Heavy Metal Islam (15 page)

Together with Salem, the two bands form the two poles of Israeli metal, politically as well as sonically. While Salem was very nationalist and patriotic, for Orphaned Land, music has always been as sacred as land and territory. The band doesn’t throw its Israeli—as opposed to Jewish/religious—identity into their music; in fact, none of the members of the band completed their army service, a rare and implicitly political act in a country where the army is the most important social bonding experience for young Israelis.

If, politically and spiritually, Orphaned Land is far more oriented toward peace than are most other bands, its music is anything but peaceful. In fact, it’s quite violent: the biblical imagery, huge guitar sound, complex sonic textures and shifting grooves, and vocals that veer between prayers and grunts, have had a powerful impact on the metal scene. The fruitful mix of Ashkenazi and Mizrahi culture that makes Orphaned Land—and Israel—so musically unique, was abundantly clear at a sold-out show the band did in Tel Aviv in late 2006 as part of the
Global Metal
documentary film. Well over 1,000 fans jammed into Tel Aviv’s Theatre Club for the show. Hard-core goth rockers headbanged next to kids swaying in trancelike traditional Jewish prayer. Kobi’s vocals veered from harsh and brutal to soaring and fluid, while the band pounded away at grooves that merged Metallica and Megadeth with their own, unique blend of “Oriental” instruments: stringed instruments like the oud, lute, saz (a three-stringed Turkish guitar played expertly by Yossi), and Arabic drums.

For two hours the Theatre Club was truly a temple—more accurately, a synagogue—of heavy metal. The complexity and strange power of the music reminded me of the concerts put on by seminal art-rock bands like Yes and Rush. Yet here were young fans wrapped in prayer shawls and tfillin—the small boxes worn on the heads of religious Jews when they pray. And when you scan the titles and lyrics of Orphaned Land’s songs, you understand why: the band’s music is saturated with religious and biblical themes.

Watching kids pray at a metal concert is quite a sight. Then I remembered Sheikh Anwar al-Ethari’s comment that when he and his fellow Shi’is pray, “we’re doing heavy metal too,” and the Noor brothers’ admission that they love to pray before they play. But Orphaned Land is not seeking to bring kids back into the traditional religious fold. Instead, Kobi explains, “We’re the next level of religion, because we’re more open. We take things that are in conflict and bring them into harmony rather than driving people apart.”

Kobi’s argument is clear from the lyrics to the band’s songs. In the band’s 1994 first album,
Sahara,
Kobi sets up the main human and political dilemma the band has been exploring ever since. In “The Storm Still Rages Inside,” he sings, “This land is barren, it does not feel / Our self-made slaughter / By our own hands / Here lies the orphaned land.” In subsequent albums a more positive view of religion emerges, and “God’s divine call” is exclaimed as a source of love and peace. But it’s in the 2004 “Birth of the Three,” from the album
Mabool,
where the band’s desire to bring the three Abrahamic religions back into harmony comes together. Arguing that it was earlier attempts at unity that drew God’s wrath, after “a thousand incarnations…the time was now at hand. A prophecy fulfilled so he may save this sinful land.”

What’s most compelling about Orphaned Land’s lyrics is that unlike most metal bands from the region, they openly bring Muslim religious themes into their music. Kobi has a strong desire to explore Islam as both a religion and culture, a drive instilled in him growing up in the mixed Jewish–Palestinian Israeli neighborhood of Jaffa: “I was so influenced by hearing the call to prayer when I was growing up,” he explained. “To this day when I hear Muslims say
Allahu Akbar,
I love it; in fact, my dream is to go to a mosque and sing the call to prayer. When I did it in the Taj Mahal [which is a mausoleum, not a mosque], it brought me closer to God.”

Yossi also “feels Muslim,” when he hears Muslim music or goes into a mosque. Kobi and Yossi may be more at home in Muslim culture than many of the Arab or Muslim metal artists I know. But is their Islamophilia ultimately a luxury easily afforded by two bohemian Jewish Israeli musicians who, when push comes to shove, are not directly involved in the conflict? I certainly couldn’t imagine Mohammed Farra declaring that when he hears Jewish music or goes into a synagogue he “feels Jewish”—if he wasn’t shot by Israeli soldiers upon entering the synagogue, he’d likely be shot by Palestinian militants upon leaving. Yet the unmistakable sincerity of Orphaned Land’s music makes it hard to be cynical about Kobi and Yossi’s embrace of the Muslim cultures surrounding Israel.

