Heavy Metal Islam (22 page)

In fact, what Moe Hamzeh describes as the “Rotana effect” has effectively put out of business both well-known local record companies such as Voie de l’Orient (the label of the seminal Lebanese singer Fairuz), the Saudi label Stallion, and the Egyptian label ’Alam al-fan. Even EMI closed up most of its local business in the Arab world because it couldn’t compete with Rotana. And now other companies, especially mobile communications giants, are moving into the music production and distribution field, making it even harder for small producers to compete.

Thankfully, the categories of music that Rotana hasn’t taken over yet have been Lebanon’s alternative music scenes: rock, metal, and hip-hop. From Moe’s perspective, Rotana’s putting so many Arab labels out of business has actually created room for alternative groups to pursue a DIY strategy, not just in producing and distributing music, but also in producing their own videos, creating their own record labels, and even producing large-scale festivals. The only problem is that once these activities achieve critical mass, they wind up on corporate radar and become vulnerable to corporate co-optation, as happened with the Boulevard festival in Casablanca.

Two Months That Changed Everything

Around the time that Rafik Hariri was assassinated, a young Lebanese video producer had just returned from living in the United States for many years and took a job at Hezbollah’s al-Manar television network. His particular talent was producing bloody music videos, in which the scenes of violence were timed to the beat of the music. His goal, according to one interview, was to remind people of the “power of blood” more specifically, he wanted to encourage young Palestinians to become suicide bombers, which he could hope to do because al-Manar is the second-most-watched station in the West Bank.

The producer, who didn’t reveal his true identity, is Moe Hamzeh’s doppelgänger—his shadowy, somewhat nefarious twin. The two represent the poles of contemporary Lebanese popular culture; one is at the forefront of a politics of hope, the other of a culture of death. As Moe is the first to admit, it was the al-Manar producer who had the better time during the summer of 2006, when Hezbollah, almost simultaneously with Hamas, launched operations that kidnapped several Israeli soldiers for use as bargaining chips for their own prisoners, prompting a massive Israeli response that quickly escalated into full-scale war across much of Lebanon.

How did the hopeful promise of the Cedar Spring end up in a blood-soaked war between Israel and Hezbollah, a little over a year later? Conspiracy theories abound on all sides. But for me perhaps the most important, yet infrequently mentioned, reason for Hezbollah’s unprovoked attack on Israeli territory was the fear by the movement’s leaders that it was losing its once-vaunted social and political power. Almost a generation had passed since the civil war, and six years since Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon. Hezbollah’s main patron, Syria, had been expelled by what started out as a ragtag movement of various Lebanese grassroots groups using nonviolent cultural events (e.g., rallies and marches). The push toward a new political order would surely leave the movement, whose claim to fame was violent resistance (even though it owes its enduring power to its extensive health, educational, and other social networks), far less powerful than it had been. Rather than engage in the hard work of competing on equal footing in a new and more robust public and political sphere, the Hezbollah leadership realized that war would both raise its profile around the region and weaken its domestic opposition, which is exactly what happened.

During the war, Moe sent me the following e-mail from Beirut: “Personally, I am not that well, physically, and psychologically. I am going into very depressive time, watching how this war affected our future…I am not performing anymore…my band members left the country during the war and the main people are not coming back, I am also not able to secure any more money to record the album, etc. etc…. So it is a very delicate phase I am going through.” Not everyone was that paralyzed, however. Layla and most of her activist friends were deeply involved in housing refugees, sometimes in their own apartments in the relatively safe areas of downtown and central Beirut.

Among musicians, the band Scrambled Eggs, one of the most distinctive bands in the Lebanon scene (its unique sound is forged out of the raw materials of progressive rock, no-wave, ambient, noise, and straight-ahead American rock ’n’ roll), stayed in Beirut, even organizing a show to help build solidarity and raise awareness in the foreign press about what it felt were the underreported realities of the war. The concert was titled “Musicians AGAINST Monsters” and was held at Club Social in the trendy, century-old neighborhood of Gemayzeh, located next to the downtown/Solidaire region. Although only blocks from the fighting, it was attended by a large share of the foreign journalists in Beirut, and became one of the few hopeful stories of the summer.

