Heavy Metal Islam (35 page)

The musical highlight of the evening occurred moments later, when we broke into a funk-blues jam we’d come up with earlier that day during our final rehearsal, and more than 25,000 fans began to jump up and down with the band in unison. The audience went so crazy that, for the only time during the festival (“Ever!” one of the organizers told me later), the stage manager had to grab a microphone in the middle of the song and scream at the crowd to move back or he’d stop the show.

Bass player Ali Sanaei had come up with the groove during a break in the run-through of our set. I was shocked to hear Ali play such a groove because I’d never before met a musician from the MENA who had an authentic feel for the soul and grooves of American blues or funk. (The same is true also for most heavy-metal musicians I’ve encountered; regardless of their country of origin, they rarely play blues or funk very well.) I pestered Ali about this fact, and finally he explained how he became the funkiest bass player in Iran, if not the entire world of heavy metal.

It turns out that under his extroverted, wild-man metal warrior exterior, Ali is completing a major in orchestral composition at one of Tehran’s prestigious conservatories. “I started with some jazz and blues and a little bit of funk and built my musicianship on that. Then I found metal, which I started playing because you can find the bloody roots of metal in the blues. The more I listened, the more I realized that the pentatonic scale that defines blues and rock is very close to the folk scales of northeastern Iran, where I grew up. The music just sounded so familiar, it was easy to play it as if it was my own.”

I smiled at Ali’s sense of connection to the blues, since the blues owes its origins in good measure to the melodies and rhythms brought to America by Muslim African slaves, which were in turn influenced by centuries of contact with the Islamic Middle East. In a small but powerful way, a historical and musical circle was completed when Ali fell in love with the blues, cut through centuries of musical accretions that had separated America’s roots music from its Islamic (among other) roots, and created a playing style that captured the essence of both.

“Music is so powerful because it can bring people close to each other,” he continued, “even if one person is from Afghanistan and another from Mars. It flies above the borders and finds its audience no matter how hard governments try to restrict it. That’s its magic. When I met all those people at Barisa, I found myself a tiny drop in the heart of an ocean.”

Ali’s metaphor called to mind Led Zeppelin’s “The Ocean”—like most metalheads in the MENA, Ali is a big Zeppelin fan—whose title refers to the band’s appreciation of the “ocean” of fans before whom they performed. The song’s lyrics, “Play for me, play for free, play a whole lot more…” sum up the attitude of most metalheads I know, for whom “DIY” (do it yourself ) has made a virtue out of necessity, and helped give the music cultural resonance far beyond its growing fan base. But the symbolism of the ocean also points us to something deeper than just the cultural power and aesthetic embeddedness of heavy metal: the religious sensibility of the heavy-metal experience, and that of other extreme forms of music, especially when performed live—whether in a basement in Tehran, in a dilapidated villa outside Cairo, or on the main stages in Casablanca, Istanbul, or Dubai.

Such twenty-first-century “happenings” hold the potential for transcending individual identities into communal solidarities, which, however tentative and insecure, are in marked contrast to the kind of violence-laden “self-annihilation” demanded of young people by the more extreme forms of Sunni and Shi’i Islam. In fact, seven hundred years before Led Zeppelin celebrated its communion with its ocean of fans, the twelfth-century Persian Sufi Farid ad-Din Attar and his more famous contemporary, Jalaluddin Rumi, wrote of the “ocean of the soul” that grounds human experience, and makes possible union with the rest of humanity and ultimately with God. As Rumi describes it: “Like the birds of the sea, men come from the ocean—the ocean of the soul…When the vessel [of the body] is broken…by the wave that comes from the soul…the vision comes back, and the union with Him.”

