Heavy Metal Islam (17 page)

As Ghidian and his wife, Manal, prepared lunch, I sat in the spacious foyer of his home, staring out at the “Jerusalem Hall” across the street, where eleven years earlier he and I had watched Yasir Arafat and thousands of other Palestinians vote during the first elections for the Palestinian Authority, on January 16, 1996. Ghidian took out his oud and played some of the songs we used to perform together. In the heady days of the Oslo nineties, Ghidian and I played several times a year with Sara Alexander. Israeli Channel 2 television even did a documentary about us. An American Jewish guitar player working with an Israeli peace singer and accordionist (who as a teenager played in the personal band of founding prime minister David Ben-Gurion before “going Arab” and being forced into exile for her views), and a Palestinian oud player with a silken voice, seemed to be a sign of a hopeful future. We even shot a video performing a song in Arabic and Hebrew at the Damascus Gate entrance to Jerusalem’s Old City. Children danced around us and we smiled as we sang because we really thought the future was going to be bright. Sara toured Palestinian refugee camps, teaching children peace songs in Hebrew. Ghidian and I made trips to Paris, where Sara lived, to record and perform together.

In fact, it was the combination of Sara’s acoustic guitar, accordion, and gypsy–Middle Eastern melodies with my distorted guitars and Ghidian’s oud that inspired the journey that has produced this book. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, it planted the musical seed that would allow me to imagine the possibility of heavy metal taking root in the Muslim world a few years later in that expensive hotel bar in Fes.

The three of us don’t play together anymore. Sara hardly comes to Israel from France, and Ghidian risks arrest and a huge fine if he accepts the weekly offers he still receives to be sneaked into Palestinian East Jerusalem to play at a wedding or hotel. (“It’s not a Palestinian wedding without you,” he’s often told.) So mostly he stays in his house and plays for the walls, Manal, and the regular stream of local and foreign friends passing through the Territories, who somewhat masochistically like to spend an hour or two reminiscing about a time when peace seemed to be on the horizon.

“Mark, it keeps getting harder,” Ghidian confided to me as Manal served us a delicious meal of homemade hummus and rice with almonds. “My brother keeps offering to bring me to Australia and get me a job at the university where he’s a physics professor, but this is my home. I was born in this house. My father sat under the same grapevines where they filmed us and Sara playing together so long ago.” The problem for Ghidian is that the Israeli government has adopted a policy that strips Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza Palestinians who have taken up residence outside the country for more than a few years of their residency rights, essentially making them foreigners in their own countries—a fate far worse for Ghidian than being imprisoned in his hometown. It’s this terrible choice that has drained the smile from Ghidian’s once-cherubic face, and made his playing more plaintive than it used to be.

As the sun began to set, Ghidian suggested that Sami and I head back to Jerusalem in order to avoid the long lines at the checkpoints. We arrived just in time for a concert by the Israeli hard-core bands Useless ID and Betzefer. I was excited by Betzefer’s new concert shirt, which had the phrase
SILENCE IS DEADLY
emblazoned on the back. But then the band’s lead singer, Avital, explained that the silence referred to is a lack of music, not a lack of political engagement.

Not long before the show, Useless ID did a rare interview for the weekly magazine of
Yediot Ahronot,
the biggest newspaper in Israel, in which, as guitarist Ishay Berger proudly showed me, they spouted outrageously critical comments about “spitting on Zionism,” and warning kids to “think hard before going into the army.” Their remarks landed them on the cover, proving the old dicta that it pays to be outrageous, and that bad press is good press if it’s
your
press.

But the sense of political urgency in the interview was missing from the show. Whatever their political inclinations, which, judging from their clothes and the ubiquitous smell of marijuana, were presumably on the “left,” the fans at the sweat-inducing show were clearly not interested in lectures about the occupation. As the increasingly large crowd writhed and moshed across the floor and jumped up and down with happy abandon, my friend Sami turned to me and said, “There’s no point preaching to these kids. They can get whatever news they want on the Web or in the newspaper, and anyway, most of them are too fucked up to care what happened in Ramallah or Nablus today.” Before the show Ishay admitted that these days his activism is geared more toward saving the local vegetarian restaurant than ending the occupation. At least there was hope for the restaurant.