Six months after the war ended, I was back in Beirut, lucky enough to see Blend and sit in with The Kordz on successive nights at Club Nova. Before Blend’s show, Moe and his wife, Manal (pregnant with twins), and I met some friends at a restaurant in Gemayze. The last time I had been there, before the war, it was cordoned off by the army to provide security for a “National Unity” conference that was supposed to—but didn’t—end the stalemate caused by the Cedar Revolution.

This time, months after the war, downtown was again cordoned off, but not for meetings between the competing members of the country’s elite. Instead, the area had been turned into a refugee camp and protest site by Shi’is who had fled the Israeli destruction of their neighborhoods and towns. They knew, from press reports, of the tacit agreement between Hezbollah and Israel in which Hezbollah wouldn’t fire rockets at Tel Aviv or Haifa if Israel didn’t attack Solidaire and other upscale neighborhoods. A quarter that had been emptied of the poor and working class to make way for steel-and-glass high-rises, haute couture boutiques, and other attractions for the elite had been reoccupied by the same class that was expelled over a decade before.

“It’s the revenge of the dispossessed,” one dinner companion explained, who then pointed out that this tent city had lasted far longer than the one erected by the organizers of the Cedar Revolution. Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah told his people that “your resistance and steadfastness dealt a severe blow to the New Middle East plan, which Condoleezza Rice said would be born in the July War. But it was stillborn because it was an illegitimate child.”

It was clear from speaking with contacts in Hezbollah that the protesters were in no mood to relinquish their hold on Beirut’s downtown until they received a bigger piece of Lebanon’s already heavily sliced pie. In the meantime, each night the residents of the tent city shone a huge spotlight on the Parliament building at one end of the central plaza and blasted al-Manar programs through the loudspeakers. They re-created what the seminal postwar German philosopher Jürgen Habermas once dismissed as a “plebian public sphere,” a public sphere for the working-class masses right in the heart of Lebanon’s global city. In doing so, they were trying to ensure that Hezbollah would wind up with more power than before the war, despite the fact that Lebanon remains more divided than ever.

When I arrived at Nova for Blend’s show, and then the next night at The Kordz’s concert, it was clear that things had also changed in Beirut’s music scene. On the one hand, the shows were attended by fewer people than attended the bands’ shows before the war. But on the positive side, the smaller crowd exuded an intense level of camaraderie that was unusual even for the normally gregarious Lebanese. People were hugging and kissing hello with far more intensity, perhaps the result of the shared weeks of hell everyone had gone through.

There was another difference in the feel of the concerts, a kind of desperation in the bands that reflected the increasing lack of hope for most people who weren’t Hezbollah supporters in any kind of positive outcome for Lebanon. This sentiment was on display when Blend played a walloping Oriental metal version of the classic Rogers and Hammerstein song “My Favorite Things” near the end of their show. When the band’s new lead singer screamed lyrics such as “When the dog bites and the bee stings and I’m feeling sad, / I simply remember my favorite things and then I don’t feel so bad,” the absurdity of war couldn’t have been more obvious.

The music was certainly symbolic, but it couldn’t compare with the feeling of actually walking through the rubble of southern Beirut, which looked like a nightmare that even Gazans or Baghdadis haven’t yet woken up to. Almost a year after the war, much of Haret al-Hreik, Hezbollah’s home base, remained utterly in ruins. The streets were filled with pancaked buildings. Sheets and clothing still billowed in the wind out of the now-sandwiched floors. Yet, amid the rubble, Hezbollah was directing a frantic rebuilding effort, and gelaterias, cafés, and small boutiques were filled with customers, in what passed for a normal day in southern Beirut.