The heavy metal of the Muslim world is often quite angry; as Sheikh Anwar al-Ethari pointed out to me when I began this journey, that anger is what reminded him of the intense form of Shi’i practice of his native Iraq. But Ali’s point, like that of so many metalheads I’ve met, is that heavy metal is about a lot more than just anger and violence. The ocean is not always angry; the music can be positive and life-affirming. It reflects the attempts by young Muslims, Christians, and Jews across the MENA to create a positive and open “project identity,” as the sociologist Manuel Castells describes it, against the grain of the negative “resistance identities” that dominate the experience of Islam today for too many Muslims. And when that project identity takes on a political edge, as it has in Istanbul, and—at least for a moment—in Casablanca and Beirut, a new “Spring,” and perhaps even a velvet revolution, becomes possible to imagine.

Corleone to Baghdad?

Ali was describing the ocean as we drove along the ring road passing through Istanbul’s modern financial center, filled with modern skyscrapers and corporate offices, on our way back to the historic Ottoman heart of the city. As our driver careened through the traffic, I recalled Jimmy Page’s interpretation of the famously obscure cover of
Led Zeppelin IV:
“I used to spend a lot of time going to junk shops looking for things that other people might have missed. [One time] Robert was…with me…and found the picture of the old man with the sticks and suggested that we work it into our cover somehow. So we decided to contrast the modern skyscraper on the back with the old man with the sticks—you see the destruction of the old, and the new coming forward. Our hearts were as much in tune with the old ways as with what was happening, though we weren’t always in agreement with the new.”

Page’s attempts to achieve some kind of reconciliation between the old and the new while remaining more sympathetic to the past well summarizes the sentiment of most metalheads—in fact, most people—I’ve met in the MENA. It also sums up the reason for the popularity of the genre more broadly: the combination of anger and positivity that drive metal in the Muslim world is motivated by the larger struggles of the region’s peoples to reconcile a powerful past with a troubled present and an uncertain future.

The greatest obstacle to converting the anger expressed by heavy music, or religion, into a positive cultural and even political force is the violence that suffuses most societies of the Muslim world—whether it’s the “pinpoint violence” deployed by authoritarian governments to stifle dissent, or the wholesale violence of war, occupation, and terrorism. That’s why the message of festivals like Barisa Rock for Peace and Dubai Desert Rocks is so important. As DDR’s Jackie Wartanian describes it, “Fans come here from across the world and they form a community, and it reminds us that whatever governments might do, peace is possible.”

But violence is also powerfully seductive to young people who have little hope for changing their societies through politics, never mind music. Lebanese-French rapper Clotaire K described it this way: “The level of violence and racism against France’s blacks and Arabs is hard for an outsider to imagine. This is why some in today’s generation are becoming more violent in response. Remember [during the protests of 2005 and 2006], millions of peaceful marchers achieved nothing politically, but a week of rioting got the country’s, and the world’s, attention.”

The kind of limited violence described by Clotaire K has long been deployed by marginalized groups to force governments to listen to their complaints. The problem is that violence is by nature hard to limit or control; it often blows back on those who turn to it, regardless of the perceived justness of their cause. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Iraq, whose tiny metal scene was devastated by the post-occupation violence set off by groups who couldn’t imagine coming together to resist the occupation through nonviolent means. In fact, when the lead singer of the country’s only metal band, Acrassicauda, was interviewed for the documentary
Heavy Metal in Baghdad,
the first thing he did was hold up a copy of Iron Maiden’s
Death on the Road,
and say, “This is what life looks like here,” before explaining just how bad a life has become to make it resemble an Iron Maiden album cover. Sadly, the band members were living in exile in Syria when Iron Maiden made its triumphant debut in Dubai.

But it wasn’t the violence of Baghdad that I was thinking about as I struggled to stay awake at Attatürk Airport a few hours after the close of the Barisa Rock for Peace festival so as not to miss my flight home. Rather it was one of the rare moments of tranquillity during my travels in Iraq: a warm early-spring afternoon spent drinking tea in the courtyard of the Hiwar (Conversation) Café and art gallery with acclaimed “guerrilla filmmaker” Oday Rasheed, director of the prizewinning 2005
Underexposure,
the first movie filmed in Iraq after the fall of Saddam.

