Heavy Metal Islam (2 page)

Why Heavy Metal? Extreme Music as the Antidote to Extreme Religious and Political Systems

Metalheads and rappers were among the first Middle Eastern communities to plug into the globalized cultural networks that emerged in the 1980s. From the start, some have been fanatical about replicating the sound and styles of the American and European progenitors of metal or rap. Others gleefully violate the boundaries separating the global from the local, the religious from the secularly profane, the exotic from the mundane, and the hip from what those in the know deride as hopelessly passé. Whatever their approach, these artists have opened new avenues for their fans to reach outside their cultures, countries, and identities, and embrace the possibilities of globalization, a project that is still viewed with much suspicion across the Muslim world.

Cultural sophistication and musical innovation are not traits normally associated with heavy metal. Indeed, say “heavy metal” to the average American or European, and you are likely to conjure an image of a group of slightly deranged-looking white guys with long, crimped blond hair and leather outfits, whose primary talents are sleeping with underage groupies and destroying hotel rooms. Certainly there were plenty of bands like that, especially in the inglorious days of 1980s and early 1990s glam metal. But to define a genre as rich and varied as heavy metal by its MTV-lite version is equivalent to defining 1.5 billion Muslims by a few thousand turban-and-djellaba-wearing jihadis running around Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) hunting infidels and apostates. Both have given their respective cultures a very bad name, and deservedly so. But each constitutes only a small minority of believers, however seemingly powerful their influence over more-mainstream trends.

The term “heavy metal” as a musical term was coined in an early 1970s
Rolling Stone
interview by Alice Cooper, the patron saint of extreme rock (the term itself originated with the “Heavy metal kid” in William Burroughs’s 1964 graphic novel,
Nova Express
). Heavy metal was influenced by a range of musical styles, from the counterpoint of Johann Sebastian Bach and the modern classical repertoire he helped to create, to the riff-driven, often equally virtuostic blues rock of Led Zeppelin, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, and Deep Purple. But if there’s one band that is most responsible for the sound of heavy metal, it’s Black Sabbath. In the early 1970s, Sabbath produced a series of albums that literally defined a new genre of rock ’n’ roll. The band’s combination of relatively slow tempos, heavily distorted guitar riffs in various minor modes, half-tone and even tri-tone modulations (known since the Renaissance as the
diabolus in musica
because of the immoral, even lustful feelings it was felt to arouse), and morbid, death-inspired lyrics spoke to disaffected American and European youth. As guitarist Tony Iommi said about the blighted working-class landscape of his teens, “It made [the music] more mean.”

By 1975 a new style of metal emerged, dubbed “the new wave of British heavy metal.” Led by bands like Judas Priest, Motörhead, Venom, and Iron Maiden, the genre was distinguished both by the increased speed and musical complexity of the songs, and also by an explicitly working-class image that fitted the painful process of deindustrialization and economic adjustment experienced by working-class communities in Britain and the United States in the mid- to late 1970s. Some of the bands, particularly Def Leppard, played up their sexuality in their image and music videos, starting a trend that would become central to the popularity of 1980s glam or hair metal.

When you hang out with most metalheads in Casablanca or Lahore, however, you’ll rarely hear names like Motley Crüe, Warrant, Poison, or other MTV hair-metal icons. Instead, bands like Metallica, Slayer, Deicide, Cannibal Corpse, Possessed, Angel, and other American and Scandinavian inheritors of British metal’s new wave captured the ears and imaginations of musicians and fans alike. These bands created a style of music that was faster and far more intense, powerful, distorted, and technically difficult than any form of rock ’n’ roll before it. Their music arrived in the region via flight attendants who spent their layovers trolling alternative record shops, expats from the United States or Europe, local record stores that sold illegal music under the counter, and the occasional courageous radio DJ.

