Heavy Metal Islam (34 page)

Desert Rock was never intended merely to be a great concert. But what made it so special was, as Marz exclaimed, the sense of community that permeated the air. However fleetingly, a pan-Islamic metal
ummah
had come into being; one that most metaliens, including Marz, see little chance of building in their home countries, even if, as in Egypt, the situation has improved recently. “The stage would literally have to be right here,” Marz told me, referring to Dubai. “There’s no way our kind of metal [death, doom, and other extreme forms] will ever be accepted in Egypt. Dubai is the future.” Marz was more prescient than he could have imagined. The next year his band played Desert Rock as part of the Battle of the Bands right before the festival.

Finding a Way Toward the Future

The phrase “Dubai is the future” has been used by everyone from Halliburton executives to mega-real-estate developers to describe the unbridled possibilities for satisfying the greed of globalization’s elite in the emirate. One official promotional video refers to it as the “mind-blowing fantasy land in the heart of the desert.” Never mind that Dubai is located on the sea, or that the existence of this supposed utopia depends on the world’s deadly addiction to petroleum, along with the uneasy presence of a super-exploited army of South Asian workers, who keep the city-state running for about five dollars per worker per day.

Giant malls with indoor ski slopes, man-made peninsulas shaped like palm trees and maps of the world, all dot Dubai’s postmodern landscape. But it’s the skyscrapers along Dubai’s main strip, Sheikh Zeyd Road, that the emirate’s leaders have determined should be the visual marker of its wealth, modernity, and global reach. Their steel-and-glass superficiality stands in marked contrast to the lush, soulful, yet violent landscape of Pakistan, which I’d left only hours before.

Unlike much of the Arab world, Dubai’s level of foreign investment, and its economy more broadly, have grown steadily, as have standards of living and other development indicators. Moreover, in contrast to most of the MENA’s authoritarian leaders or monarchs, the leaders of Dubai and the other Gulf emirates have moved away from wasting much of their oil-derived wealth on military spending and vanity projects; instead they are investing in world-class architecture, museums, publishing, education, and media “cities” that are becoming regional hubs for global commerce and cultural production.

Because of these positive developments, the United Arab Emirates’ relatively liberal economy and social mores are touted as the “model for the future” of the Arab world, as the
New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman titled one of his columns. While admitting that it’s not yet a democracy, he argues that “Dubai is the model we should want the Arab world to follow” because it offers a “decent, modernizing model” for other countries of the region.

This is wishful thinking at best. Neither Dubai nor the other emirates have moved close to having a functional democracy. Moreover, Dubai’s small population and large per capita income, coupled with its large, low-wage foreign workforce, makes it an unlikely model for other countries in the MENA. Even the Emirates’ relative cultural tolerance, a necessity given the overwhelming number of foreigners living there, will not easily be emulated by larger Arab/Muslim countries.

Dubai, however, has had little choice but to accept the powerful impact of globalization on its culture. As one senior Gulf minister explained in reference to the foreign influence on the Gulf sheikdoms: “The effects on our culture [are] unavoidable. The world today is one big village. Cultures are melting and a mixed global heritage is being formed. Yes, we might lose some identity, but that is the price we must pay.”

A more optimistic version of this view is shared by Jackie and Laura Wartanian, the founders of the Desert Rock Festival. Indeed, Desert Rock is perhaps as close to counterculture as you can get in Dubai, although it remains well within the limits of the accepted morality there today. “We wanted to create a special community,” Jackie explained to me. “One that starts to know each other, and meet each other at Desert Rock every year. We call our fans ‘disciples,’ and while it’s still in its early stages, every year we can see the disciple community grow.”

She continued, “We wanted the Middle East to experience the same atmosphere, energy, and passion of rock music that we’ve seen at major festivals around the world.” While the festival is decidedly not political, by focusing on still-taboo subjects like AIDS awareness and condom usage, and offering a space where young Arabs of both genders can meet and have fun, together with fans from around the world, the festival can serve as a model for the region. “If one person or two take this message from the Festival with them, they will tell their friends and then the friends will tell the other friend and so on.”