The music did give me an itch to play some guitar before I left for the States. Luckily, the Palestinian-Israeli metal band Khalas was rehearsing in Tel Aviv not far from Sami’s house, so we hopped in his wife’s car, put on the Oum Kalthoum, and drove effortlessly home on the spacious and checkpoint-free highway to Tel Aviv. I was keen to meet Khalas because they are one of the few heavy-metal bands—perhaps the only one—I know in the MENA that sings entirely in Arabic.

Khalas (the band’s name is another way of saying “Enough!” in Arabic, like
kefaya
) was in the middle of working out some new songs when I arrived. Not wanting to break the rhythm by sitting them down for an interview, we decided just to jam for a while and then talk. The rehearsal room stank of sweat, cigarettes, pot, and beer. But the members were happy and satisfied with their progress on the new material. While Orphaned Land likes to incorporate Arabic music into its songs, Khalas does so in its membership: two Muslims, a Christian, and a Jew. Khalas’s sound, however, is pure metal, with very little in the way of the Arabesque ornamentation that Orphaned Land and Salem helped make a signature sound of Israeli metal.

One thing was certain, the band wasn’t going to endear itself to Sami; Bassam is not a fan of Oum Kalthoum. “I regarded her as a fat woman,” he once said in an interview. The band decided to open its first album with an instrumental metal version of the classic Oum Kalthoum/Abdel Wahab song “Inta Omri” (which Sami, ever the purist, didn’t find very convincing). Bassam and bass player Rooster are more into Led Zeppelin than the native music of the Middle East. Yet as we blasted through a few more songs, an image of an old building Sami and I had passed on the way to the studio came into my head: Jaffa’s once-famed al-Hambra theater, where, over six decades ago, Oum Kalthoum used to perform. Back then she was the future of Arabic music; for Khalas she’s a past better left behind.

For Bassam and Abed, Oum Kalthoum was a kind of opium for the masses that “lulled crowds into…complete inaction while they listened. We made people move when they heard [our version]. At the very least,” Abed explained, “we can be loud and provocative—and in Arabic, which no one else is doing. But we’re not so directly political because we feel it’s important to focus on social problems, to fix family and social issues first.”

I was in the middle of a discussion with Rooster about what it’s like to be the only Jewish member of a Palestinian metal band that sings in Arabic when Sami tapped me on the shoulder and told me it was time to go. His uncle—it seems wherever I travel in the Arab world, my friends always have an uncle who drives a taxi—would soon be at his house to take me to the airport for a 6:00 a.m. flight home.

A couple of hours later, after my usual interrogation by airport security (being a Hebrew-speaking American with a journalist ID and a passport with stamps from most of Israel’s enemies is a sure invitation to a preflight grilling at Ben-Gurion Airport), I settled into my window seat and scrolled through all the new music I’d just finished arranging on my computer. As the flight attendant did the usual safety demonstration, I thought of something Saz had said to me as we walked through the Ramla market a week earlier. “If one of my lyrics goes into your heart, it’s worth more than a thousand stones thrown at your head. If my raps make the Jews open their eyes and the Arabs open their eyes, then I’ve done my share.”

