Heavy Metal Islam

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BOOK REVIEW (Los Angeles Times)

Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam

Frustration and rage fuel heavy metal across the Middle East and North Africa, where poverty, oppression and war are rampant.

By Steve Appleford, Special to The Times
July 17, 2008

TRUE believers are essential to rock 'n' roll. That's especially true in heavy metal, a sound fueled not just by raw aggression and noise, but by youthful feelings of frustration and rage, railing loudly against rules and authority. The greater the repression, the heavier the metal.

By that measure, any metal to emerge from the most restrictive regimes across the Middle East and North Africa should be the hardest rock of all, feeding off real poverty and oppression largely unknown to American rock fans. It is a landscape of war, dictatorship and uncertain democracy, where songs of horror and intolerance are reality-based, not fantasy. As one metalhead in Morocco told author Mark LeVine, "We play heavy metal because our lives are heavy metal."

LeVine is one of the truest believers of all, a passionate adherent of Afrobeat visionary Fela Kuti's declaration: "Music is the weapon of the future." A professor of Middle Eastern history at UC Irvine and sometime musician, LeVine documents some vibrant, if marginalized, hard rock scenes across the region in "Heavy Metal Islam," and comes away convinced of the "revolutionary potential of a bunch of kids."

In chapters devoted to Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan and Israel and the Palestinian territories, LeVine hears an explosive cry for freedom he argues could have a role in resolving the communication breakdown between ethnic groups, sects, generations and classes. Whether that outsized hope is realistic or misplaced, the music he found during five years of travel represents a stirring alternative voice for Muslim youth.

He describes an environment where rapid globalization has shaken identity and community, places such as Morocco where the rich live more lavishly than ever and young multitudes from slums of Casablanca and elsewhere have few places to turn beside the local mosque. That gap, writes Le- Vine, is the "caldron that produces both Morocco's metalheads and its extremists."

Heavy metal musicians in the Islamic world are not typical careerists but musical revolutionaries putting everything at risk for little payoff beyond dreams of free expression. The price has been high, writes LeVine. Morocco initially repressed the scene, convicting 14 metal fans in 2003 as Satanists recruiting "for an international cult of devil worship." In 1997, more than 100 players and fans were jailed in Egypt, where the grand mufti demanded they repent or be executed. (They were eventually released.) That same year in Iran, homes were raided and metal fans arrested.

Some struggles are internal. One young player from the Moroccan band Immortal Spirit was "wicked at soloing," but quit the band and turned "fanatic about religion," grew out his beard and no longer listens to music. The all-female Moroccan band Mystik Moods were screamed at by young men outraged by the idea of teenage girls playing metal. As one band member told LeVine, "It's not easy to be a girl on the metal scene, no matter what country you're living in."

LeVine compares the polite, soft-spoken manner of Islamists he meets to conservative Christians back in the U.S. And the crackdown on "Marockan roll" and other scenes shares some of the historic intolerance for the devil's music in America, where Beatles records were burned, shock-rockers arrested and songs banned from the airwaves. Young men in long hair and black T-shirts are proudly marginalized everywhere, but the stakes are far higher here.

In Egypt, where fans and musicians call themselves "metaliens," LeVine found young women in head scarves banging their heads to the blunt death metal attack of Hate Suffocation. The scene represents a rare corner of that country's society where religion is not central, and young bands are nurtured in garages, in basements, at private parties, while living freely and loudly online to be discovered by the rest of the world.

The book includes some striking scenes of politically charged hip-hop (the preferred musical language of Palestinian youth), but LeVine is most interested in loud guitars. His best chapter is on Iran, where there is no night life and women still can't be shown singing on TV. Western pop culture is privately craved as the volunteer force of basij morality police patrol the streets and government agencies judge bands on such infractions as "too many riffs on electrical guitar and excessive stage movements."

