casablanca, the wealthy Anfa neighborhood, or from Paris’s funky 11th arrondissement, the fans at the Boulevard clearly enjoy the chance to let loose in an otherwise relatively conservative city. Poorer kids in particular enjoy the few days of freedom to move, sometimes a bit menacingly, through neighborhoods in which they’re normally not allowed to congregate in large numbers. As one friend described it, the festival feels like a Moroccan Carnivale—one crazy enough that organizers have to hire French-trained security personnel to handle the crowds.

Mostly, however, the tens of thousands of people who flock to the Boulevard each year come to hear the music, which is so loud that it reverberates for many blocks outside the stadium. In fact, this year’s sound system was even louder than the year before, when a band I had just hooked up with, Reborn, worked the crowd into such a frenzy that the police almost had to stop the show. Word of last year’s musical theatrics had spread across the Mediterranean, and a decent contingent of foreign fans and reporters attended. They would not be disappointed: the bands at the festival, from headliners such as the groundbreaking Portuguese goth-metal band Moonspell and the American hip-hop pioneers De La Soul to local stars such as the rapper Bigg and the metal band Syncopea, were all in top form.

When I arrived at the stadium, Moonspell had finished its first song, and the crowd was going crazy. Their brand of goth metal is a fusion of the older styles of death and doom metal, often featuring fast riffs over low and slow grooves with growling, brutal vocals beneath. Lead singer Fernando Ribeiro barked the lyrics to the band’s first single, “Finisterra” (Latin for “end of the world”) as the crowd got sucked into the angry yet somehow still joyful spirit of Moonspell’s music. As the energy level of the crowd grew to match that of the band, I wondered how many people in the audience knew that Casablanca was destroyed by the Portuguese in 1468 (in response to attacks on Portuguese vessels by Moroccan pirates based in what was then the town of Anfa), only to be rebuilt, renamed Casa Branca, and ruled by Lisbon from 1515 until 1755.

The seventy-five-foot viewing screens on either side of the stage and the multiplex light system suited a headliner of Moonspell’s stature, while giving the local bands a welcome aura of rock stardom they hadn’t yet achieved. Syncopea’s music was a particularly fresh combination of progressive metal, funk, pop, and jazz. Both metalheads and those looking for a danceable groove were banging their heads with equal glee during their set, to songs that were at once strangely dissonant and harmonically rich. It became a little more difficult to party with abandon, however, if you actually listened to the words that lead singer Badreddine Otky, his close-cropped hair and goatee dripping with sweat, was screaming: “A world so fucking insane, injustice, abortion, and pain…a life so fucking disturbed and I can’t avoid all this pain. Genocide, intolerable agony, politics, and wars”—the images upon which most good death-metal songs are built.