Heavy Metal Islam (23 page)

One thing’s for sure: both Hezbollah and Lebanon’s hard rockers are expert at reminding people of the “power of blood.” The difference is that Hezbollah and other political parties and militias use the symbolic power of blood to win support for shedding more of it when they deem necessary, while Lebanon’s metalheads and their comrades across the musical spectrum use the symbolic power of blood for the opposite reason: to evoke the futility of violence.

It’s hard to imagine who can initiate a dialogue on these issues, and in so doing give more space to the metaphorical, rather than actual, spilling of blood. Nevertheless, everyone agrees that such a dialogue is crucial to securing a peaceful future. (During one of the country’s periodic political crises, in late 2007, a television ad was aired appealing for dialogue, “if not for us, then for our children. Talk to each other.”) Putting The Kordz or Blend into heavy rotation on al-Manar might be a good place to start. But given Hezbollah’s history of being ahead of the cultural-political curve, the movement might decide it’s more efficient to train its own generation of Islamic rockers to take to the streets, airwaves, and satellite channels by storm.

The question is, will they, or their comrades in Hezbollah’s political and military wings, be willing to share the stage with their peers? Or will an emboldened Hezbollah become more like Rotana and Wal-Mart, seeking merely to crush or buy out the opposition rather than engage it for the common good. Somewhere in the answer to this question lies the future of Lebanon, and of the Middle East as a whole.

IRAN

“Like a Flower Growing in the Middle of the Desert”

T
o travel from Beirut to Tehran is to move between two poles of the “Shi’ite Crescent” that couldn’t be more different from each other. Beirut is a seaside city where even walking in the poor, Shi’i southern suburbs you can’t escape the Mediterranean culture. Its legendary nightlife a few kilometers uptown doesn’t stop even for suicide bombings and civil war. Tehran is roughly eight times the size of Beirut. With twelve million people, it is at least three times as large as all of Lebanon, yet the city seems devoid of character, and has no nightlife to speak of. At least aboveground.

My arrival at the recently opened Imam Khomeini Airport was quite a shock. The airport’s hypermodern glass-and-steel design puts Milan’s Malpensa or Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airports to shame. It seemed a world apart from the stern-looking photos of Khomeini that stare down at you from various angles in the arrival terminal. I was nervous about getting into Iran—and even more so about getting out—given the tense state of relations between Iran and the United States and the United Kingdom. But the passport officer waved me through when he saw my American passport. No questioning, no heavy-handed security people following me. Just “Welcome to Iran,” and off I went.

“Let’s see…you’ve got the British hostages, the crackdown on insufficiently headscarved women, and the escalating nuclear showdown. There always seem to be at least three crises involving Iran these days, don’t there?” Behnam Marandi asked as we walked down Jomuri-ye Eslami street in downtown Tehran, about a block and a half from the British Embassy. A computer programmer and Web designer by profession, Behnam is also one of the main forces behind
Tehran Avenue,
a semi-underground online magazine covering the arts, especially music in and around the city. Not only does Behnam know every important musician in Tehran, he knows what they have to do to survive in the era of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Behnam was actually off by at least one crisis. There was also an American “tourist”—who some people claimed was a CIA operative (it turned out that he was a former FBI agent)—who had disappeared on one of the small Iranian islands in the Persian Gulf. But where were all the protesters I had seen in front of the British Embassy while watching the BBC a few minutes earlier in my hotel room? This was only day five of the “British hostage crisis” that began when Iranian Revolutionary Guards detained a small British naval vessel patrolling the waters close to (Iran claimed inside) the country’s territorial waters. Surely I should have heard them chanting their amusingly histrionic 1970s-era chants, this close to the embassy.

But, as with almost everything in Iran, reality rarely corresponds to the images of the country we see on television. Aside from the 150 or so protesters, many of them either “professionals” brought in for the cameras (and indeed, many milled around until given the cue to chant and march for the cameras) or die-hard regime supporters, Tehran’s twelve million or so residents apparently had better things to do that afternoon. Even a block away from the protest site life went on as usual.

Officially, Iran is a country still obsessed with past humiliations. Newly printed posters of martyrs from the Iran-Iraq war, now a generation removed from public consciousness, cover buildings and utility poles. If you drive by Palestine Square, it’s hard to miss the giant bronze sculpture of a map of Palestine, with life-size figures of women and children on one side, and fighters taking on the Zionist Goliath on the other. “But who thinks or cares about Palestinians?” a friend asked, with derision in her voice. As we walked by the former American Embassy, now home to a museum and offices of the dreaded Revolutionary Guards, we passed a huge, freshly painted mural on a building that read,
ISRAEL SHOULD BE WIPED OUT,
while the walls of the embassy featured numerous insults in Persian and English against the United States. No one pays much attention to them; and indeed the government allows Iranian Jews to visit the country’s mortal enemy, Israel.

