Republic or Death! (31 page)

No one knows who the people are actually writing the Islamic State's
nasheeds
– not their names, what they look like, or even their musical backgrounds – but Phillip says they'll be using a production line method with poets writing the words, then passing them to musicians to come up with melodies, before singers record them – a bit like a jihadi version of how Motown Records used to make its hits. Whoever is writing them, though, excelled themselves with ‘My Ummah, Dawn Has Appeared', he says. ‘The Islamic State isn't going to say, “This is our official song.” But it's recognised by the fighters and the supporters as kind of like their anthem. It just spells out everything they stand for: the Islamic State has arisen, we've defeated so many enemies, we're going to keep on doing so. And it also sounds good. I mean, even for an infidel like me, it has a certain quality. It invigorates certain spirits.' Other
nasheeds
have risen in popularity among the groups for a few months at a time, he adds, but this is the one everyone keeps coming back to.

I ask Phillip if the Islamic State could ever officially adopt it as an anthem, in an effort to prove they are actually a state – whether in a few months they'll start sending copies to foreign embassies with official translations attached or handing over recordings to the International Olympic Committee. It's a flippant comment, I know – a bad joke, at best – but he takes it entirely seriously. ‘There's always a possibility,' he says. ‘Iran's technically an Islamist state – it supports the ideology of jihad – and it has an anthem. Is it possible that a Sunni state could do it too? Well, the Ottoman Empire had anthems, although I imagine the quote-unquote Islamic State would say, “That wasn't a real Islamic state, guys.”'

*

It's winter 2014 and I've just written an article about ‘My Ummah, Dawn Has Appeared' for the
Guardian
newspaper, and had the pleasure of reading several hundred comments people have posted about it online. Worryingly, several were from ISIS sympathisers thanking me for bringing their anthem to wider attention, but many are from people angry at me for having written the article at all. All these ask why – ‘Why
in the
world
', in fact – I'd give publicity to the music of murderers, several asking when I'd be booking my plane ticket to Syria to join them. That level of vitriol is a little understandable, as the article didn't actually explain why I thought the fact ISIS had an anthem was important. I didn't explain at the time, because I thought the answer was so obvious: the Islamic State's meant to be made up of the people who should most shy away from anthems – condemn them, in fact. But if it's got an anthem – if, deep down, even its leaders realise a song can help bond people together in ways few other things can – it doesn't just show the ongoing importance of anthems, it shows that ISIS is trying to create a sense of belonging among the people in its territory, rather than just frightening them into submission. It shows it's genuinely trying to create an actual state, with all the hallmarks that involves – and that's something that makes it all the more frightening. It's an uncomfortable conclusion to come to, especially as ‘My Ummah, Dawn Has Appeared' is, in comparison to most anthems, a great song. And that's why every time I find myself whistling it, I have to remind myself what the words mean: ‘… victory is near. / The Islamic State has arisen. The dreaded might has begun.'

 

TO MY EYES
at least, Ma'adi, one of Cairo's southern suburbs, looks like paradise. Trees bend over the roads and flicker shadows across the tarmac; women, their necks heavy with jewels, sit in gardens sipping fruit juices; the usually grey Nile glistens as it flows past. Compared to the middle of the city – where there seems to be nothing but dust storms, drivers leaning on their horns and people demanding to know if I'm a spy (‘Why would I be asking you about your national anthem if I was a spy?' I asked one. ‘I thought you were just really bad at your job,' he replied) – it couldn't be more welcoming.

So it's rather annoying that Tarek Sharara, a composer in his mid-seventies who's giving me a tour, won't stop pointing out its faults. ‘Look, there's another pothole,' he says, as we cruise down a street lined by fig trees. ‘And another! And look at that one – I don't think pothole's even the right name for it; it's too large. These roads used to be pristine,' he adds, wistfully. ‘They used to clean them every day with soap and water. They used to be so shiny you could see your face in them like mirrors!'

I ask when that was. ‘The forties, fifties,' he says, at which point I finally realise why I was told Tarek is the best person in Cairo to speak to about Egypt's first ever anthem, a song that was thrown out after the country's 1952 revolution along with its British-supporting royal family: Tarek is nostalgic for Egypt's past. Not for the time when it was ruled by globe-strutting presidents like Anwar Sadat, who brought peace between Egypt and Israel, or Gamal Abdel Nasser, who led the revolution and then tried to unify the Arab world. But further back, to the days of that royal family. Or maybe earlier still, to the time when it was ruled by the Khedives (‘I actually know Khedive Abbas II's grandson; a very charming man,' Tarek says at one point).

When I ask about his family, his nostalgia becomes somewhat understandable. After the revolution, they lost everything. Land was confiscated, money too, while his father was only allowed to earn a set amount a year (‘The money they permitted him was what he used to spend on cigars!' Tarek exclaims).

We go for lunch in a restaurant that Tarek insists is the only place I can still get a feel for what Ma'adi used to be like, back in the fifties when Cairo was the Paris of the Middle East. It's the sort of place where waiters gently slip cushions behind your back if they think you might be uncomfortable and where food comes out under silver cloches that are pulled away dramatically to leave you gawping at what's below.

As we eat, I start to ask him about that first royal anthem, but he corrects me before I can even finish the question. ‘You shouldn't say it's our first,' he says. ‘It's the only anthem we've ever had. You can't just change anthems. The sound stays in people's hearts, in their memories, for generations. A country should only ever have one, like it has a certain people, a certain language. Maybe you update the words to it to keep pace with the world; you don't want to look backward. But changing the melody?' He shakes his head.