LeVine is not an especially vivid writer, and he tends to praise most of the music he presents, offering little critical context. But his material is rich, as he mingles scenes of conflict with surprising moments of understanding, such as the enthusiastic Arab following for the Israeli metal band Orphaned Land.

And while the sounds and scenes he finds are a fascinating social phenomenon, it's not likely a movement to shake the rigid foundations of Iran or Pakistan, any more than Bruce Springsteen could get John Kerry elected president in 2004. Its value is as culture and communication, not geopolitics.

Metal is slowly being embraced in some corners of the region. By 2006, the Boulevard of Young Musicians fest in Casablanca enjoyed the support of the Ministry of Culture and increasing corporate sponsorship from Nokia.

But when the sounds of the underground reach stages in front of 20,000 paying fans it's no longer just about outcasts and misfits. It has become a commercial enterprise, and any potential as political force will be left to the artists onstage to set free.

Steve Appleford is a journalist based in Los Angeles.

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Islamism and Heavy Metal

Today's post is a guest blog from Mark LeVine, Professor of Middle Eastern history, culture and Islamic Studies at UC Irvine and author, most recently, of Heavy Metal

Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam (Three Rivers Press/Random House)

By Mark Levine

Heavy metal has had a more powerful and controversial appeal than perhaps any other element of Western culture that has taken hold in the Muslim world. It might seem strange that a genre of music long associated with sex, drugs and even Satan worship should be popular in Muslim countries. But heavy metal can't be reduced to the "hair" or "glam" metal epitomized by one-time MTV staple bands such as Motley Crue or Quiet Riot. Instead, the much harsher sound of death, doom and other forms of extreme metal are winning a growing following across the Muslim world.

This is partly because the subjects these and other extreme metal bands deal with - death without meaning, the futility of violence, the corruption of power - correspond well to the issues confronting hundreds of millions of young Muslims today, the majority of whom live under authoritarian governments in societies torn by inequality, underdevelopment and various types of violent conflict.

As one of the founders of the Moroccan metal scene, the Sorbonne-educated Reda Zine, explained to me when I first met him: "We play heavy metal because our lives are heavy metal."

Middle Eastern metal isn't merely an outlet for youthful frustration. It offers fans a sense of community, "affirming life" through its seemingly morbid focus on death, creating a space outside of government control to express identities that don't conform to those sponsored or desired by undemocratic regimes and conservative religious establishments.

The characteristics that make metal increasingly popular across the Muslim world are the same qualities that have long made Islamist movements popular as well. And in a region with the world's highest percentage of young people (in many countries more than half of the population is under 25 years old) there is a huge constituency for the kind of community and solidarity that both metal and Islamist movements offer. In Morocco, for example, only two groups could bring 100,000 people into the streets: the rock band Hoba Hoba Spirit and the semi-illegal social-political religious organization, the Justice and Spirituality movement.

Certainly, the region's various religious movements have a far larger base of support than rock, metal, hip-hop or other forms of pop music, despite pop music's rapidly growing fan base. But with festivals in Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey and Dubai attracting tens of thousands of fans, and a growing list of music video channels catering to the youth demographic (Pakistan alone has upwards of a dozen 24-hour video channels), there's no doubt that rock music is playing an increasingly important role in shaping the identities and attitudes of young people around the Muslim world.

Historically, Islamists and metalheads have been on opposite ends of the political and cultural spectrum. Conservative religious establishments have supported and even encouraged crackdowns against the metal scenes in Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon and Iran. In Egypt's case, the Grand Mufti actually called for the death penalty for the hundred-plus metalheads arrested in 1997 in the region's first full-blown "Satanic metal affair," if the accused didn't repent from their "apostasy."

In fact, Middle Eastern metal was one of the first victims of such strategies of "repressive tolerance," as the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse labeled the phenomenon. The charges have been risible; evidence included Chicago Bulls caps (the bull horns were said to represent Satan) and ashtrays in the shape of pentagrams (in Morocco, no less, where the pentagram is on the nation's flag). But their impact was powerful. Indeed, musicians' reactions to the Satanic metal incidents tell us a lot about how deep the authoritarian culture is embedded in particular countries.