Together, death metal and its sister subgenres of black metal (which, in contrast to death metal, features screamed rather than growled vocals and often deals with explicitly satanic themes), goth, doom, grind, grind-core, progressive, and ultimately nu-metal, reshaped the musical landscape of the MENA. Uniting all these genres was the military-style discipline it took to play them correctly at superfast tempos, and the violent, war-laden themes that dominated their lyrics. As one Israeli black-metal artist put it, “You play black metal like a warrior.” Many bands, most notably Iron Maiden, designed their album covers and stage shows around the warrior image, although their warriors looked more like Orcs from
The Lord of the Rings
than the clean-shaven and telegenic young soldiers appearing in commercials for the U.S. armed forces.

Indeed, the warrior allusion is a bit ironic, since with the exception of satanic metal, most of the violence in heavy metal is depicted as part of a critique of the violence of society at large, especially its warlike propensities. While it might be hard to imagine when watching Ozzy Osbourne stumble around semi-incoherently in his pajamas on his MTV reality show, in its early days Black Sabbath could be a very political band, as exemplified by the seminal Sabbath song “War Pigs,” in which Osbourne railed against “generals gathered in their masses / just like witches at black masses.”

Osbourne was singing about the Vietnam War at a time when America was lurching toward a new, globalized “free market” that hit the industrial cities of the United States and Britain, and the working class that populated them, particularly hard. The foreboding and sometimes depressing music of Black Sabbath and the first generation of metal bands resonated with their fans, for whom deindustrialization and other economic problems were accompanied by a rise in alcohol and drug use, and a loss of community and hope for a better future. The same process would inspire punk in London and hip-hop in the South Bronx, a few years later, and gangsta rap and grunge on the West Coast of the United States a decade after that.

The community of fans these genres brought together reflected the widespread desire to drop out of, and in a few cases offer some kind of resistance to, a society from which they felt increasingly estranged. Today the aggressive nature of extreme rock and rap have won them fans across the MENA, where young people are facing dire economic conditions with the added burden of political oppression and, in some cases, occupation. The MENA’s metal and rap fans are converting their musical communities into spaces where they can carve out a bit of autonomy, if not freedom, within which they can imagine alternatives to the status quo.

Ultimately, metal, punk, rap, and hard rock are giving their fans a feeling of self-respect and the courage to say to oppressive societies and repressive regimes, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me,” as a famous Rage Against the Machine song of that title put it. Such a grassroots or do-it-yourself attitude is even more important in the MENA and the larger Muslim world, where governments and societies are strongly opposed—sometimes violently—to metal and everything it represents.

Music and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam

Metal and hip-hop musicians are at the center of the anxieties and even hopes of many Muslims in their teenage years through their late thirties. As a percentage of the population of most Muslim countries, this demographic, particularly its younger members, is close to twice as large as its counterparts in the United States or Europe. Musicians from these cultures tend to be much better educated and informed, and more socially active, than their Western counterparts. The music, politics, and lifestyles they embody are crucial to obtaining a full picture of the dynamics of Gen-X, Gen-Y, and “millennial” Muslims, a good many of whom, in the words of one Lebanese journalist, “love metal [and] freedom, and most of all, they love to live.”

I have met musicians, activists, scholars, Islamists, and ordinary people in Morocco, Egypt, Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, the Persian Gulf, and Pakistan. This is a wide swath of the Muslim world, home to upward of 500 million people; but that’s still only one-third of the Muslim world. The Middle East, and our journey, ends at the Pakistan-India border, but the Muslim world, and Muslim metal, hip-hop, and other forms of pop music, continue all the way to Indonesia.

Even within the region of the Muslim world I know best, I’ve still found it hard to overcome the clear imbalance in the preponderance of male voices versus those of young women. The most obvious reason for this is that, as with heavy metal, hip-hop, and other macho forms of music in the West, in the Arab/Muslim world these genres tend to be dominated by men, whether musicians or fans. The problem is so acute that the brochure for a 2006 rock and hip-hop festival in Morocco actually included an open letter from one of the female organizers titled “Girls Wanted,” imploring young women to become more involved in this kind of music. But as one female artist lamented to me, as long as it’s considered immoral, or at least unsafe, for young women to go out on their own to concerts, let alone to be on the stage playing “satanic music,” it will be men who make up the majority of metal musicians and fans in the Muslim world.

