Heavy Metal Islam (13 page)

The brothers are among the first in what will surely become a trend—as it has in other Muslim countries—of religiously grounded hard rock, or at least a metal sound that doesn’t violate more-traditional religious and moral sensibilities. “Look, you can be a metalien and a good Muslim at the same time,” they explained, without a hint of the internal conflicts over their identities that plague so many of their musical comrades.

Besides, Bliss had a strangely upbeat sound, among the first metal bands in Egypt that consciously sought to play something resembling the “oriental doom metal” made famous by the Israeli band Orphaned Land. It’s only fitting that Shady and Noor would be big fans of Orphaned Land, whose members come from mixed Middle Eastern and European Jewish backgrounds, and feel like orphans in a country that is claimed by all but belongs to none. Shady and Noor clearly feel similarly; their eyes lit up when I mentioned I’d be seeing Orphaned Land in a few days. “Can you send them a ‘horns’ from us? We love them.”

I asked Slacker about the importance of Orphaned Land when I noticed that the band was listed as a friend on the MySpace sites of a lot of Egyptian bands. “I know it seems weird, but they’re awesome.” Shady Nour was even more emphatic that Orphaned Land was a band to be emulated. “The main reason for their success is that despite everything, Israel is comparatively free and democratic, even though Egyptians hate to admit it.”

To emphasize the difference between Egypt and Israel, Shady explained that the police had recently threatened his father that if he wasn’t more cooperative, his sons would be arrested as satanists. “And as you’ve seen, we’re watched twenty-four hours a day, even coming to our house with you, we were followed,” Shady cautioned. “We can’t even go into the studio to record, because the police might plant drugs and then have us arrested.”

I couldn’t help thinking, as I walked home from their apartment, that maybe the metal scene’s search for autonomy and authenticity—that is, to be left alone—was in fact a political act in an environment where direct political action is a risky endeavor. Hardly anyone agreed with me, however, inside or outside the metal scene. Blogger Nora Younis summed up the problem best when she explained that for musicians to stay apolitical is exactly what the government wants, because music then becomes a safety valve for young people who might otherwise join more politically subversive groups like Kefaya or the Muslim Brotherhood.

Mohammad Said, editorial writer for
al-Ahram
and a generation older than Younis, went further, explaining that “the political sphere is and will remain relatively empty until culture can become more politicized.” But politics could be taken to a whole new level if culture became more positively political. “What Egyptian politics needs is more ‘civil guerrilla action’—learning to adapt to whatever fits the situation.”

Heba Raouf, perhaps the most famous “Islamist-feminist” professor in Egypt, summed up the problem best when we discussed why Slacker, Stigma, and Seif were unhappy sitting down—never mind working—with Ibrahim. “There are no overlapping spheres here. These two groups, young metalheads and young Brothers, are completely isolated from each other and uninterested in communication. Even enemies can become friends because through conflict you communicate. But they’re not at that point yet. Until they are, they’ll be fighting their battles alone, and they’ll lose.” It’s not just that bringing these two groups from the opposite ends of Egyptian society together would win the day, it’s that such a process would act like a net, helping to bring other marginalized yet opposing groups together in the common struggle for democracy and economic equality.

…Under the Dark Blue Alexandrian Sky

It took about three and a half hours to drive from Cairo to Alexandria. Marz, Slacker, Stigma, a few of their friends, and I had come to meet up with their counterparts in Alexandria’s metal scene. On the way I practiced the vocabulary and grammar invented by the metaliens to describe their scene in Egyptian Arabic. To headbang:
bangara.
I’m a headbanger:
Ana babangar.
This song really headbangs:
Lughnaiti babangar.
I’m a metalhead:
Ana metil.

As we arrived in the city center, the sun had just begun to set over the Mediterranean. It shimmered off the windows of the spectacular Great Library of Alexandria, historical symbol of a city that’s been famed for its learning and cosmopolitan personality since the time of Aristotle, and whose recent “reopening” was intended to symbolize Egypt’s intellectual and scientific renaissance. This sent a small tingle up my historian spine, even though there’s little in the present-day collection I couldn’t find online or through my university library. Alexandria is also famed for its food, and after so many meetings in Cairo’s coffee bars and European-style restaurants and pubs, I was equally excited about the possibility of eating something more authentic than pasta or hummus. “Maybe some
foul
or
mujedara
?” I asked Marz. “Mark,” he said, laughing, “that’s so five years ago.”

The sea and some good Egyptian cooking beckoned a few blocks away, but I wound up going to yet another soulless yuppie café-restaurant, which blasted the air conditioning and the Eurotrash dance music with equal disregard for the comfort of its customers. It didn’t matter once the musicians started arriving, maybe a dozen of them from Alexandria’s best bands, including Erebus, Chronic Pain, Ammattammen Bas, Hellchasm, Massive Scar Era, and Worm, which was one of the first Egyptian bands to be noticed in Europe.

As we moved to a bigger table to accommodate everyone, Ahmed, a member of the band Erebus—in Greek mythology, Erebus is the embodiment of primordial darkness and the son of Chaos—sat next to me. His opening words made clear that the scars of being a metalien run as deep in Alexandria as in Cairo: “If the government just sees you playing guitar, they think you’re a satanist,” Ahmed explained. “But we’re Muslims, we do our prayers. We don’t violate Islam.” Sitting a couple of feet away, Marz rolled his eyes at Ahmed’s testament of faith.