In Lebanon and Iran, however, such episodes did little to dampen the enthusiasm for metal. In Morocco fans actually fought back, staging mass protests, playing concerts in front of courthouses, and pressuring the government until the verdicts were overturned. Indeed, heavy metal is responsible for perhaps the Arab World's only successful civil protest movement in recent memory.

In recent years, most governments (with the exception of Iran and Saudi
Arabia) have grown more tolerant of their countries' metal scenes, although the price of greater freedom to play metal has often been a growing de-politicization of inherently subversive subcultures. Some governments even co-sponsor metal festivals (with an even bigger stake being taken by Arab and Western multinational corporations, who have equally little interest in encouraging dissent.) This is occurring at the same time that governments are intensifying crackdowns on other movements, particularly against young activists from Islamist groups such as Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood or Morocco's Justice and Spirituality movement.

Pitting two seemingly opposite poles of youth culture against each other is a time-tested strategy to divide and rule, but it's worked well in this case because the memory of religious support for the crackdowns against them is still fresh in the minds of most metalheads. Indeed, the few times I've managed to bring metalheads and young Islamists together in the same room it has been the metalheads who've squirmed in their seats, anxious to leave, while the religious activists -- many with the same biographies (college educated or MBAs, fluent in English and/or French, working in the IT sector) -- were happy to stay and talk.

What is increasingly clear is that heavy metal is playing an important and potentially crucial role in a region still dominated by undemocratic governments that routinely arrest and even torture people for expressing political or social views that deviate from the prescribed norm.

Perhaps this is why the emerging generation of Islamist activists has become far more tolerant of their metal-loving peers than were their elders. With everyone facing the same struggles against authoritarianism, an increasing number of religiously motivated political activists has figured out that, in the words of a 25-year old Muslim Brother in Cairo, "Only when I'm ready to fight for everyone's rights can I hope to have mine." In fact, most every religious activist I've met under 40 has answered an emphatic "Yes"
when I've asked them if one could be a metalhead and a good Muslim at the same time.

This belief is supported by the reality that the majority of metalheads I know consider themselves good Muslims; many even pray five times a day. As the teenage musician sons of jailed Egyptian presidential candidate Ayman Nour put it, "We love to go to the mosque for Juma' (Friday afternoon) prayers for three hours and then go play black metal for four hours."

Perhaps one reason for this dynamic is that the experiences and practices surrounding metal culture fulfill many of the same needs as religion. Sitting next to Reda Zine when he first told me why he loved metal was a young Iraqi Shia religious scholar, Sheikh Anwar, known as the "Elastic Sheikh" because of his willingness to combine western and Islamic ideas to better serve his Baghdad flock. As soon as Zine finished, he exclaimed, "I don't like metal; not because I think it's haram (forbidden), but because it's not my kind of music. But when we get together chanting and marching, banging our fists against our chests and pumping them in the air, we're doing metal, too."

Salman Ahmed, a Pakistani rock star and founder of the genre of "Sufi rock," agreed, explaining that one of the reasons he's received death threats from hardcore Islamists in his country is precisely that "we're competing for the same crowd." As important, however, is his revelation that many of the mullahs who publicly lash out at his group, Junoon, ask him for autographs and admit to knowing the words to his songs when no one else is around.

Most interesting, more than a few times, it has turned out that today's twenty- or thirty-something Islamists were yesterday's teenage metalheads. And the transition from one subculture to the other was often not as jarring as one might imagine; nor did it involve a move from the fantasy violence of extreme metal to the real violence of al- Qa'eda, as apparently occurred when a metalhead from Orange County, California named Adam Gadahn converted to Islam, joined al-Qa'eda and became the infamous "Azzam the American," appearing in numerous propaganda videos for the group.