Faraz Kahn, a Pakistani VJ who hosts
Rock On,
a weekly show from Dubai for the Musik, has a unique perspective on the larger significance of Desert Rock. As he explains, “While there are clubs that cater to hip-hop and trance, until Desert Rock there was nothing dedicated to rock ’n’ roll here. And more than helping to grow the metal scene, the festival creates a unified space rather than the barriers normally constructed in the region. In doing so, it’s become a gateway for kids to experience life in a slightly different way, where it doesn’t matter if you’re Muslim or Christian, Buddhist or Hindu, black, white, or brown…Everyone sings together, jumps together, and respects one another.”

Rocking for Peace at the Crossroads of the World

Despite the many positive accomplishments of Dubai Desert Rock and its counterpart 3,769 miles to the west, Casablanca’s Boulevard des jeunes musiciens, neither festival can push the boundaries far enough to challenge their countries’ political systems. A more relevant political and musical model for the future of the Arab/Muslim world lies at the crossroads of East and West: Turkey.

It was in Istanbul that I joined Iranian guitar virtuoso Farzad Golpayegani, along with the Egyptian rock band Massar Egbari, at the fifth annual Barisa Rock for Peace Festival (in Turkish,
barisa
—pronounced “barisha” in English—means peace). The experience reminded me of how much further along Turkey is on the path of democratic development than other countries in the Arab world.

Despite three or four coups (depending on who’s counting) during the last forty years, and the heavy hand of the military in Turkey’s political and economic life, there’s no denying that democracy is strongly rooted in Turkey today. This fact is what led the European Union to begin the long process that could ultimately lead to Turkey’s accession to the EU. But this process has also generated intense debate in Europe over whether Turkey is “European enough” to justify its membership, with even the Pope opposing Turkey’s joining what many European leaders would like to keep a “Christian club.”

For their part, most Turks I’ve met don’t want to be forced to choose between “East” or “West,” between being European or being Muslim. Ethnic Kurds and Armenians retain a strong ethnic (and in some cases separatist) identity, but the majority of Turks consider themselves just plain Turkish. As anyone who’s listened to Turkish pop, rock, or Arabesque music knows, “Turkishness” (
Türklügü
) includes a range of identities that come together with varying degrees of compatibility and success. Indeed, Turkey’s ravenously hybrid music scenes offer innumerable examples of how music moves across national, cultural, and civilizational borders, whether or not politicians and business leaders support such exchanges.

Gergo Barcza, founder and saxophonist of Besh o Drom, one of the hottest Gypsy-inspired bands in the world, explained it to me this way when I met him in Budapest about a month before the festival: “The point is that all these people, the Arabs and the Jews, Armenians and Turks, Bulgarians and Romanians, they all hate each other, but they all listen to the same fucking music. Stupid, no?” He laughed as he considered the absurdity of the dynamic he’d just described. “And in many ways it’s the Turks today who have the most globalized music. It’s taken over popular Romanian music, for example. No one wants to play what we would consider real Gypsy music today. Now they just play variations on Turkish pop. That’s globalization, for better or worse, and it shows how music is deeper even than nationalism. The musicians might be Romanian, Serbian, or Macedonian, but musically their roots are clearly to the East.”

By “East,” Gergo meant Islam, and it’s precisely Islam that has not only Europe up in arms, but millions of secular Turks as well, who fear the rise of a religiously centered culture that is represented by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). The irony is that today it’s Turkey’s Islamists who support greater democracy and integration with Europe, while the country’s once pro-Western military and secular elites are turning to Central Asia and farther east in search of allies who won’t demand they relinquish as much political, economic, and cultural power as would be required to join the European club.

The complex nuances of Turkish politics today are well understood by the organizers of the Barisa Rock for Peace Festival. One of the festival’s main organizers, Avi Haligua, picked up on a theme I’ve heard in countless meetings with musicians and Islamists alike during the last few years: “The problem with the AKP government is not Islam, which has nothing to do with anything since most everyone is Muslim and the country remains as socially open as before. The problem is with the government’s neoliberal policies, and their impact on Turkish workers, the environment, and the cause of peace.”

