Heavy Metal Islam (10 page)

However you want to describe the band, it’s clear that Hate Suffocation is one of the best of the new generation of metal bands in Egypt. Considering the complexity and intricacy of the music, one of the most important reasons for its success is the military-like discipline with which Marz manages the band and its rehearsals, a trait that he no doubt inherited from his father, a retired general in Egypt’s Air Defense Command.

Being a general’s son has shaped Marz as a person and as a musician. He lived in Miami for six years, until high school, and later in Poland. In fact, while pirated copies of metal albums were available in kiosks across Egypt as far back as the 1970s, Marz fully embraced metal in Krakow rather than Cairo. “But I always hung out with the wrong people, like my friend Amira, who introduced me to heavy metal in the ninth grade. She was considered a loner and was discriminated against by her schoolmates because of how she looked and the music she listened to. One day I came up to her and she was wearing a band T-shirt for Korn. I asked her what she was listening to…and it was all so raw and powerful. Bands like Morbid Angel, Iron Maiden, W.A.S.P., Opeth, Pantera, Sepultura, Bathory, Benediction, Vader, Megadeth, Metallica, Annihilator, Cannibal Corpse, Death, Deicide, Monstrosity, Slayer. Basically from thrash to death metal. I just went crazy.”

What was it about heavy metal that drove him crazy? “I was a confused teenager and had many problems trying to blend into Egyptian culture because I had lived in the U.S. and my cultural norms were different. In fact, I was discriminated against by teachers and other students for being open-minded, especially about music, and I was constantly being force-fed religion in school and by society in a way that really turned me off.”

Many Egyptian metal musicians have a similar life story. They are the well-educated prodigal sons (and in a few cases, daughters) of diplomats, military officers, or other members of the country’s elite—a bit strange if you think about it, since metal is supposed to be the ultimate outsiders’ music. Most of them, including Marz, also have university and even graduate degrees.

So why are these sons and daughters of the Egyptian elite checking out of a system designed to enable them to join the global elite of tomorrow? As Marz tells me, it can be summed up in the band’s name. “I chose Hate Suffocation to reflect the suffocating level of hatred across Egyptian society. The rich and poor hate each other, conservatives and liberals hate each other, cops and metalheads hate each other, religious and secular hate each other.” At least that’s how Marz and many of his fellow musicians experience Egypt today. “People pretend to love when in fact they really hate. That’s why we title our songs ‘Confused,’ ‘Corrupted Virtue,’ ‘Human Betrayal,’ and ‘I Hate.’”

Their music can’t avoid dealing with the problems of Egyptian society, but the goal of Marz and his fellow metalheads is not to transform the country. It’s much more modest: to be left alone by both the government and society—to be able to play their music and walk down the street without being harassed by the Mukhabarat or the Muslim Brotherhood. They also want to become famous, or at least successful enough to tour outside of Egypt and not have a day job. Achieving such a level of success would place these bands directly in the public eye, which would make them even more of a target for a government that regularly exiles anyone who becomes too popular and won’t publicly support the regime.

Just being a metal musician is enough to get you in trouble. As Marz recounted: “A few months ago my band got dressed up in our best metal gear and went to the pyramids to do a promotional photo shoot. It happened to be October 6, the anniversary of Egypt’s launching of the Ramadan, or Yom Kippur, War. While we were setting up to shoot, a couple of cops came over and started harassing us, and when they found that one of us didn’t have proper ID, we were all arrested. Just for trying to take a picture in front of the pyramids. All we wanted to do was show fans that we were from Egypt and support our country, but to the cops we were like enemies of the state.”

“Enemy of the state” is an apt description of how anyone is regarded who challenges the Mubarak regime. One of the best-known Egyptian political figures to be slapped down—but not silenced—by the regime, is the former presidential candidate Ayman Nour, whose Tomorrow Party was the standard-bearer of the Egyptian reform movement. His teenage sons Shady and Noor dealt with the pain of watching their father rot in jail by founding Bliss, which for a brief time was one of the best up-and-coming metal bands in Egypt. Nour is a gentle, affable man with an impeccable reputation for honesty, a steel resolve, and little fear of the consequences of taking on the Arab world’s longest-serving dictator. He was convicted of forgery in the 2005 presidential election, a cruel joke, since it was clear that Mubarak had rigged the vote against him.

Largely abandoned by the United States and Europe, both of which initially supported his push for real democratic reform, Nour was still being held in solitary confinement, without proper treatment for his diabetes, when I went to see Shady and Noor at their apartment. Their building has the kind of post–World War I eclectic architectural style that gives the Zemalek district its charm. Their apartment, one of the building’s penthouses, has a commanding view of the surrounding neighborhood, yet its elegant but slightly tattered furniture, and empty swimming pool on the terrace, hints at the sacrifices their father has made trying to bring democracy to Egypt.

Both of Nour’s sons are blessed with the kind of rock-star looks and attitude that would stand out in any scene. Their sense of style and their energy as performers—which they documented by pulling out their video iPods and cell phones to show me clips of recent shows—are remarkable, given how young they are. But Shady and Noor have been forced to become wise far beyond their years because of their father’s imprisonment. Watching their father paraded in and out of sham trials (whose proceedings they secretly record on their video phones and show to friends and journalists), and grow sicker each month he remains in jail, has taught them that music and politics can and should come together. This is still very much a minority position within Egypt’s metal scene, but as the brothers expand their musical horizons, performing with more established bands, they hope to encourage their largely teenage fan base to translate their cultural individualism into political activism.

Can Metal Help Heal a Sick Country?