Another preconception about Islam that is disturbed by delving into the extreme music scenes of the MENA involves the reality of a thriving secular Islam across the region. Contrary to what most westerners and conservative Muslims think, there are plenty of secular Muslims, even in Saudi Arabia and Iran. Some are in fact atheists, or at least agnostics. Most, however, prefer to separate their religious beliefs from their music or their politics, including those who use their music to deepen their personal faith (as opposed to a Christian metal artist who uses the music to evangelize publicly).

Those who identify themselves as religious are often followers of various Sufi, or mystical, forms of Islam. Their style of faith and practice goes against the grain of the Saudi-inspired orthodox vision of Islam that, thanks to decades of missionizing (
da’wa
in Arabic) by ultraconservative Saudis made possible by the kingdom’s vast post-1973 oil wealth, is assumed by most non-Muslims to have always defined the religion. In fact, until the last forty years or so, Sufism was the Islam of the vast majority of the world’s Muslims, including those in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and Northwest Pakistan.

Why Metal?

Our discussion still elicits the question of why heavy metal has become increasingly popular in the Muslim world—popular enough that the Moroccan government, which has cracked down on home-grown metalheads, sponsored a metal festival organized by American evangelical Christians with ties to the Bush administration as a way of scoring points with both young Moroccans and its primary political and military sponsor. (Though lots of kids came, hardly anyone understood or paid much attention to the evangelizing lyrics.) The answer is quite simple. As Reda Zine, one of the founders of the Moroccan metal scene, explained to me, “We play heavy metal because our lives
are
heavy metal.” That is, the various aesthetic qualities of heavy metal—its harshness, angry tone, and lyrical content—are enmeshed with the quality of life in contemporary Muslim societies. Even for well-educated and relatively prosperous Moroccans, the level of corruption, governmental repression, economic stagnation, and intolerance make it extremely hard to imagine a positive future in their country.

The metal life is not limited solely to metalheads. Young people who don’t like metal can still
do
metal, as I learned when I brought Reda together at a conference with a young Shi’i sheikh from Baghdad named Sheikh Anwar al-Ethari (known to his people as “the Elastic Sheikh” because of his willingness to blend Western and Muslim ideas and practices). After listening to Reda describe why he plays metal, Anwar responded, “I don’t like heavy metal, not because it’s irreligious or against Islam, but because I prefer other styles of music. But you know what? When we get together and pray loudly, with the drums beating fiercely, chanting and pumping our arms in the air, we’re doing heavy metal too.” In other words, whether chanting for Ozzy, Osama, Najaf, or Moqtada al-Sadr, youth culture is crucial to the larger identity formation and debates within the Muslim world.

The difference between the two forms of metal—playing and praying—is that metalheads are generally quite accepting of outsiders and innovation; conservative Muslims, like their counterparts in most other religions, are not. But Sheikh Anwar, and many metal musicians who are deeply religious, are far from conservative, although figuring out how to categorize many of their relationships to orthodox Islam can be hard work. Beirut-based Iraqi researcher and activist Layla al-Zubaidi put it best when we left a clandestine meeting with a group of Moroccan Islamists on our way to the Boulevard festival to see De La Soul. As we zigzagged through Casablanca’s nighttime landscape, she shook her head and complained, “Islamists don’t even know who they are—so how can the people who study them, never mind the West more broadly, figure them out?” This is especially true when governments ban or otherwise restrict their activities so that their fellow Moroccans or Egyptians rarely get the chance to explore their ideas firsthand. And the same problem is faced by metalheads, who, in addition to being arrested, jailed, and even tortured for being “Satan worshippers,” have become the butt of national jokes and a foil for comedians, preachers, and talk-show hosts looking to assure mainstream Muslims of their own moral and cultural superiority.

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