Alaa Abdel Fatah and his wife, Manal, who’d joined me in Beirut for a conference on youth and the public sphere that Layla al-Zubaidi had organized, toured the neighborhood with me. Never having experienced war’s devastation before, they were blown away. “It’s so very intense,” Alaa explained. “Lebanon was our—the Arabs’ and Muslims’—hope. Everyone was very excited when they saw Hezbollah winning. But now, as I walk through here and see the result, it’s so depressing. We always thought that if we brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets, we could bring down the government, but this taught us otherwise.”

As he processed his feelings during our tour of the rubble, two girls walked by wearing army fatigues, tight black T-shirts, and full headscarves. They were
muhajababes,
the object of media scrutiny ever since BBC producer Allegra Stratton published a book of that name, playing off the term
muhajaba
that was coined by young Arabs to describe their female peers who wore headscarves along with their tight jeans and T-shirts or designer clothes.

Having baited our eyes with their outfits, they glared at us as they walked by. As we passed, I noticed that each was wearing a yellow rubber wrist band, which looked a lot like the Lance Armstrong cancer bracelet worn by millions of Americans. But then my eye caught the Hezbollah logo on them, and I realized they were merely the newest item of Hezbollah chic, easily purchased, I soon discovered, in the local stationery store along with etched crystal paperweights bearing Nasrallah’s likeness inside, and innumerable Hezbollah books and videos about the war with catchy titles such as
Nasr min Allah,
or
Victory from God
(the Arabic is a play on Hassan Nasrallah’s last name; the text isn’t nearly as interesting).

However distasteful Americans might consider their accessories to be, the young women walking through the rubble in their funky outfits and Hezbollah charms are as much the future of Lebanon as are their funkily dressed sisters in Gemayze or Hamra, musicians and fans alike. Their perspective on the world is global, yet their allegiance is at least partly to Hezbollah, not merely (or even primarily) for religious reasons, but because the movement has managed to defy Israel and the United States, increase the power of their historically marginalized community, run a fairly corruption-free local government, and allow them the space to define their own cultural avant-garde, which is every bit as radical as the one that’s been crafted a few kilometers to the north.

In fact, for all we knew the girls were on their way to class at AUB (they certainly looked like AUB students). Even if they were, however, it wouldn’t change the basic equation that divides southern Beirut, and the Lebanon it represents, from the central and northern parts of the city, and the neoliberal vision of the future that, several years after Hariri’s murder, still governs the worldview and policies of the country’s pro-American elite.

Sheikh al-Mardini captured the despondency felt by most Lebanese I know over Lebanon’s postwar paralysis when I went to check on him and his family on the last day of my trip. As we sat in his bedroom, he recounted how much more divided Lebanese society is after the war. There was a moment after Hariri’s assassination, he explained as his children crawled over him, stealing the cookies his wife had laid out for us, when everyone could have worked together. But Hezbollah only wanted to lead, not participate as an equal, in any move toward the future. “Today, each side in Lebanon has its own culture, and religious and other ideas. At the moment of the Cedar Revolution we could have offered a model not just for the Arab world, but for the whole world. But Syria, Iran, Israel, and other powers all preferred that we be a failed experiment rather than succeed and challenge the existing system, which they all benefit from.”

What troubled both the sheikh and Moe Hamzeh was how religion and culture were working against each other rather than for reform. As al-Mardini explained, “Religion and cultural reform don’t just come with other reforms, they’re crucial to them. That’s why it’s better for all of them [leaders of various factions] if everyone stays asleep, lazy and humiliated.” Moe concurred, adding that “it’s the role of culture to force those questions on their leaders, and it’s the goal of leaders to stop those questions from being asked. And we’re more important than ever because the gap between intellectuals and the rest of society is growing. Society is lazy, the system is lazy, but music can’t be lazy.”