*

The Arab world's anthems aren't, obviously, something you can just tick off by talking about the songs of jihadists, as I did in the last chapter. Its anthems are just as diverse, and relate to each other just as chaotically, as the nations themselves. Some are filled with religious devotion, of course (‘Remember through my joy each martyr; / Clothe him with the shining mantles of our festival,' goes Yemen's), but there are others that spend most of their time praising sultans (Jordan's doesn't just start ‘Long live the king', it also goes out of its way to flatter him, its chorus claiming his honour is ‘Talked about in the depths of books'). Others are simple calls to patriotism, such as Lebanon's ‘All of Us, for Our Country, Our Flag and Glory'; then there are those that spend their short life just screaming for a fight (Palestine's ‘Fida'i', especially, which goes, ‘With my determination, my fire and the volcano of my vendetta, / With the longing in my blood for my land and my home,' leaving you in little doubt what it's talking about).

If you listen to all these it might seem as though they have nothing in common, but there is, in fact, a heart to the region's anthems: Egypt.

In the middle of the twentieth century, Egypt wasn't just the political centre of the Arab world, but its cultural one too: the place with the greatest musicians, the best bands and an elite happy to splurge money on their talent then take credit for anything they created. Its radio stations spread the country's music across much of the region; and its films and emigrants got wherever those couldn't. Because of all that, if you were an emerging nation at that time and you needed an anthem, there was really only one place to go: Cairo. Egyptian musicians are responsible for the anthems of everywhere from Libya to the United Arab Emirates, Algeria to Tunisia, Palestine to Saudi Arabia.

Every country seemed to knock first at the door of the composer Mohammed Abdel Wahab, a man who daringly brought Western rhythms into Arab music, but who would also happily churn out martial compositions for anyone as long as they didn't question the results (he wrote the music to Tunisia's, the United Arab Emirates' and Libya's anthems, none of which you can really tell apart). But the fact that Cairo was once the Arab world's anthem factory isn't what makes Egypt most interesting in the history of these songs; that's more the stories of its own – three songs that couldn't be more tied in with Middle Eastern politics (from Israel to the Arab Spring) and that, more uniquely, are entwined with celebrity in a way few other anthems seem to be.

*

‘Of course people tell you the anthem's by Verdi,' laughs Tarek, sitting beneath a parasol in the garden of the Ma'adi restaurant, having finally stopped reminiscing and instead started talking about Egypt's first anthem, ‘Alsalam Almalaky' (‘Peace to the King'). He pulls out a memory stick and starts playing different versions of it on my laptop: one from a children's music box that twinkles like a fairy tale; another played on an oud that almost demands any men within earshot to link arms and dance (Tarek uses the table as a drum kit as it plays); a third, a traditional brass number, which Tarek sings over so I can hear the anthem's original, somewhat repetitive lyrics: ‘For the king, hail for king. / Hail for the king, oh lion of protection … or something like that anyway,' he says. When he's finished I have to admit it's a fun tune, whichever way it's played – oddly like Chopin's ‘Funeral march' if you put it in a major key – but at the same time it's hardly what you'd expect of a man of Giuseppe Verdi's stature. He was the man who wrote the music for
Aida
(the love story of an Egyptian military commander and an Ethiopian princess during the time of the pharaohs), for
Rigoletto
, for
La Traviata
. He'd surely have written something better than this if it were his anthem, as every Egyptian insists it is. Unfortunately for every Egyptian, every Verdi scholar insists it isn't.

Tarek tries to explain how the mix-up happened. In the late 1860s, Khedive Isma'il Pasha, Egypt's then ruler, commissioned Verdi to write
Aida
for the opening of his opera house – the first in Africa – lavishing him with 150,000 francs to do so (one of the highest fees any musician's ever received). The Khedive was so committed to getting Verdi's name associated with his opera house, he even tried to get him to conduct the opening performance, despite knowing full well that Verdi feared the seas. ‘Is it possible to build a bridge to Italy?' the Khedive is meant to have said.

The production ended up opening two years late because a war meant the costumes got stuck in Paris, but the Khedive still loved the end result, and the attention it brought both him and Egypt – so much so, in fact, he then tried to commission Verdi to write an anthem, suggesting he could perhaps take one of
Aida
's tunes and tweak it a little. But, Tarek says, by then Verdi was long fed up of working for the demanding, if well-paying, Egyptians and so politely declined. Some say another Giuseppe – Pugioli, an unknown composer then working for the Egyptian army – ended up writing the anthem instead and that's where the mix-up was made. ‘But even that's not right,' Tarek says. ‘So who was behind the anthem?' He gives himself a drum roll and mimes a trumpet salute before unveiling the answer that took him months of research to find out. It was an Egyptian, Mohammed Bayoumi Effendi, he says, a man who was in charge of the band on the Khedive's yacht.

‘If it's so clear this Bayoumi's the composer, why does everyone here still think it's Verdi?' I ask. Over the past couple of days several people in Cairo insisted to me it was him, I add, and I'm pretty sure they didn't think I was a British spy they needed to give false information to. ‘The famous Verdi wrote our anthem and no one else's!' Tarek laughs. ‘That's how great Egypt once was – the mother of the world! We could have the greatest composer alive write to our whims. I'd want to believe it too.'

*

‘I wish it was still the anthem now,' sighs Bahaa Jahin, sitting in the offices of the newspaper where he works, his hands resting gently on his bulging stomach. ‘It was born with me – both of us came into the world in 1956 – so I grew up with it, and of course I'm biased towards my father's things, but I honestly think the words to it are far more poetic than any other anthem we've had. They're quite violent, yes,' he laughs, ‘but so are many songs from that time.'