At its base, a growing cadre of both metalheads and the progressive-minded young Islamists are searching for alternative yet authentic identities to those offered by sclerotic and autocratic regimes and a monochrome globalization.

Ultimately, the best exemplars of Middle Eastern metal and of activist Islam share many attributes: they look critically at their societies, refusing unquestioningly to buy into the myths and shibboleths put forward by political or spiritual leaders; they are positive and forward-thinking rather than nihilistic or based solely on resistance; they create bonds of community that stand against state-sponsored repression; and they reveal the diversity of contemporary Islam.


Mark LeVine is Professor of Middle Eastern history, culture and Islamic Studies at UC Irvine and author, most recently, of Heavy Metal
Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam (Three Rivers Press/Random House)

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http://www.thenational.ae/article/20080812/ART/94611949/-1/NEWS

Arabia’s metal scene

Mark LeVine

Last Updated: August 12. 2008 2:39PM UAE / August 12. 2008 10:39AM GMT
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Fans at the fifth annual Dubai Desert Rock Festival in March attended performances by Machine Head, Korn and the Dubai-based band Nervecell. PA

I was not a metal fan growing up. Sure, I had been into the great late 1960s and early 1970s groups from which metal had emerged – Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, and Led Zeppelin. But I came of age at the moment that MTV took over, and the brand of metal that grew up with it – “hair” or “glam” metal, epitomised by groups such as Mötley Crüe, Poison and Quiet Riot – seemed more about debauchery than building on the foundations of the ur-generation of heavy rock.

Regional Picks

Moroccan metal scene
More than perhaps any other country, Morocco is filled with some of the most stylistically innovative hard rock bands anywhere. From seminal bands such as Carpe Diem and Reborn, who brought a hard-core metal and thrash sensibility to the early scene in the 1990s, to post-grunge and progressive metal bands such as Lazywall and Syncopea (both of whom headlined the 2008 l’Boulevard Festival in Casablanca), the reggae and punk-inflected gnawa rock of Hoba Hoba Spirit, and the instantly recognisable hip-hop of H-Kayne and Bigg da Don, the country stands at the avant-garde of rock ‘n’ roll worldwide.

Arthimoth
The Iranian extreme death metal band Arthimoth could well have the most intense sound of any metal band in the Middle East, if not the world. Its songs pack the power of jack hammers and its lyrics take on Iran’s social and political problems with equal vigour. Slightly softer and more melodic but equally powerful is the music of the Iranian guitar virtuoso Farzad Golpayegani.

Orphaned Land
Orphaned Land are considered by many to be the founders of the “oriental death metal” style and are a staple friends on most regional metal bands’ MySpace pages. Its mixture of hard-core metal and Arab instrumentation, brutal and soaring vocals, and lyrics that take on humanity’s contradictory tendencies towards both good and evil epitomise the core elements of extreme metal worldwide.

Acrassicauda
Iraq’s signature metal band, Acrassicauda, had its travails in post-occupation Baghdad chronicled in the film Heavy Metal in Baghdad. From struggling just to find copies of classic metal albums during the Saddam era to having its rehearsal space bombed to the ground during the post-invasion revolt and being forced to become refugees, the band has managed to survive and serve as a symbol of the spirit that drives heavy metal. Hearing metal in war-torn Baghdad gives one a new appreciation for the power and meaning of the genre.

Saudi Arabia and Pakistan
It’s hard to imagine a more inhospitable place to play death metal than Saudi Arabia, but in fact the Kingdom has a growing – if truly underground – scene, with bands like Wasted Land and Creative Waste building on the tradition of the best Euro-American extreme metal. Pakistan’s metal scene is more developed and features “pure” metal bands as well as masters of hybrid styles such as Mekaal Hasan and Junoon, the “U2 of Asia” and the founders of the genre of “Sufi Rock.”