If only I could get Saz, Dam, Orphaned Land, Abeer, Palestinian Rapperz, Ramallah Underground, Useless ID, Betzefer, Ghidian, Sara, and Khalas to do a show together—set up a stage on both sides of the wall, crank up the amps and turntables, and do a hard-core, oriental-tinged, rap-metal version of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” so loud that it would literally blow the wall down, the way Joshua had done a few millennia before (although for very different reasons). Maybe ten bands and 100,000 watts could change the face of Israel/Palestine where ten years of failed negotiations and ten times as long of violence could not. As the plane settled in at cruising altitude, I opened my computer and put on a track from Ramallah Underground’s latest project,
No Borders,
which features Arab MCs rhyming over tracks by European producers, and European rappers dropping rhymes over tracks by Palestinian producers, while I read about the latest “Hip-hop Sulha,” this one in New York City, bringing together Israeli and Palestinian rappers in a musical version of the traditional Arab ritual (the
sulha
) for mediating and reconciling a conflict. For a moment my idea didn’t seem so crazy.

LEBANON

Music and the Power of Blood

O
f all the countries I’ve visited in the Muslim world, I’ve always felt most at home in Lebanon. Perhaps it’s because of the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Beirut, a city that seems at once fully Arab, European, and quintessentially Mediterranean. Or that, like its neighbor and enemy to the south, Israel, Lebanon’s geography is among the most beautifully diverse in the world, especially for a country no bigger than New Jersey. Or it could be that Lebanese Arabic is one of the dialects of Arabic I know best.

Maybe it’s the abiding warmth of the people despite the war, violence, and political disappointments they’ve had to endure in the last two generations. Ultimately, however, I think I love Beirut because, like the New York I came of age during the 1980s and early 1990s, its vibe is just a bit more intense, hedonistic, and dangerous than most cities. Within, at most, an hour’s drive from downtown Beirut you’ll find a hyper-consumer culture obsessed with copying the latest Euro-American trends in fashion, music, and plastic surgery, a resurgent Shi’ism nurtured on poverty, political discrimination, and military discipline, a foreign-sponsored Sunni radicalism spreading virally through the Palestinian camps and Sunni areas, and the shifting alliances of Lebanese politics—Shi’a Muslims with Maronite Christians, Sunni Muslims with the breakaway Druze sect, conservative Hezbollah with secular Syria. Lebanon is the Middle East in miniature.

Beirut is also one of the most open cities in the MENA. Friends from Egypt or Morocco are shocked at how young women walk around the streets, even in Hezbollah-controlled neighborhoods, in tight jeans, often without headscarves. “They could
never
walk around like this in Cairo,” Egyptian blogger Alaa Abdel Fatah exclaimed as we toured the rubble-strewn streets of the Hezbollah stronghold of Haret al-Hreik, in the south of the city, less than a year after the Israel-Hezbollah war.

But Beirut is also a supremely divided city, just as Lebanon is a divided country. If people are relatively tolerant of each other on the street, Lebanon has one of the most toxic political environments in the world, having been poisoned by two centuries of foreign meddling, war, and corruption. In a way, the country was created by the French to establish a Maronite (the 1,500-year-old Eastern Catholic Church) enclave in Syria that would be loyal to France. It suffered over a dozen years of civil war (1975–1989), almost thirty years of de facto Syrian political and economic control of the country (1975–2006), eighteen years of Israeli occupation (briefly in 1978, and then 1982–2000), and most recently the short but incredibly destructive Israeli-Hezbollah war (summer 2006).

The bombing that killed billionaire developer and former prime minister Rafiq Hariri on February 14, 2005, split a country that had never fully healed from the wounds of civil war and Israeli occupation. On the one side stood most Sunnis, the majority of Maronite Christians, the Druze, and much of the educated upper middle class more broadly. At the initiative of thousands of young activists, artists, scholars, and NGO workers, upward of one million citizens thronged the streets in several mass protests after Hariri’s assassination. They blamed his murder on Syria, and used it as the spark for what became known as the Cedar Revolution or “Cedar Spring” (the Lebanese flag has a cedar tree in its center).

The huge rallies, and the sprawling tent city that emerged overnight at the site of Hariri’s murder, achieved the previously unimaginable dream of ridding Lebanon of its thirty-year direct occupation by Syria. In the process, the Cedar Revolution nurtured a sense of possibility and community that inspired peace-and-democracy activists around the world.