Heavy Metal Islam (9 page)

The rap scene best illustrates the shallowness of most Egyptian music today. While powerful local styles of hip-hop have developed in Morocco or Palestine, in Egypt the biggest star among the “popular” class and young people more broadly is Sha’aban Abdel-Rehim, a working-class hero from Cairo (he started life as an “ironer,” or
maqwagi,
in a laundro-mat) who used to be a nightclub singer before becoming an Egyptian phenomenon with his song “Ana bakrah Isra’il” (“I Hate Israel”). In the song he famously boasts, “I hate Israel and I’ll say so if I’m asked even if it costs me my life or I get arrested.”

Unlike his compatriots on the metal scene, however, Sha’aban has no need to worry about being arrested despite his occasional criticism of government ineptitude. That’s because he also sings of his love of Hosni Mubarak’s “broad mind” (in fact, the president has long been the butt of jokes depicting him as stupid). Sha’aban’s Mubarak-good/Israel-bad rap is held up as the epitome of “authentic” Egyptian popular culture today because it allows people to vent anger at Israel that otherwise would be directed at the Egyptian regime.

Metalheads have had to struggle to be accepted as authentically Egyptian against the same political-cultural forces that crowned Sha’aban the prince of Egyptian pop. Even more difficult has been their struggle against so-called traditional popular religious identities that are viewed as authentic by the lion’s share of Egyptian society. Such identities have been the basis for the social and political power of the Muslim Brotherhood, the social movement created in 1928 by Hasssan al-Banna, which, more than any other movement, is responsible for the rise of political Islam.

The good news (for metalheads, if not the government) is that as the Brotherhood moves cautiously into mainstream politics, its leaders, but particularly its younger members, are coming to realize that the best chance for them to answer skeptics is to recognize the plurality of Egyptian society, to stop defining other points of view (particularly those not grounded in their reading of Islam) as being alien and dangerous to Egypt, and in so doing, finally to let the metalheads be.

This marks a fundamental change compared with the mid-to-late 1990s, when Egyptian Islamists played a prominent role in the Arab world’s first genuine satanic-metal affair. The crackdown was initiated by the government on January 22, 1997, after newspapers published a photo from a metal concert allegedly showing someone carrying an upside-down cross. Both Muslim and Christian clerics smelled blood; the press, always looking for a way to boost sales, had a field day with the “satanic” musicians and fans and their fantastical sex-and-death-filled orgies.

Upward of a hundred metal fans and musicians were arrested (some of them as young as thirteen), including dozens who were caught hanging out illegally at the decrepit, cobweb-filled Baron’s Palace, a dilapidated nineteenth-century villa located on one of the main streets of Cairo’s Heliopolis district. The villa was built by a wealthy Belgian industrialist and amateur Egyptologist named Baron-General Edouard Louis Joseph Empain. The Palace had become a favorite haunt of metalheads looking for a creepy place to hang out, spray-paint graffiti, and party. The Egyptian media decided the goings-on were far more macabre (one article imagined how the Palace was “filled with tattooed, devil-worshipping youths holding orgies, skinning cats, and writing their names in rats’ blood on the palace’s walls”).

“All of a sudden I was seeing pictures in the newspapers of my friends, with captions under them describing them as the ‘high council of Satan worship,’” Hossam El-Hamalawy, one of Egypt’s most prominent bloggers and a metalien from the old days, recounted to me. “It was all quite frightening.” It was even more so after Egypt’s state-appointed mufti, Sheikh Nasr Farid Wassil, demanded that those arrested either repent or face the death penalty for apostasy.

To make matters worse, the satanic-metal affair occurred when the government was struggling to deal with a surge in extremist activity that culminated terrorist attacks by radical Islamists on tourist locations in Luxor and Cairo later that year. In its battle for the hearts and minds of the average Egyptian, the Mubarak regime couldn’t be seen as standing by while a growing swarm of westernized and, it goes without saying, Zionist-sponsored vampires shook the foundations of Egyptian morality. With Egypt’s highest religious authorities literally calling for their scalps, the metal scene came screeching to a halt.