* Mark LeVine
Indeed, while most of my friends either moved into hip-hop or tried to be the next Eddie Van Halen, there was something about the music of those seminal bands which drew me backwards in time: towards the blues, classical music, and, while I couldn’t at first put my ears on it, what I gradually realised were the Arab roots of rock ’n’ roll.

The more deeply I delved into music, the more I understood the powerful links between black American music, hard rock and music from around the Muslim world, especially the Middle East and Africa. That same realisation also drove me to spend a decade getting a doctorate in Middle East studies.

Yet despite working with many Middle Eastern artists as a musician and researcher, I was shocked when I first heard about the metal scene while celebrating a friend’s birthday in Fes, Morocco. If there could be such a thing as a Heavy Metal Islam, I thought, then perhaps the future was brighter than most observers of the Muslim world imagined less than a year after September 11.

What quickly became clear, however, was that Muslim metal artists and their fans could teach us a lot about the realities of the Muslim world today: the imagination, openness, and often courage of the artists, fans, and many other young people I met across the region, from bloggers to religious activists, points to just how much more heterogenous and complex Muslim culture is than the peddlers of the clash of civilizations would have us believe.

Hair and glam metal never quite caught on in the Middle East. Instead, the harsher sound of death, doom and other forms of extreme metal won a growing following, with bands such as Cannibal Corpse, Deicide, Death, Slayer and Iron Maiden banging heads across the region. The subjects they deal with – death, the futility of violence, the corruption of power – correspond well to the issues young Muslims confront today.

One of the founders of the Moroccan metal scene, the Sorbonne-trained Reda Zine, said, “We play heavy metal because our lives are heavy metal.”

When you grow up in a region dominated by war, occupation, and political and social systems from which you feel marginalised, Britney Spears and Haifa Wehbe are just not going to cut it. More than a few Lebanese and Iranian friends have told me stories of how, growing up, blasting metal and hard rock on their headphones was one of the only ways they could drown out the sounds of war outside their windows.

The bleak urban landscape that shaped Black Sabbath’s sound in late 1960s Birmingham, England was a product of the first pangs of global economic restructuring that would soon produce the angry sounds of punk and hip-hop in the de-industrialising cities of the UK and US. Less than a decade later the economic forces associated the “Washington Consensus” model of development, and heavy metal, had both arrived on the shores of the southern Mediterranean and Middle East.

Just how positive a force the music could be first jumped out to me when I attended the Dubai Desert Rock Festival in March 2007 with one of Egypt’s leading metal musicians. As upwards of 20,000 fans streamed from all over the Muslim world and beyond into the field for the festival, my friend stared at the scene in amazement and said, “Finally, a real metal community”.

Coming from a country where metal artists and fans have largely been marginalised from mainstream society, the ability to “headbang” freely with throngs of fans from most every country in the Arab world and beyond was incredibly liberating. As the lead singer of Iron Maiden, Bruce Dickinson, told the crowd, “I know Dubai is the melting pot. Everybody is here. We have people from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Scotland, Lebanon, Egypt, Sweden, Turkey, Australia, Wales, America, Canada, Kuwait. We have the whole world, just about, here tonight... And we’ll be back.”

It wasn’t too long ago, however, that the future of heavy metal in the Muslim world looked bleak. In the late 1990s and early 2000s there were several “Satanic metal affairs” across the region, the most well-known of which occurred in Egypt, Lebanon and Morocco. Musicians and fans were arrested and in some cases tried and convicted of being Satan worshippers. In Egypt, the 1997 affair pushed the scene underground for most of the next decade. But Morocco’s 2003 affair had a very different ending, as metal fans and musicians organised such a popular protest that the verdicts were overturned.

In recent years, most governments have grown more tolerant of their countries’ metal scenes, although the price of greater freedom has often been a growing depoliticisation. Government censorship is no longer much of an issue because of the internet (although in countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia, the ability to perform live is generally restricted), and most mainstream religious leaders have adopted a live-and-let-live approach to many elements of pop culture as long as they don’t put out immoral or irreligious messages.

