Republic or Death! (30 page)

In July
1979
, just a few months after he'd proclaimed the creation of an Islamic Republic and got rid of the shahs, the country's royal family, Khomeini sat down with a room full of the country's radio broadcasters and, fixing them with his intense stare, announced that music ‘stupefies people who listen to it and makes their brain inactive and frivolous'; that it ‘corrupts Iranian youth'; and that it robs them of their ‘strength and virility'. ‘A youth who spends their time listening to music can no longer appreciate realities, just like a drug addict,' he added, in case the DJs hadn't yet understood that they wouldn't be allowed to play the next Kate Bush single. ‘It's just like opium.'

The next day, headlines around the world screamed that Khomeini had ‘banned music'.

Khomeini's regime did, it's true, place some horrific restrictions on musicians – banning women singing solo in case it aroused men, requiring songs to be vetted, restricting concerts, and closing university music departments. Many of those restrictions are still in place today. But the Western newspapers created the impression that Khomeini – and so all conservative Muslims with him – was against music full stop; that he was railing against every note and melody, every harmony and chord. That couldn't be further from the truth. Khomeini might not have been a fan himself, but songs and music had been at the centre of his revolution, with the million-strong crowds who had woven their way through Tehran and called for him to save them, having sung and chanted continually. Khomeini obviously wasn't going to step in and tell those same people to stop singing – to stop praising him and his revolution. What he was against, though, was music he thought of as decadent and indecent: the pop songs that dominated Iranian radio in the shah's time; that godforsaken rock 'n' roll that seemed to be everywhere. He clarified these views just weeks after the supposed ban in an interview with an Italian journalist, Oriana Fallaci.

That interview is an incredible read. In it, Fallaci pillories Khomeini for all the freedoms he's restricted, especially for forcing women to wear the veil. ‘If you do not like Islamic dress, you are not obliged to wear it,' he seethes at one point. ‘It's for good and proper young women [not you].'

‘That's very kind of you, Imam,' Fallaci replies, before pulling off her chador and throwing it to the floor, a move that led to Khomeini walking out in disgust (when the interview resumed, Fallaci immediately raised the issue of the veil again, causing Khomeini to burst into laughter at her cheek, one of the few times he's known to have ever laughed).

Eventually, Fallaci got round to asking him about the music ban. ‘Why is listening to music a sin?' she said. ‘Our priests drink and sing – even the Pope.'

‘The rules of your priests do not interest me,' Khomeini replied. ‘Music dulls the mind because it involves pleasure and ecstasy. Your music, I mean. It destructs our youth, who become poisoned by it.'

‘Even the music of Bach, Beethoven and Verdi?' Fallaci asked.

‘I do not know those names,' he said. ‘Some of your music is permitted. For example, hymns for marching … and music that makes our youth move instead of paralysing them; that helps them to care about their country.'

Unsurprisingly given those last few sentences, Khomeini seems to have been very much in favour of national anthems. On the eve of the Persian New Year in
1980
, his government adopted a new one, ‘Lasting Iran'. ‘The Islamic Republic has been established,' it begins.

Through the Iranian Revolution,

The palace of oppression has been overturned.

…

Under the Qur'an's shadow,

May Iran be permanent, everlasting.

That march survived a decade until it was replaced with the anthem still in use today (it's equally religious: ‘Your message, O Imam … / is imprinted on our souls,' it goes at one point). Many think Khomeini's death prompted the change; it's actually because the government realised his anthem went on too long.

Iran isn't the only strict Islamic country that has embraced anthems. Saudi Arabia, a place where music isn't played in shopping centres for fear it might offend conservative Salafis, has a sprightly anthem that cries out for Saudis to ‘Glorify the Creator of the heavens' and ‘Repeat:
Allahu Akbar
.' In fact, the only Islamic country that has ever refused them is Afghanistan under the Taliban's austere rule. For three years, from
1999
to
2002
, it was the only country in the world without an anthem, although I doubt anyone suffering there noticed that bizarre fact.

Afghanistan became a place where musicians had to bury their instruments and where anyone found with a cassette tape that didn't feature only religious chanting was thrown in prison. The insides of the cassette itself would be hung from trees as a warning to others. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that even under that brutal regime there would have been something akin to an anthem being sung: a Qur'anic chant, perhaps, that was being heard more frequently than all the others; one that Taliban soldiers instinctively cried out at moments of joy when prayer just wasn't enough. The reason I believe that isn't because I'm an anthem obsessive desperately trying to prove the importance of these songs; it's because of what's happened in the Islamic State, and the prominence music has among every jihadi group in the Middle East.

*

‘When you quote me, can you please make it clear I'm not a supporter of the Islamic State?' Behnam Said asks from his home in Hamburg. The plea seems somewhat unnecessary given his job – he's a member of the German intelligence service, and spends his days analysing jihadi trends – but his concern becomes slightly more understandable when he starts talking about jihadi songs, a topic he completed his PhD in. These songs are known as
anasheed jihadiya
, or
nasheeds
for short – a slightly annoying shorthand given it can also refer to a normal Islamic chant – and Behnam sounds so enthused when he starts talking about them it would be easy to get the wrong idea.
‘The first time I heard “My Ummah, Dawn Has Appeared”, I couldn't get it out of my head for about two weeks,' he says at one point. ‘It touched me in a different way to other
nasheeds
. I mean, I'd sit on the metro and it would just come into my head. The melody's just so striking.' He pauses and lets out an awkward laugh. ‘I do realise just how I sound right now. This is what happens to you if you listen to too many of these songs!'

