Heavy Metal Islam (33 page)

I asked Junaid why, since he is so involved in the plight of his people, he hasn’t become more explicitly political. Echoing the view of Orphaned Land that if you preach too hard, people will refuse to listen, he explained that “I’m an artist at the end of the day, and I have to think like one. If you want to tell people something this difficult you have to sugar-coat it.”

Although he didn’t participate in it, one example of sugarcoated politics is the 2006 song (and foundation of the same name) “Yeh Hum Naheen,” which means “This Is Not Us.” The official English title is “Say No to Terrorism.” The song features about a dozen of the biggest pop artists in Pakistan, and sounds like an American-style acoustic guitar–driven pop song, except it’s sung in Urdu, with a background track of Qawwali vocal improvisations.

“Yeh Hum Naheen” was written to persuade young Pakistanis that the violent and intolerant Islam they are being fed by so many religious quarters is both wrong and doesn’t represent the true Islam of Pakistan. The lyrics include lines such as “These stamps of death on our forehead are the signs of others” and “The stories being spread in our name are lies.” But while the song reached number one on MTV and The Musik, its Western sound and bevy of secular pop stars seems geared more to the young ravers in Islamabad than to their much poorer and more-militant peers in the madrasas. It’s hard to imagine the song encouraging the much-needed dialogue about both terrorism and the forces that nourish it, even if Junaid Jamshed sang the chorus.

At heart, according to one senior government-appointed religious figure whom I know, the problem is that Pakistan is divided by vested interests that are beyond the reach of any conceivable medicine to heal, no matter how much sugar is added. At best, if enough money is thrown into the medicine chest, one could hope to produce a strange simulacrum of Islamic and Western society, such as have evolved in Dubai or Doha, where huge amounts of wealth and an invisible foreign underclass allow a few lucky Arabs to live the “liberal” Muslim dream next door to their expatriate Texan and British neighbors.

Indeed, if you walk through the airports in Lahore and Karachi, you’ll find advertisements for Emaar Pakistan’s latest luxury development, Crescent Bay, along Pakistan’s Arabian Sea coast. It’s a lovely-looking development, with happy-looking families living in homes that could easily be in Dubai, or Minnesota for that matter. But only a few Pakistanis will be lucky enough to live there—or even work there as the guards, cooks, gardeners, and drivers that make the lives of Pakistan’s elite livable. As I walked past the munaqqababes with their tags on their veils, something Ali Roooh said to me as we drove through one of Lahore’s poor and overcrowded markets rang inside my head: “Mark, Pakistan is doomed unless we can return to our traditions of taking care of each other.”

A few months later, as I sat at home watching on television the assassination attempt of Benazir Bhutto, followed by Pervez Musharraf’s declaration of a state of emergency, I contacted many of my friends in Islamabad, Peshawar, Lahore, and Karachi, and asked if they had any plans to join the pro-democracy protests. None had any plans to join, or even write a good song, as Junoon and other artists had done a decade ago. A few laughed at my naïveté “Most of the musicians I know are busy with video shoots and recording,” Ali explained, “or enjoying the show—which mice are going to get which scraps of cheese. Otherwise life goes on as normal, which means people are watching their dreams, and Pakistan, rot in front of them.”

A few days after Bhutto’s assassination, I called Salman Ahmed. He was emotionally torn, considering the news of her assassination reached him just as he was coming down off the high of performing with Alicia Keyes and Melissa Etheridge at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony for Al Gore in Oslo. But while most of his fellow musicians in Pakistan sat shocked on the political sidelines, he was already thinking of ways to build a new social and political movement by creating a television show that would feature some of the country’s brightest young activists, artists, and scholars discussing how to rebuild civil society from the ground up.

No one knows how bad the situation has to get before Pakistanis, including musicians, take to the streets in large enough numbers to force a change in the system.
Insha’Allah,
Ali, Mekaal, and most of my friends said that some sort of miracle will pull the country out of its current mess. But as of early 2008, it seems that Pakistan—or at least large swaths of it—has gone beyond the point where either music or religion can save it.

EPILOGUE

Which Way to the Future?

Five years ago, when I began this journey in a hotel bar in Fes, Morocco, I had only the faintest inkling of the incredible variety, richness, and sophistication of the music, musicians, and cultures I would soon encounter. Twenty trips and sixteen countries later, I have gained a strong appreciation for the role played by “Western” forms of music like heavy metal and hip-hop in helping young people across the MENA cope with the stress produced by lives spent, at least on the surface, on the margins of their societies.

Some are doctors, others law professors, MBAs, or just plain musicians. Whatever their original training or day job, almost everyone I’ve met has chosen to make rock, metal, or hip-hop their life’s work in the belief that music can help them heal themselves, and their societies. As Junoon’s Salman Ahmed (an MD) put it, “I could heal a lot more people using my guitar as a stethoscope than I could using a real one.”

The question remains whether the MENA’s metal and rap scenes can help stimulate wider cultural and political transformations in the societies of the region. The answer depends on whether the increasingly transnational communities of fans and activists can outwit the policies of “repressive tolerance”—as the twentieth-century German philosopher Herbert Marcuse described it—pursued by governments and corporations since World War II. This strategy involves public support by political and economic elites for greater tolerance and freedom of speech, but only after they’ve rigged the game so that genuine alternatives to the status quo are either co-opted and depoliticized, delegitimated and marginalized, or harshly repressed.