Most Iranians don’t want revolution; they just want to manage their lives with as little interference as possible from the government. It’s not easy to stay out of the government’s way, however, when the Ahmadinejad regime constantly shifts the parameters of what’s “Islamically acceptable” behavior, clothing, or music. Yet Iranians also seek to raise their standard of living by pressuring the government to maintain or increase public services and provide a better social infrastructure. It’s the tension between these two desires that gives the ayatollahs and Ahmadinejad breathing room to enforce a social and political system that few Iranians care for.

Officially, I had been invited to Iran to give some academic lectures and meet with members of the religious establishment. But my real reason for coming to Iran was to meet with musicians. “The first thing you need to understand about music in Iran today,” Behnam explained, “is that you can’t show instruments on TV because that’s considered against religion. You can have people playing them on TV, and you can hear instruments and the music, but you can’t see the musicians playing the instruments, except for the daf [a type of drum] or flute—unless, of course, you’ve got an illegal satellite dish.”

We were looking for a quick bite to eat, but that’s not easy to find in downtown Tehran. In most cities of the Middle East, you can’t walk a block without passing several restaurants or food stands. There are restaurants and fast-food-type storefronts in Tehran, to be sure, but compared with most of the region, there’s never been much of a café and restaurant culture in Iran, so most meals are eaten at home.

Indeed, in a society where there’s not much to do outside the home, dinner has become one of Iran’s most important social lubricants. A member of Iran’s top metal band, Ahoora, told me, “Our whole life is inside.” Inside you don’t need to wear your veil, you can blast your music, dance, watch pirated copies of the latest Hollywood—or Bollywood—movies, kiss your girlfriend, and otherwise feel free.

Of course, most Arab/Muslim countries try to control the use of public space by citizens—both where and how they can come together and what they can do and say when they do so. But in Iran the level of control is greater than in any other country aside from Saudi Arabia and parts of Afghanistan; it’s surely the envy of the Egyptian or Pakistani Interior Ministries. As in the old Soviet Union, there simply is no public sphere in the traditional meaning of the term, as a space where citizens meet publicly and freely discuss issues of social or political concern.

There is one big difference between the Iranian regime and its predecessors behind the Iron Curtain: East Germany and the Soviet Union had elaborate internal intelligence networks that reached deep into the private lives of average citizens; in Iran, private space has become increasingly free of government interference in seemingly inverse proportion to crackdowns on the public sphere. Successive governments have come to understand that the majority of Iranians will not tolerate policing of their private lives anywhere near the extent that they’ll accept control of their public identities and actions. And so, for the most part, the state leaves Iranians alone behind closed doors.

And even outside the home, Tehranians have long been adept at finding spaces to gather outside the official gaze—publicly, if not politically. They often take to the mountains north of the city in order, literally, to “get away from it all,” particularly the control of the various arms of the state and its guardians of public morality, the
basij
(Persian for “mobilized”). This feared volunteer force is made up largely of young members of the Revolutionary Guards. For three decades now, when not engaged in war, the
basij
have roamed the country’s main cities, harassing anyone who violates their interpretation of proper Islamic conduct or dress.

The
basij,
and the interests they serve, have made it nearly impossible to find a good place to play or hear heavy metal in Tehran. For the most part, nontraditional music, and rock in particular, is heard not just indoors, but quite literally underground, in basements, the storage rooms of apartment buildings, and parking garages. Performances are occasionally allowed, but only under tightly controlled conditions, and even then they can be canceled with little notice, sometimes in mid-performance. Few countries in the world have repressed non-official public culture, and particularly music, as thoroughly as has Iran.

What most defines Iran for me is a particular musical interval, one traditionally unique to Persian and Indian music. Called the
koron
in Persian, and a “neutral third” by Western musicologists, the first time I heard the
koron
it literally stunned me, since it’s almost completely unknown in Western classical or popular music. It is a microtone, an interval less than the semitone (for example, C to C#), which is the smallest interval traditionally used in Western music. The
koron
is formed by taking the major third of a key and lowering it by somewhere between a quarter-tone and a third-tone, which produces a very strange and unsettling yet somehow “neutral” sounding interval, so it’s difficult for a westerner to tell whether the piece is being played in a major or minor key.

The
koron
is not used very often in Iranian metal because it’s difficult for fretted instruments (and impossible for the piano) to play microtonal intervals. But it helps us understand the complexity of Iranian culture more broadly—that is, the ability to hold two seemingly contradictory positions and achieve a kind of reconciliation, or harmony.