This is also true of hip-hop, which in recent years has become at least as popular as heavy metal. Much of the hip-hop is rapped in local languages, in contrast to most Arab metal’s preference for English. While in the US rap has long had a lurid reputation similar to that of glam metal, the best Middle Eastern hip-hop has generally avoided these themes and focused on social commentary and occasionally political critique.

The main challenge to metal, hip-hop and other scenes is the growing power of Arab mega-entertainment companies such as Rotana, who have the resources and power to take over and homogenise any music scene. While heavy metal has thrived mostly in a “DIY” environment and artists are typically less interested in commercial success than being true to their sound, this could change as the number of bands, fans, and festivals featuring such groups grows.

One of the most interesting things about heavy metal in the Middle East is that the music and the communities it creates fulfil many of the same functions as activist religious (or “Islamist”) movements across the region, especially as they involve young people. As a young Iraqi Shi’i scholar said, “I don’t like metal; not because I think its haram (forbidden), but because it’s not my kind of music. But when we get together chanting and marching, banging our fists against our chests and pumping them in the air, we’re doing metal too.”

Both extreme metal and seemingly extreme religion are outlets for anger, frustration and often hopelessness at the prospects for a better future. And both practices have the potential to transform these emotions into more positive identities.

Indeed, the growing tolerance of metal and other genres by religious (or at least socially conservative) forces reflects the rise of an emerging generation of Islamist activists that has finally figured out, in the words of a 25-year old Muslim Brother in Cairo, that “only when I’m ready to fight for everyone’s rights can I hope to have mine.” Almost every religious activist under 40 I have met has answered with an emphatic “yes” when I’ve asked if one could be a metalhead and a good Muslim at the same time.

As the teenage musician sons of the jailed Egyptian presidential candidate Ayman Nour put it, “We love to go to the mosque for Juma’ (Friday afternoon) prayers for three hours and then go play black metal for four hours.”

While many people, including some young metal fans, believe that listening to any non-religious music is against Islamic law, more and more people are becoming familiar with the trained Islamist scholars who convincingly argue that music is not haram as long as it is not encouraging immoral or anti-religious thoughts or activities.

Growing cadres of both metalheads and progressive-minded young Islamists are searching for identities different than those offered by governments that often remain out of touch with the dreams their people and a monochrome globalisation – whether western or Arab-led – that is only interested in commodifying culture for profit. But for the most part, the two groups remain separated by a wide gulf, caused in good measure by lingering suspicion and the mainstream religious movement’s support for crackdowns against metalheads in the last decade.

Today, the best exemplars of Middle Eastern metal and activist Islam are responding to their countries’ problems by looking critically at their societies and leaders, trying to put out positive ideas, and creating communities that stand against hatred and oppression – whether from governments, extremist religious voices or external forces. Pakistan’s supergroup Junoon have, for well over a decade, led a public campaign against corruption in Pakistan and for peaceful relations with India. The Palestinian-Israeli hip-hop group DAM rap their highly charged lyrics in Hebrew and Arabic to make sure the country’s Jewish population pays attention to their critique of the status quo. Grassroots organisers of large festivals such as Barisa Rock for Peace in Istanbul and l’Boulevard in Casablanca have sacrificed large sums of corporate and government sponsorship over the years to retain the freedom to educate fans about important and often controversial political and social issues.

Both movements, which remain misunderstood in the Muslim world almost as much as in the West, reveal the diversity of contemporary Islam, reminding us that most generalisations falter on most Muslim countries’ historical, political and cultural uniqueness.

It’s hard to overstate how important it is for the rest of us to understand this reality before the violence and hatred bringing the so-called western and Islamic “worlds” into conflict drown out even the loudest new soundtrack of the Middle East.


Heavy Metal Islam, by Mark LeVine, is published by Three Rivers Press.