Tupac Lives On, from Ramla to Gaza

Ramla is one of the oldest towns in Israel, having been founded by one of the early caliphs of Islam, Suleiman Ibn Abd al-Malik, in 716. He liked the city so much he chose to remain there rather than move to Damascus, the imperial capital, when he was chosen as caliph. It remained one of the most important Arab cities in the country until 1948, when most Palestinians fled or were forced into exile.

Today only about 16,000 out of Ramla’s 70,000 people are Palestinian. The rest, including the mayor, are Israeli Jews, most of them supporters of right-wing, anti-Palestinian Zionist parties. Not surprisingly, it was in neglected Palestinian neighborhoods of towns like Ramla and Lydda where Palestinian rap was born.

I was in Ramla to see one of the best young rappers in Israel, Sameh Zakout, aka Saz, a baby-faced MC with a linebacker’s body, who is also a cousin of Tamer Nafar, a founder of the seminal Palestinian rap group Dam. As we walked through Ramla’s decrepit souk, Saz gesticulated wildly as he spoke, filling me in on how the poverty and closed horizons that define life in Israel for the 1.4 million Palestinian citizens have impacted his life. “We wanna feel human,” he explained in rapid-fire Arabic punctuated by Hebrew and English. “But instead the Jews are against us and call us a threat, a ‘cancer’ [as many senior Israeli officials have called Palestinians over the years]. They don’t want to accept that we have the same dreams as them. And how can we achieve them when we’re closed into these ghettos with little hope of improving our lives and the government treats us as a danger who isn’t worth shit?”

Saz is clearly a political rapper, who barely gets by on income from his music. Yet his financial difficulties don’t stop him from walking around with the swagger of a rap star—and from the way people greet him in the souk, or market, it seems as if he’s one of Ramla’s most famous sons. “Look at this shit,” Saz explained, motioning to the crumbling market and dirty streets around us. “You want to know why I rap? Don’t you listen to Tupac?”

Tupac Shakur is without a doubt the greatest single influence on Arab, and especially Palestinian, rappers. If you think about the violence that trailed Tupac literally from the cradle (his mother and uncle were involved in murders of police officers and armed robbery) to the grave (his own gangland-style murder), you can understand why he’s idolized by aspiring rappers from Brazil’s favelas and South Africa’s shantytowns to the decaying Palestinian neighborhoods of Israel.

Tupac’s powerful intersection of political and gangsta rap has served as the perfect model for young Palestinians whose neighborhoods are similarly drug- and crime-ridden, whose schools are underfunded and subpar, and who are surrounded by a hyperconsumerist culture that is out of reach for most. His tragic and meaningless death resonates strongly with young people who have little hope for the future, however talented they might be.

Saz dropped a verse for me: “My beats are my M16 / and my rhymes are my bullets / Each rhyme is a bullet and it’s going somewhere.” The music he records under these lines doesn’t quite match Tupac’s lushly produced sound, but it captures the same grittiness and intelligence that initially made Pac’s thug-intellectual persona so appealing.

Just as Egyptian activists and metalheads describe their country as a “sick and rotten place,” Saz smells the rot at the heart of his society. As he raps in his song “Yooma”: “History has changed / It is the era of weapons / Do weapons bring victory? Our youth are lost in ridiculous customs and traditions. You smell it at first, this is not the smell of our country; its rotten root has entered inside us.” But as bad as the situation can be for Palestinian Israelis, Saz is the first one to admit that it’s not nearly as bad as in the Occupied Territories, where the construction of the so-called separation barrier or apartheid wall, and the more or less permanent closure of the Territories from Israel, have made the West Bank and Gaza a series of prisons for Palestinians.

When the Dam Bursts

The impossibility of regularly moving through the Occupied Territories has meant that the globalizing force of the Internet has become perhaps the most important way for rappers to communicate with one another, their fans, and the wider world. Dam’s most famous song, “Min Erhabi” (“Who’s the Terrorist?”), has been viewed on YouTube or otherwise downloaded over 2 million times. Without the Internet, Palestinian rap would still exist largely in obscurity; because of it, it has become the most important hip-hop in the Muslim world. Yet before Dam’s Web success is celebrated as an example of the liberating power of the Internet, it’s worth noting that from the perspective of the Israeli government, a cyber-intifada led by Dam and Palestinian Rapperz is far less threatening than the real one, which is precisely why more-militant Palestinians don’t see much to be gained from political hip-hop unless it’s directly motivating an even younger generation to take up the struggle, usually armed.