Such strategies have often helped to stifle or defang dissenting voices in so-called advanced democracies. As Thomas Frank demonstrated in his
Conquest of Cool,
this process enabled corporations to “conquer” the 1960s counterculture before hippies could transform their cultural revolution into large-scale political and economic change. More recently, the Bush administration used repressive tolerance during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq to discredit its critics (indeed, Marcuse’s analysis of repressive tolerance is focused on the United States and other democratic societies). In the authoritarian systems of the MENA, this strategy allows a veneer of democracy—or merely promises of democratization—to mask continued marginalization and even intensified oppression of anyone who threatens the power of elites.

Metalheads, and musicians more broadly, have little chance of overcoming the repressive tolerance that passes for “liberalization” and “democratization” in the MENA on their own. But their struggles and successes remind us of a past, and offer a model for the future, in which artists—if inadvertently at first—helped topple a seemingly impregnable system of rule. The model, as the Iranian and other MENA governments are well aware, is the Velvet Revolution that swept across Eastern Europe in the mid- to late 1980s. A generation later, the Iranian government jails activists for being “velvet revolutionaries” precisely because it realizes what a threat a culturally grounded rebellion against the political status quo can be.

The original Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia was a society-wide nonviolent revolt against a repressive Communist government spearheaded by students, playwrights, philosophers, novelists, filmmakers, and musicians. The “Prague Spring” of 1968 inspired a cultural scene in Czechoslovakia that bolstered the country’s pro-democracy struggles during the Soviet occupation and the hard-line Communist governments of next two decades. The most famous group presence on the scene was the Plastic People of the Universe.

Named after a Frank Zappa song, the PPU started out playing covers of bands like the Fugs and, of course, Velvet Underground. Fairly quickly, however, the musical talent of the core members of the group helped the PPU become one of the most innovative bands in Czechoslovakia, one that occupies a unique place in the history of rock ’n’ roll. The PPU combined Western and local styles of rock with an ability to reach both international and domestic audiences (after being “demoted to amateur status” in 1970 by the post-Soviet-invasion government, the band hired a Canadian singer to help them reach an English-language audience). Their wide appeal helped them to become a potent political symbol as a result of the state’s crackdown on freedom of expression and dissent.

Indeed, the PPU was not political by intent, at least at first. But their defiance in the face of the professional and personal costs they suffered for their music inspired other bands and culture producers to join them in their refusal to bow down to the Czech government. Together they nurtured a truly “counter” cultural scene under the political radar that exploded out of the underground just as the era of contemporary globalization commenced in the late 1980s, sparking the wider political rebellion that forced the Communists from power.

There is no reason to assume that Muslim metalheads and rappers who are picking up where Ozzy Osbourne or Tupac Shakur left off can’t play a role similar to that of the Plastic People of the Universe. But any Velvet Revolution that emerges in the MENA will have to look also at the Polish experience in toppling Communism, where religion, in the form of the Catholic Church, and labor activism, in the form of the Solidarity movement, played prominent roles in overthrowing the regime. If the musicians and more-secularly oriented intellectuals can join with the rising generation of progressive religious activists and the leadership of the still-suffering working classes, they stand a good chance of creating the kind of broad community that was behind the revolutions in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the rest of the Eastern Bloc.

“Finally, a real metal community!”

It was a hot March afternoon, and Marz had just spent several hours in the desert being interviewed for
Global Metal,
the sequel to the documentary
Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey,
directed by Sam Dunn. We caught sight of each other as he entered the field of the Dubai Desert Rock Festival, increasingly known as the Mecca of the Middle Eastern Metal Scene. As we kissed hello, Marz surveyed the crowd of 20,000 metalheads, most of them Arab kids, quite a few of them the metal equivalent of muhajababes—jeans, Iron Maiden T-shirts, and headscarves. He had trouble taking it all in.

Though exhausted from the heat, Marz had the wide-eyed, wonder-struck grin of a boy who’d suddenly walked into the world’s biggest candy store. “I never thought I’d see something like this in the Middle East,” he confessed later as we walked around the giant stage, chatting with members of the Atlanta-based group Mastodon while we watched the Swedish death-metal band In Flames run through a powerhouse set.

Already in its third year, Desert Rock’s headliners included Incubus, Prodigy, Robert Plant, and, in the biggest moment in Middle Eastern metal history, Iron Maiden (although it’s not widely known, one of the band’s original lead singers, Paul DiAnno, converted to Islam in the early 1990s). Few crowds have erupted with more energy than did the fans at Desert Rock when Maiden, with its full twenty-ton show, hit the stage. And I don’t think I’ve witnessed a more poignant moment at a concert than when the crowd sang Maiden’s anthem, “Fear of the Dark,” in unison with lead singer Bruce Dickinson, lighters aloft in one hand, cell phones in the other to record it for You Tube posterity.

Audience members were literally in tears. One girl, in a muhajababe outfit, told me that she’d been waiting her whole life for this moment. “This is our first time playing in an Arab country,” Dickinson told the audience, visibly taken aback by the crowd’s reaction to the previous song. “I know Dubai is the melting pot. Everybody is here. We have people from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Scotland, Lebanon, Egypt, Sweden, Turkey, Australia, Wales, America, Canada, Kuwait. We have the whole world, just about, here tonight…And we’ll be back.” Robert Plant’s set the next night was equally inspiring. And when he spoke briefly to the audience in Arabic and Urdu—the only artist to do so—the crowd roared in appreciation.