The Islamic State isn't actually the first group to use
nasheeds
, Behnam says. Jihadi songs date back to the
1970
s, when Islamic fundamentalists in Egypt and Syria – mainly members of the Muslim Brotherhood – started writing them to inspire supporters and get out their message. ‘
Nasheeds
as a genre of religious songs are as old as any other, but these groups started making ones that were political and rebellious against governments and that was entirely new,' Behnam adds. The groups would record them on to cassettes and hand them out to anyone they could, hoping to offer people an alternative to pop music. After clampdowns on the Brotherhood's activities in the early
1980
s, its members fled to countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and started teaching
nasheeds
in training camps, thereby spreading them further. They took advantage of any technological developments, using synthesisers as soon as they became available, for instance, then moving on to sound effects.

Immediately, of course, some scholars condemned the songs as un-Islamic – ‘One wrote that the very idea of Islamic music made literally no sense, like Islamic democracy or Islamic communism,' Behnam says – but soon no one could stop them. Even a teenage Osama bin Laden founded and sang in a
nasheed
group in an effort to avoid being seen as ‘too much of a prig'. By the late
1980
s, Hamas, the Palestinian group, was including
nasheeds
in its official charter, admitting its members' ‘souls will be bored' if they can't listen to some kind of music. Today, most Islamist scholars seem to have realised there is no turning back and have decided to say they're acceptable, at least at times of war. They've become a major propaganda tool for all jihadi groups, although they are seldom commented on in the West due to the fact they are in Arabic and so difficult for non-speakers to understand.

If you want evidence of the impact of these songs, you only have to look at the writings of jihadists, Behnam adds, before telling me about one al-Qaida member who wrote a piece for the group's in-house magazine (for want of a better term) that read almost like a music review, talking of being transfixed by one particular
nasheed
while driving across the Yemeni desert. ‘I closed my eyes as the wind blew through my hair,' he wrote.

I try to get Behnam back to discussing the Islamic State's songs, but he's really more interested in the history of
nasheeds
than what they sound like today. But he has noticed one important thing about them. ‘Older
nasheeds
tend to have been produced by groups that are small and clandestine and so they have a defensive message – “They can torture us, but we'll hold on to our beliefs,” things like that. But the Islamic State's
nasheeds
are not defensive at all. They are about a hope to change the world for ever.'

*

‘I do sometimes find myself having conversations with people about how catchy some of this music is then look back and think: What the hell was I drinking when I decided I liked this stuff?' laughs Phillip Smyth, a young researcher of Middle Eastern affairs and the person I've been reliably informed knows more about modern jihadi music than anyone else. Phillip's your typical ‘beer-drinking, hot-dog-eating, politically incorrect American' (to use his description), but he's also one who happens to be obsessed with jihadi music, so much so, he regularly uses
nasheeds
for his ringtones, something that apparently ‘scares the shit' out of the people he sits next to on his commute each morning.

Phillip
once spent time with a former militia songwriter just so he could see how this type of musician works (‘I sat in this guy's mother's basement, where he had a little keyboard and he put a whole song together in a week and a half'), and he knows these songs so well he can pick them out at any occasion. ‘It's really surreal where you can find these jihadi songs being played,' he says. ‘In Lebanon, you can be in these villages drinking arak, the aniseed liquor, just chilling out, dancing to some music, checking out the girls and whatnot, and then you'll suddenly hear a song from Palestinian Islamic Jihad. I don't even know how to start explaining how weird that is.'

Probably the most interesting thing about jihadi
nasheeds
today, Phillip says, is how different they sound depending on which branch of Islam the musicians belong to. Most Sunni jihadi groups, like the Islamic State, see instruments as haram (forbidden) and so take a bare-bones approach to their composition. Almost all their
nasheeds
are a cappella, the only accompaniment being the sound effects, which can range from galloping horses (symbolising the Prophet's time in the desert) to bombs going off. The only other ornamentation they have is a spoken-word intro in which someone dramatically says the Arabic word for ‘Introducing …' like a judge on
The X Factor
.

In contrast, Shia groups like Hezbollah don't seem to have any such self-restraint
. Many of their
nasheeds
are packed with drums, and sometimes feel as if they place as much importance on rhythm as rap or ragga tunes. Their singers also apparently cannot get through a verse without heavily processing their voices with Auto-Tune, while the videos for their songs are so packed with young men dancing they come across more boy band than militia. ‘These groups will call their songs
nasheeds
, but sometimes they don't even fit in with their own ideologies,' Phillip says. ‘If Ayatollah Khomeini was still around, he'd look at some of the techno stuff and go, “What the hell is this?” But the groups are all operating off some kind of religious guideline. They're all getting an ayatollah in who's saying, “Yes, this is halal. Go for it.”'

Some might think the influx of Western fighters into the Islamic State's ranks would see the group's music move away from a cappella, but Phillip says that's never likely to happen – Western jihadi converts always wanting to appear even more fundamentalist than a group's founders (although they have released some songs in French that seem remarkably close to raps).

There are many groups producing music like the Islamic State's, but Phillip insists ISIS is operating on a level all its own. Most jihadis simply recycle old
nasheeds
, but the Islamic State has set up its own wing, the Ajnad Media Foundation, to produce new ones, and it churns them out on an almost endless array of topics. Some of these are little more than exercises in trolling – naming Iraqi politicians and saying they're coming after them, for instance – but there are others aimed at the people under the Islamic State's control, trying to convince them they've found a ‘life of security and peace', or which try to encourage foreign groups to join the caliphate. There are also many that seem written simply to sate the bloodlust of the militants. ‘
Nasheeds
have become a real comprehensive messaging strategy for ISIS. They know everyone in the Middle East's listening to them.'