Unlike foreign rappers or those across the Green Line, Dam, Saz, and other Palestinian Israeli rappers and singers have no choice but to carve out a musical and, through it, political identity that can move back and forth between the Palestinian and the Israeli. Dam (in both Hebrew and Arabic,
dam
means “blood,” and is also an acronym for “Da Arabic Microphone Controllers”) titled one of its biggest Hebrew language hits, “We’re Born Here,” as a direct response to the song “Bladi ve-ardi” (“My country, my land”), by the ultra-Zionist Jewish rapper Subliminal. The song’s video drips with the kind of anger and contempt for the symbols of the Israeli government—especially the police—that used to populate rap videos during the heyday of American rap in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The group is rapping in Hebrew, but the female rapper and R&B singer Abeer Zinati adds a chorus in Arabic.

That the video was shot in Lydda, which looks an awful lot like the West Bank, only adds to the song’s power. “Maximum Jews, maximum land. Minimum Arabs, minimum land” the rap goes, in a summary of Israeli strategy vis-à-vis Palestinians for the last century. To counter it, Dam regularly crosses the Green Line for concerts in Ramallah and other Palestinian towns, uniting Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line and fostering a sense of solidarity that is all but absent on the political level.

Men come to Dam’s shows wearing their best hip-hop bling, kaffiyeh (the traditional Palestinian scarves), and American football or basketball jerseys. Headscarved women can be seen dancing next to their more-secular sisters and brothers as well. Some dance the
debka,
the Palestinian national dance, with the same fervor that the latest moves from J-Lo or Shakira are imitated at concerts in New York.

Yet if songs like “We’re Born Here” and “Who’s the Terrorist?” challenge the positive self-image most Israelis, Diaspora Jews, and supporters of Israel have of themselves, Dam’s goal is not merely to be provocative. As Tamer Nafar explains, “I don’t ask people to be pro-Palestinian or anti-Israeli. I just ask them to listen, read about the situation, and then decide.” Picking up the famous line from Chuck D about rap being the “CNN of the street,” Tamer argues that Arab hip-hop is the “al-Jazeera of the street.”

Abeer Zinati’s goal, by contrast, is precisely to provoke—not just the Israeli establishment, but Palestinian society, and even her own family. As we sat at a café on the campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Abeer explained that her stage name is “Sabreena Da Witch.” She fingered the witch necklace—a figurine of a little witch on a broomstick—that she wears both as a symbol of her power over men and a not-so-subtle buzz-off to anyone (especially family members) who tries to label her or tell her what she can and cannot do. When not working on a new R&B or rap tune, Abeer is a photography major at Hebrew University. She’s also one of the most beautiful singers in the Middle East, but with a roughness—or as she calls it “rudeness, hey, I’m from the ’hood”—that would never be tolerated in more-traditional Arab divas in Lebanon or Egypt.

As she describes her hometown, “You come to Lydda and you feel like the Separation Wall is here, even though we’re well inside Israel. On the one side, beautiful houses and lawns, and on the other—our—side, shit. I don’t know how a rat survives here, how kids aren’t constantly sick. The police put drugs in our neighborhood and let the collaborators deal them, then they surround our ’hoods with checkpoints in order to police us, using the drugs as an excuse. I mean, you’re telling me this is a country that can kill with precision Sheikh Yassine or Abd al-’Aziz Rantisi [two assassinated Hamas leaders] in the middle of a crowd, but the cops can’t figure out where the drugs are in my neighborhood?”

Abeer is not the only Palestinian Israeli female rapper, but she’s without a doubt the most talented. Her voice sounds as if it’s been through a life of pain and joy far longer than her twenty-three years should have given her. Although we’d only just met, her cadences were familiar to me, even when speaking in Arabic. I understood why as soon as we began discussing her influences: “I sing most every type of black music: hip-hop, R&B, whatever. Because I’m Arab and I’m Palestinian, I’m black.” Her home, located in the same poor neighborhood as Dam’s in Lydda, is festooned with pictures of her idol, Tupac, and her musical heroes—Lauryn Hill, Bob Marley, and, most of all, Michael Jackson. “The sadness in MJ’s breath moved me, literally, to sing and dance too. And when I saw vids of Tupac or other gangsta rappers running from the police, it seemed so much like my experiences that I was hooked on hip-hop.”