The crackdown, and the fear of jail or even execution, was so frightening that some musicians destroyed their guitars and cut their hair to avoid arrest (which is, to look on the bright side, still better than Iran, where the police drag you to jail and cut your hair for you). A decade later, such are the scars of the satanic-metal affair that the majority of musicians I know are scared to speak on record about their music, never mind politics. Marz and several other artists wouldn’t even give me copies of the lyrics to their songs when I first met them. They’re not about to cut their hair or sell their guitars, but they’re also not going to risk setting the scene back another decade just to score a few meaningless political points.

One History, Two Cities—at Least

Most tourists or casual visitors to Cairo get only a circumscribed view of the city. But the experience of living there is central to understanding how and why Egypt’s metal scene developed. It’s not just that the Egyptian government is more repressive than Morocco’s; size matters too. Compared with Casablanca’s population of about 4 million, Cairo’s nearly 24 million people make it the most populous urban center in Africa, with twice as many people as Istanbul and Tehran, and more than all but four of the Arab world’s twenty-two countries.

Tourist attention is focused on such Pharaonic and Islamic monuments as the famed pyramids or Muhammad Ali’s mosque. Tourism brings in about $7 billion annually in revenues, but the city’s economy lives through the networks connecting upscale island neighborhoods like Zemalek, Gezira, and Geziret El Rhoda to the bustle of Cairo’s downtown, and to slightly more dépassé neighborhoods such as Heliopolis, Garden City, and Giza. Surrounding the inner city are middle- and working-class neighborhoods such as Medinat Nasr, the largest residential district of Cairo.

The majority of metalheads I know live in middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods like Zemalek or Muhandasin, filled with high-end coffee shops that provide free wi-fi access, as well as numerous bars and pubs bustling with expats and well-off middle-aged Egyptians out for a drink with their friends or mistresses. At heavily secured five-star hotels such as the Nile Hilton, wealthy American tourists mingle with the country’s burgeoning Islamist bourgeoisie over pastries and coffee.

Yet few of the metalheads I know feel at home in these neighborhoods, at least during daylight hours. They live in a kind of twilight world; like denizens of an Anne Rice novel, they come alive after the sun goes down, when the city exhales 4 or 5 million workers to the suburbs, the pollution has settled down for the evening, and the city becomes livable—or almost. More important, darkness is when a metalhead can walk around with a ponytail, earring, and concert T-shirt, and even carry a can of beer, without fear.

Just how different night and day can be for Cairo’s metaliens became clear as I strolled through Cairo with Stigma, acclaimed as one of the best singers in the Egyptian metal scene. Despite his prodigious talent, however, Stigma can’t walk the streets of Cairo, particularly in his own middle-class neighborhood of El Haram, without suffering some form of abuse. El Haram is a mixture of conservative working-class and petit-bourgeois residents on the one hand, and musicians and nightclubs—of the “traditional” belly-dancing kind—on the other. “There is
no way
I can walk around Haram Street without tying my hair,” he explained to me, “or else people are going to stare at me, make fun of me, and maybe insult and swear at me.

“If you look like an Egyptian and you have long hair…that’s a disgrace,” he says. But it’s not just in El Haram. Walking around greater Cairo or Alexandria with Stigma at most any time of day puts one on the receiving end of unwelcome, sometimes utterly disdainful glances that remind you that you’re not legitimate members of Cairo’s cityscape. In London of the 1970s or the Southern United States of the 1980s, kids had long hair or mohawks, and dressed in punk or metal outfits with the specific goal of ruffling their societies’ feathers. But in Egypt today it can be quite frightening; only in Iran and Gaza have I felt more eyes focused angrily upon unconventionally dressed young people.

The same angry eyes that can make Stigma’s life so uncomfortable also inspire his voice with its anger and power, qualities that don’t quite fit his rather diminutive frame and delicate Egyptian and Indian facial features. His style of singing is literally “brutal,” the technical term for the low and guttural screaming—which one friend described as sounding like the Cookie Monster singing high on angel dust—made famous by seminal American death-metal bands such as Death and Morbid Angel.