If Morocco is a
blad schizo,
or schizophrenic country, this is largely a result of French colonialism and France’s effort to assimilate conquered peoples into French culture. As a result, many Moroccans have some measure of affection for France. England had a very different attitude toward Egypt—rule without assimilation—and as such, the English language, and British culture more broadly, never became part of the Egyptian soul.

Yet metal in Egypt is almost entirely an English-language affair. Few can articulate exactly why, but most musicians I’ve met feel that while rap can work in Arabic, metal works only in English. In other countries, particularly Turkey, Iran, Israel, and Pakistan, there’s a growing hard-rock scene that not only sings in Turkish, Persian, Hebrew, and Urdu, but even includes overtly religious lyrics. Even the
shahadah,
or Islamic testament of faith (
La illaha illa-llah,
“there is no god but God”), has been recorded over a driving hard-rock groove by one Turkish rock group.

Egyptian metal’s “English only” policy points to how important the influx of foreign, and particularly Anglo-American, music has been there. Despite the unwillingness of most metalheads to mix metal with Egyptian or other Arabic styles, there are strong local roots for what sonically might seem like a foreign style of music. This became clear to me about fifteen minutes into watching a popular movie from the 1980s, Samir Seif’s
Al-Halfout
(
The Nobody
), on Egyptian television. The movie’s star, the well-known comedian Adel Imam, enters the home of a provocatively dressed woman, followed by a group of middle-aged women and men. Suddenly the women pick up traditional drums and tambourines and begin chanting, and banging out a driving beat while they dance around in a circle, heads swaying up and down and back and forth. As the circle breaks up, the men pair off with the women and go into different rooms, apparently to have sex.

What millions of Egyptians and I had witnessed was a bastardized version of a
zar
ceremony, an ancient magical ritual meant to cure mental or physical illnesses by contacting and hopefully placating what is believed to be a spirit (or spirits) possessing a woman, and which are believed to cause various types of illnesses, including infertility. Though prohibited by orthodox Islamic law because of its roots in pagan African religions, the
zar
has long been an essential part of Egyptian culture. The ritual is traditionally performed in private settings that are free from the prying eyes and ears of outsiders, especially those in political and religious power. The heavy, sexualized, beat-driven music and swaying head movements that make up the
zar
ritual are used by one of the country’s most marginalized groups—women—to cope with the stresses of living in an oppressive society.

The parallels with the metal scene are striking, and run a lot deeper than just headbanging, heavy drumming, and alcohol-driven sex. Chief among them are the “psychological issues” that a lot of the metalheads I know say motivated them to become metal fans and musicians. “Most everyone who plays metal in Egypt has some kind of psychological problem,” Marz explained one night as we left a marathon six-hour rehearsal for two of the bands he plays in. Although that is surely an exaggeration, it is accepted as true in Egyptian pop culture. In fact, in his long-running one-man play,
A Witness Who Witnesses Nothing
(
Shahid ma Shafish Haga
), Adel Imam does a skit depicting metalheads as mentally disturbed. The slightly crazy—and therefore either amusing or dangerous—metalhead has become part of Egypt’s cultural vocabulary, to be feared, censured, or ridiculed depending on the political or cultural needs of the moment.

The reality, however, is that like the female practitioners of the
zar
ceremony, the metalheads are using the “ritual” of playing or listening to music as a way to cope with the stress they face as a marginalized group in an oppressive society. When Egypt’s metaliens describe problems such as loneliness, alienation, or having little hope in the future, I don’t see a psychological issue as much as a social and political one that can’t be expressed politically because of the country’s patriarchal, highly authoritarian political system.

A good example of the connection between psychological and political problems can be seen in a young, Cairo-based band called Enraged, one of the few Egyptian metal bands with a female lead singer. When I arrived in Egypt, the band had just released a powerful song dealing with this issue, titled “The Truth Is Concealed.” It blends together the haunting vocals of the band’s lead singer, Rasha, with the brutal growling of Stigma, who guests on the song. Giving the song its tension and sense of movement are alternating soft and hard sections. Rasha’s vocal over an arpeggiated piano melody surrenders to Stigma’s brutally vocalized chorus, which is sung over a super-distorted guitar riff. The lyrics take on Egyptians who hate metalheads, especially those in power. Rasha accuses them: “Nothing you justify is real. The only reason you hate is that I am a part of you,” while Stigma counters, “This hate is all that I know, and it runs in my every vein. Under the shadows of a deserted throne.” Finally, Rasha replies, “If this is just a dream, I hope it never becomes a reality. There is a fine line between knowledge and insanity.”

According to the lead guitarist, Wael Ossama, the song is meant to be a critique of a political and social system based on “hate propaganda…living in fear and ignorance, under an iron fist.” The song’s protagonists believe that without hate, their world will fall apart. Hatred has become their identity, and their madness.

To an outsider, these songs might well seem political. They represent the kind of messages that some artists confided to me they like to slip into their songs without being explicit enough to get censored or arrested. But the majority of the bands won’t go as far as these moderately critical songs. When I asked Marz why this was the case, he looked at me with near disdain for even asking the question. Didn’t I know that doing so would lead to another crackdown by the government on the metal scene, just when it was picking up again? And anyway, where was the evidence that real political and social change were possible in Egypt, so that he should risk his freedom—and his music—to pursue it? Where exactly was Shady and Noor’s father as we spoke?

Slacker, the metal scene’s chief archivist, was even more honest, although wistfully so. At around six feet tall and well over two hundred pounds, with a round, shaved head that crowns the contours of his body, Slacker is one of the most imposing presences in the metal scene, but his physical appearance is completely at odds with his jovial and gentle personality, and he is anything but a slacker. He seems to be in perpetual motion, running from gigs to rehearsals to photo shoots to document the evolution of Egypt’s metal scene.