Heavy Metal Islam (5 page)

The Makhzen might seem removed from the metal scene, but in fact the relationship between the two is symbolic of the larger problems facing the country today. As one metal musician explained, it’s the Makhzen that decides whether you can realize your dreams. Its long history of behind-the-scenes power has been crucial to the stability of the monarchy. But the price has been an equally stable system of corruption and authoritarianism whose roots are centuries deep, and which continues to make it extremely difficult to achieve real democracy and economic development in Morocco.

Whatever the democratic pretenses, there are limits to what a 2005 U.S. State Department report terms “tolerable dissent” in Morocco—meaning that nothing that represents a popular challenge to the power of the king, the government, or the Makhzen is tolerated—whether it’s the main opposition and Sufi movement, the Justice and Spirituality Association, or the metal scene pushing the boundaries. These limits are clear from the increasing repression against journalists in Morocco in the last few years, even as the ruling elite has allowed increasingly “free and fair” elections to be held.

As exemplified by the Boulevard (and more recently by festivals in Europe devoted to Moroccan metal and rap), musicians and other marginalized groups (for example, Berber-rights groups, anti-globalization activists, and environmental and religious movements) have responded to the complex and often disheartening realities of life in Morocco today by using globalization to create alternative, often grassroots networks that provide the kinds of social, economic, and political space denied by the establishment. These global networks are among the best, if not the only, lines of defense against the toxic strains of globalization to Islam that circle like vultures over the politically and economically weaker countries of the Middle East and North Africa. They help the often young Moroccans who move within them to express their anger at the status quo, exercise autonomy from a system they find exceedingly hard to change, and even formulate a vision and strategy for doing just that.

In Hoba Hoba Spirit’s anthem “El Caid Motorhead” (also known as “Morockan Roll”), the band calls out to anyone who’ll listen that Morocco has developed its own rock ’n’ roll, and with it a powerful community that’s not afraid to take on all who dare attack it. Yet one of Allali’s chief worries remains the loss of social solidarity in Morocco in recent years, and in expressing this concern he’s making a pointed critique of a state in which the king, who is designated as God’s appointed deputy on earth, is considered the binding force that unites the country’s diverse population. This ideology has served the Moroccan political and economic elite surrounding the king quite well, but not the rest of his subjects.

Given its reach into Moroccan society, the Makhzen is well aware of how Hoba Hoba Spirit and other artists are creating new modes of resistance against it. At one of Hoba Hoba Spirit’s concerts, “someone from the Makhzen was standing next to me in front of 100,000 people,” Allali recounted, “and he said, ‘We can’t do this; only you can. Be careful what you say.’ But he didn’t mean this as a warning; he said it with a tone of admiration.”

The man from the Makhzen was also wrong, or, rather, only half right. Yes, rock groups like Hoba Hoba Spirit can bring 100,000 people to a concert, but the only force in the country that can bring out similar and even far greater numbers into the streets for an explicitly political purpose is the Justice and Spirituality Association (JSA), the country’s largest religious-political movement, founded by the famed Sufi sheikh and scholar Abdessalam Yassine in 1981. This is why, as a headline from the newspaper
as-Sahifa
on the second day of the 2006 Boulevard festival described it, the group was in “a war of destiny” with the government, even as metalheads and other cultural subversives in Morocco were finding their social and even political horizons a bit more open than before.

The JSA shares Allali’s view of Morocco as a schizophrenic country. Moreover, both see the kind of tolerated dissent represented by most “alternative”-seeming music and/or religious forces—just edgy enough to seem critical or innovative, but avoiding a direct challenge to the system—as the antithesis of a true political opening. Instead, they point to how difficult it is to work for serious yet positive change in a system that has had centuries to cement its hold on power.

Indeed, the Makhzen does not tolerate dissent that would challenge its power. What it does tolerate, and what the government is regularly celebrated for, is the kind of “bold” economic, political, and social reforms demanded by the United States and international lending and development agencies, regardless of the steep social and economic costs that accompany them. Such reforms have been imposed on Morocco for almost three decades, making the country one of the Arab world’s “early reformers” when it comes to embracing neoliberal globalization. But it leaves the country still behind the curve as far as democracy and freedom of expression are concerned.

There is a strong connection between the slum neighborhoods of Casablanca—home to the
khush pish
who flock to the Boulevard every year—which have grown in step with Moroccan poverty and inequality, the radicalism they breed, and the music that reflects this situation. As Omar Essayed, a member of Nass El Ghiwane, one of Morocco’s seminal musical groups of the 1960s and 1970s, explained in a 2006 interview, mixing great rhythms and subtle political critique has long been a recipe for climbing out of the slums of Casablanca and onto the North African pop charts. But back in his day, music also had to give some hope, to reaffirm the strong bonds that united Moroccans even during troubled times.

Today, he lamented, “Where can young people go? If they have plenty of money, they go to nightclubs. Otherwise it’s the mosque.” There are raves and smaller festivals and concerts, but most of the musicians and activists I know—religious as well as secular—agree with Essayed when he argues that the social solidarity and modest ambition of previous generations of Moroccans have been replaced by extraordinary wealth for a few, and despair and violence for far too many. What’s behind this transformation away from a shared sense of belonging and toward either individualistic ambition or a narrower, religiously grounded solidarity (or both)? In a word, globalization.

As in most Muslim countries outside of the wealthy Persian Gulf states, the majority of Moroccans have been structurally marginalized from the economic processes of globalization, such as increased trade, foreign investment, and adoption of the latest technological advances to modernize industry. And as in Jordan, Egypt, or Syria, whatever economic growth these policies have produced has been accompanied by levels of poverty, inequality, illiteracy, unemployment, and disease that have either worsened, or at best remained anemic.