After experiencing a week of steadily increasing violence as the insurgency focused on central Baghdad, my conversation with Oday, who is also one of Iraq’s best hard-rock and blues guitarists, was a much-needed respite from the encroaching insanity around us. But I had no answer for him when he chided me gently for the cultural myopia of most Americans. “I know all your artists and cultural figures—Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane, F. Scott Fitzgerald. But I also know my culture—Oum Kalthoum, Farid al-Atrash, and Adonis. How many Americans even want to know my culture, let alone take the time to do so?”

I met up with Oday a year later when I invited him to Messina, Sicily, where he joined Reda Zine, Sheikh Anwar al-Ethari, Layla al-Zubaidi, and the Italian scholar of Islam Armando Salvatore, for the workshop on heavy metal and Islam that gave birth to this book. It turned out that Oday and I were both big fans of
The Godfather;
and we pledged not to leave Sicily without making a pilgrimage to Corleone, on the opposite side of the island, after the conference. As we took turns driving along the rugged, switchback-filled landscape of the SS118
superstrade
(in reality a two-lane road without a shoulder), we returned to our earlier conversation about the problems of cultural transmission between the Muslim world and the West. As we talked, thousands of years of history passed around us. Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Goths, Byzantines, Muslims, the Spanish, Bourbons: all had controlled Sicily at one time or another, and all had contributed to the richness and diversity that define the island’s unique culture. The imagery, and the history behind it, helped put the disaster of Iraq, and the Middle East more broadly, in perspective.

“I fell in love with blues, rock, and metal because it was a way of being against Saddam without being obviously political,” Oday admitted as we tried to find the little square through which the young Vito Andolini (and future Don Corleone) was smuggled inside a basket on a donkey. “You might get roughed up a bit because of your long hair or clothes, but you wouldn’t get shot or your parents tortured for being a metalhead or rock ’n’ roller.” No more, he explained.

“I am an Arab, a Muslim, and I lived under Saddam,” he told one interviewer when
Underexposure
came out. When the violence of the U.S. invasion and occupation was added into the mix, they become “reasons enough to put a wall around your thoughts, as in a prison.” But Oday was lucky; filmmaking and guitar playing gave him the means to break out of the prison in which most of his fellow Iraqis remain trapped.

The problem is, for every Oday Rasheed risking his life to capture the chaos of life in post-invasion Iraq, or Clotaire K using hip-hop to force French society to recognize the rights of its Muslim immigrants and their children, there’s a paranoid government willing to do what’s necessary to silence them, a superpower bent on invading their country to liberate them, a Rotana or Coca-Cola out to defang them in order to secure greater profits, or a fanatical religious leader trying to convert or kill them to further his cause—sometimes all at the same time. The stakes in this contest couldn’t be higher.

Luckily, the metalheads, hip-hoppers, rockers, and punks of the Middle East are no longer alone. They not only have each other; helped by the Internet and an increasing number of international festivals of various sizes, the world is starting to listen to their music and their stories. A real dialogue between cultures and countries is emerging, one that will not be cowed by authoritarian governments, silenced by war-crazed administrations, overshadowed by jihadi propagandists, or co-opted by multinational conglomerates. It is being conducted by young people around the world, on their terms, and if they’re lucky, it will be free of the stereotypes, prejudices, and conflicting interests that have doomed their elders’ conversations for generations.

As we ate dinner in a small restaurant on the road to Corleone, Oday, his partner Furat al-Jamil (a respected documentary filmmaker based in Germany), and I agreed that if Sicily could rise out of the ashes of centuries of occupation and from the powerful mafia culture it produced to become one of the most rapidly, yet sustainably, developing regions of Europe, then maybe there’s hope for the Middle East, and even Iraq. It’s a vision none of us wants to give up, even though every time I hear from Oday or Furat, it seems that another close friend or family member of theirs has been killed.