Such an analysis explains why the Barisa Rock for Peace Festival has next to nothing to say about the secular-religious debates that still roil Turkish society. Its organizers understand the core issues facing their society, and so the festival—which began in 2003 as an alternative to corporate-sponsored summer music festivals such as the “Rock ’n’ Coke”—focuses on the environment, war and militarism, globalization, and various social issues (including, quite loudly, gay and lesbian rights). This combination of great music and progressive politics has helped the festival to grow from around 10,000 fans in its first year to more than 130,000 attendees in 2006. When I played with Farzad Golpayegani in 2007, the number of attendees approached 150,000.

There are many reasons why Barisa Rock has become something of a Turkish Woodstock. To begin with, the festival has been able to grow in size and stature while remaining grassroots because its organizers could build on Turkey’s well-developed network of leftist, peace, environmental, and anti-corporate globalization movements. Together they have more organizational as well as financial resources than their counterparts in most other countries in the region, including the organizers of the Boulevard des jeunes musiciens or Dubai Desert Rock. As important are the social and sexual freedoms experienced by the tens of thousands of fans who camp out for three days in a space that is free of outside interference or prying eyes, with dozens of activist booths and stages for poetry, lectures, and theater, to enrich the experience.

Musically, Barisa resembles the Boulevard des jeunes musiciens at the other end of the Mediterranean in the trampling of musical boundaries that is featured in its lineups each year, which include bands from Ireland to Iran. This is nothing new in Turkish music; as Cahit Berkay, guitarist and saz player for the “Rolling Stones of Turkey,” Mogollar, explained it to me. “You think mixing Eastern instruments over rock grooves is new? We were doing that forty years ago. The key for us is that we never just copied the West. It was always us taking what we heard to a new level. That’s why we still can play in front of 20,000 people after all this time.”

Pulling this off is not as easy as Berkay makes it sound. “There’s a delicate balance we have to keep,” Avi Haligua said. The balance between politics and partying, metalheads and muhajababes, had to be just right: “Politics is the driving force. The environment, peace and justice, women’s issues—all these messages have to get through to the crowd, otherwise what’s the point? They might as well just go to Rock ’n’ Coke. But we have to do it as much through the music, and especially through the sense of community and conversations we create each year and the long-term connections we help forge, as through the information we try to get into fans’ hands and minds.”

The Funky Iranian

For me, round one of the conversation Haligua has tried to create occurred on the festival’s opening night, when I sat in with the group Massar Egbari, whose soulful combination of rock, Latin, and Egyptian melodies and instruments has quickly made it one of the premier bands in Egypt. “We’re about having conversations that can challenge enforced identities and politics,” guitarist Hani El Dakkak explained the morning after their show. “In a situation like ours, where mosque and state are far more powerful than here, you have to be positive, create conversations, not allow the political situation to stop you from reaching out and spreading the word that another future is possible.” But the conversation has to extend beyond Egypt to really succeed. “Like when you came onstage, and without having met us, started trading solos with us. It has to be free, honest, and push the boundaries but with respect,” Hani continued.

Farzad Golpayegani’s British drummer, Eddie Wastnidge, agreed with Hani’s assessment of the role of music in generating such conversations. “And performing such music in Istanbul—it’s the ultimate fusion where East and West can meet, and have met for centuries.” It wasn’t surprising, then, that in the context of ever-worsening relations between Iran, the UK, and the United States, Eddie jumped at the idea of rejoining Farzad and an American guest guitarist at Barisa Rock. It was hard for any of us to pass up the chance to make such a public statement against the political and cultural status quo on all sides.

The most meaningful demonstration of just how powerful that communication could be occurred when percussionist Arash Jafari called out to the crowd, to great applause: “Muslims, Christians…Jews [he paused for a second before adding Jews]. Together, for peace, not war!” It was clear from the crowd’s reaction how important it was for the fans to hear such a statement from a group of musicians whose countries were engaged in a war of words (over Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program) that threatened to move toward military confrontation as the festival was taking place.