Moroccan and other peoples of the Muslim world have been exposed to the full force of cultural globalization in other ways as well. All of the satellite dishes you see from the train as you pass by the slums of Casablanca and Rabat bring into the homes of poor, and often religious, Moroccans an endless stream of images, advertisements, half-naked and in many cases fully-naked bodies, and fantasy depictions of life
outremer
(beyond the sea), that few of the people watching them, especially young men, can either resist or ever hope to afford. This is a sure recipe for social anomie and psychological and political distress.

Yet at the same time globalization also makes it possible to watch MTV’s
Headbanger’s Ball,
and dozens of styles of music from across the globe, which have inspired a generation of Morocco’s best musicians to create some of the most innovative new styles of music in the world. And it helps activists forge connections across the Mediterranean and beyond, which have opened up small but potentially significant new spaces for critiquing and offering an alternative to the existing system.

But whether it’s globalization’s negative or positive implications, one thing that became clear to me as I learned more about its many roots and pathways is that the United States isn’t always at the center of these processes. This became clear to me while drinking, I admit, Lipton tea—few people these days bother going through the ritual of preparing the traditional but far more delicious sweet mint tea—with two of Morocco’s leading sociologists, Muhammad Tozy and Abderrahmane Lakhsassi. It was the third morning of the 2006 Boulevard festival, but it wasn’t music that was on their minds. Instead it was the upcoming World Cup, most of which they weren’t going to be able to watch after a Saudi company bought the rights to broadcast the World Cup in Morocco and then demanded that the Moroccan government pay $8 million for the signal (a tidy sum for a relatively poor country), which it couldn’t afford. Only last-minute negotiations with the king ensured that Moroccans could watch a few important matches.

This, Tozy explained, was what globalization meant in Morocco, and it wasn’t America that was behind it. Rather, it was the Saudis and their Persian Gulf brothers who were determining not just what Moroccans could watch on TV, but, increasingly, the shape of their economy and culture as well. The privatization of Moroccan television by foreigners is just one example of how an emerging “Dubai Consensus” is using the unprecedented oil wealth of the Gulf states to integrate other countries of the Muslim world into an OPEC-led regional economy with more success and less opposition than the largely discredited Washington Consensus before it. What we see in Morocco is how, if the United States and the other Western powers set the macro-level conditions for the globalized economy, today their Arab allies are acting in concert to solidify and even strengthen the system’s power in the MENA.

To see the Morocco imagined by the Dubai Consensus, Tozy reminded me, visit the website of the Dubai-based Emaar Properties, perhaps the largest real-estate developer in the Muslim world. There you can fantasize about—or, if you’re one of the few people lucky enough to afford it, actually consider—buying a home in a development like the “Bahia Bay” gated community on the Atlantic Ocean, the luxury golfing complex “Amelkis II,” and “Saphira,” the marina beachfront development in Rabat. Then visit the slums of Rabat, Casablanca, and other towns. Inside the gaping hole between vision and reality lies the cauldron that produces both Morocco’s metalheads and its extremists.

Critiques of Arab neoliberalism are not offered just by curmudgeonly professors. Musicians are just as sensitive to the impact of Gulf hypercapitalism, which has made it even harder for Morocco’s heavily politicized metal scene to travel across North Africa and into the Middle East, where the music is more depoliticized. Reda Zine explains this situation using the same language—an “invasion of foreign cultures”—bandied about by Muslim critics of Western globalization: “We’re estranged from the dull Lebanese music clips that invade our media…In the end, it becomes a question of identity—musical and personal.” In response, the Moroccan metal scene, and Marockan roll more broadly, has acted as a counterpoint to the domination of the production and distribution of popular music by a few Arab media conglomerates. It’s not an easy struggle or a fair fight.

But it’s getting harder to counter the power of global capital in Morocco, as became increasingly evident at the 2006 Boulevard. The festival was in many ways a more professional affair than in previous years. But that’s because it was more corporate as well. Formerly free to the public, the festival now charged for entry (although only a modest fee, equivalent to about two dollars, just enough to keep the really poor out), and had enough security to ensure that those who couldn’t pay couldn’t sneak in. But something was also missing from the 2006 festival, and troublingly so. The year before, when I first attended it, the festival grounds were ringed by tents put up by grassroots NGOs from around Morocco. Many of them were associated with bands at the festival; the volunteers were often young women with headscarves, and they worked on issues ranging from homelessness to AIDS, drug addiction, and human rights. One of the musical highlights was the performance of an all-girl thrash-metal band, Mystik Moods.

In short, the 2005 festival pushed political and gender boundaries as much as musical ones. Walking through the various NGO booths was as exhilarating as standing on the stage. In 2006 all the booths were gone, save for a giant tent selling Red Bull at the back of the field. Few fans needed the energy boost provided by the drink; the music more than sufficed. But with the booths went the grassroots spirit that had made the Boulevard a unique combination of art and activism, and, because of that combination, a unique and valuable cultural and political space.

Perhaps the most telling image suggesting that the balance of power had shifted from the festival’s grassroots organizers to its corporate sponsors was the logo. In 2005 the logo was a silhouette of Amine, in a guitar-god pose—legs apart, head bowed, long hair flowing, ripping into a guitar solo—which was also featured on seventy-five-foot banners on each side of the stage. The T-shirt featured the same image, with the logo of Nokia, the main corporate sponsor, relegated to the side of a sleeve. In 2006, however, Amine was replaced by a rip-off of the old Aerosmith logo, in this incarnation a winged cell phone with the word “Nokia” inside it. Both the T-shirt and the giant banners on each side of the stage bore the same image.