“No one dares to fuck with the government because no one fucks with the government and gets away with it. Even at metal shows, everyone is tense, waiting for something to happen. So you see the musicians with less long hair, while the poseurs come and go because they don’t appreciate the music for what it is.” At the same time, however, succeeding in Egypt as a metal artist brings a great feeling of accomplishment. “Despite the fact that the government is trying to fuck you, repress you, and control you—did you know that Egypt is like the twelfth most corrupt country in the world?—you have your fan base and you, not the government, are in control.”

Women, of course, face a bigger challenge. The members of bands like Massive Scar Era have to deal with conservative fathers who strictly enforce 8:45 p.m. curfews (Massive Scar Era’s guitarist had to rush home soon after explaining this to me, to make hers), and fans who don’t want to accept girls playing metal. Male or female, being a metalhead is a daily struggle to affirm one’s identity against a host of forces—the government, religious leaders, the music business, and economic pressures.

It was sad to sit across from Alexandria’s Library, so recently reopened after more than 1,600 years, hearing story after story of ignorance and oppression at the hands of Egypt’s present-day rulers and society. Perhaps that’s why everyone seemed a bit subdued on the ride home later that evening, if not downright emotional as we sat down in the lobby for a farewell drink.

After the usual promises to stay in touch and perhaps work together on some new music, Marz, Slacker, and Stigma stood up to say good-bye to me. As they headed out the door, past the beat-up metal detector, Marz turned around, his voice choking just a bit, and said, “Despite everything, Egypt is my country and I love it.” At least for Marz, Egypt is still the promised land.

A few months after our “summit” in Alexandria, Massive Scar Era and other local bands organized a metal festival on the steps of the Alexandria Library. The event was by most evaluations an important steppingstone in the public legitimization of Egyptian heavy metal. Artists were interviewed by international Arabic news channels, who compared the evening favorably with the Dubai Desert Rock festival that Marz and I had attended a month earlier. More high-profile gigs came every few months, and Stigma, Slacker, and even Marz started to sound optimistic about the future of metal, if not of Egypt. But Ayman Nour remained in solitary confinement without proper medical care, while bloggers, Brotherhood members, and other civil society activists were being arrested with increasing frequency.

Hate Suffocation also changed its name—to Scarab. Soon after the Alexandria festival, either emboldened by musical success or having had enough of Egypt’s poisonous politics (or both), Marz sent me the following e-mail:

MArk YOU KNOW WHAT!

I WANT TO DO SOMETHING i was thinking over a million times!

WRITE MY NAME!

WRITE WHAT WE ARE GOING THROUGH HERE!

SAY WHAT EVER YOU THINK IS RIGHT

i want people to know that we are struggling!…

am not afraid anymore FUCK IT!

USE MY FULL NAME AS YOU WANT!

We are who we are we are not hurting our culture in fact we are an evolution

let the fucking world know what we are doing!

please feel free

We decided the band to suffer what ever consequences i believe that we should be activists and musicians at the same time!

please make it happen even though am afraid BUT AM NOT SO FUCK IT!

Mark! use my full name if you want

AL SHarif Hassan MArzeban

ISRAEL/PALESTINE

Hard Music in an Orphaned Land

“
I
f you’re lucky, you can say you were here for the start of the Palestinian civil war,” joked my friend the Palestinian sociologist May Jayussi. She jumped into a taxi and sped out of downtown Ramallah, where our expensive lunch had just been interrupted by a firefight between Hamas and Fatah fighters that left thirty-three people shot and me sliding ever lower in my chair as we hurried to finish eating before the cab arrived. (The restaurant staff had already abandoned us to get a better view of the fighting.) A demure, chain-smoking dynamo with an angular Chanel-girl haircut, May is the director of the most important Palestinian think tank, Muwatin, the Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy.

May’s concern that day, however, was to make it to her house on the outskirts of town without running into any of the pickup trucks overloaded with young men brandishing Kalashnikovs and cruising the city for someone to fight. I ran around the block and jumped into my friend Sami’s car. Fortunately, despite its slipping transmission, we caught up with May’s taxi, whose driver knew a safe route out of downtown. As we careened through the backstreets of Ramallah, Sami and I had to laugh. This wasn’t what we’d expected to be doing when we met, both of us students, more than a decade ago.

Even then, Sami’s unfailingly calm demeanor and pleasant smile belied an activist streak that had earned him a “Shabak education,” a euphemism Palestinian citizens of Israel use to describe the sometimes violent harassment that so many of them experience at the hands of Israel’s security services. (I use “Palestinian Israelis” to refer to Palestinian citizens of Israel, and “Palestinians” to refer to Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza, and the Diaspora.) In those days, before the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the more or less permanent closure of the Occupied Territories, I’d think nothing of popping over to Ramallah on a Saturday afternoon or evening with Sami and other Palestinian Israeli friends from Jaffa (the onetime economic and cultural capital of Palestine) and even an Israeli Jew or two, to have lunch at my favorite hummus restaurant, shop for the latest Arab pop CDs, or even go to a nightclub that featured the latest underground house or trance music spun by European DJs.