When you watch Stigma scream his lyrics in concert, riding the harsh, syncopated guitar riffs and rapid-fire bass-drumming of Hate Suffocation to even higher levels of intensity, the last thing you think about is the first lady of Arabic music, Oum Kalthoum—who worked hard to identify herself with the traditional values and cultural tastes of the Egyptian peasant or villager, or her onetime partner Muhammad Abdel Wahab, with whom she defined the contours of classically inspired Arabic-language popular music. But if Egypt’s metal bands show little interest in blending heavy metal with their local musical traditions (it’s mostly at the edges of the MENA—Morocco, Iran, and Pakistan—that you find this phenomenon), they are inspired both by the same iconoclastic spirit, and by Oum Kalthoum’s improvisatory artistry: her ability to lead her audiences into
tarab,
what in Arabic music is known as a state of musical surrender and ecstasy that has all but disappeared in contemporary Arab pop music—although not at metal concerts.

But the still-shadowy existence of Stigma and so many other Egyptian metaliens also reflects the less celebrated part of this heritage: the realities of Mubarak’s rule, a half-century of military domination of Egypt’s political life, and the legacy of British colonial rule. Western involvement in Egyptian politics began with the brief but violent Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798, the failed attempts at industrialization by the Ottoman viceroy Muhammad Ali and his successors in the first half of the nineteenth century, and increasing European control over the economy that culminated with the British invasion and occupation of 1882. Although Egypt was formally granted independence in 1922, the British effectively controlled the country for the next thirty years, until the Revolution of July 1952.

The Nasserist era of the 1950s and 1960s saw the implementation of a quasi-socialist “authoritarian bargain,” in which the Egyptian people traded democracy for significant gains in social development and welfare. However, Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, “reopened” Egypt to Western capital and influence with his
infitah
(open-door) program that began after the October War with Israel in 1973, when Egypt turned away from the Soviet Union and toward the United States.

Hosni Mubarak’s almost-thirty-year rule has only intensified the drive toward economic liberalization and privatization, which is more accurately described as the handing over of control of key industries to members of the country’s elite. As has occurred elsewhere in the developing world, the structural transformation of the Egyptian economy has transformed the country from a breadbasket of the Mediterranean and the Near East—a position it has held for some 5,000 years—to a net importer of food (this in turn caused the Arab world’s first anti-globalization riots, against an IMF-imposed reduction in food subsidies in 1977). All told, as one of Egypt’s most respected journalists put it to me, almost a century of authoritarian politics and three decades of neoliberal economic policies have today made Egypt a “sick and decaying place.”

The extent of the country’s problems is evident on the drive from downtown Cairo to the villas outside the city where metal concerts and raves usually take place. If you happen to go the wrong way, you wind up driving through the sometimes desperate city that surrounds Cairo’s fashionable neighborhoods, with dilapidated buildings, smog-filled air, decrepit cars running without headlights, a sea of uncollected garbage, and the smell of more than 4 million residents without a functioning sewer system.

How a Music About Death Overcomes Suffocating Hatred

There was a palpable sense of relief as our bus arrived in my neighborhood in Zemalek at the end of the four-hour drive back from Alexandria. Most of the trip was spent driving through the rain on a poorly lit highway, with a driver who had a predilection for hashish-laced cigarettes and an inability to notice the giant twin-cab trucks making illegal U-turns across the divider until it was just about too late to slam on the brakes without going into a spin. It had been a long ride.

As we pulled up to the Hotel Horus, on Ismail Muhammad Street, I was forced to admit something I’d been hoping not to have to disclose. I still couldn’t tell the difference between death, doom, black, melodic, symphonic, grind-core, hard-core, thrash, and half a dozen other styles of metal that make Egypt among the Muslim world’s most eclectic metal scenes. Most bands here reject the blending of metal and local styles that has helped define the scenes in Morocco, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Israel. Even after observing rehearsals and gigs and listening to their demo, I didn’t have a clue to how to describe Hate Suffocation.

Marz answered emphatically that the band is a combination of death metal, a style known for chromatic progressions with detuned guitars (Marz is one of the few guitarists I know who plays a seven-string guitar; the added B below the low E string gives even more power to his power chords), rapid-fire drumming, dynamic intensity, and growled lyrics about death, and black metal, which tends to use screamed vocals and more-melodic and fluid grooves. “But it’s not blackened death metal!” he clarified for me.