Heavy Metal Islam (4 page)

As I walked backstage, I caught sight of Reda Zine and Amine Hamma, two of the leaders of the Moroccan metal scene. We embraced and high-fived in celebration of how well Amine and the other organizers had pulled off the Boulevard despite all the financial, artistic, and security obstacles that had stood in their way. Amine reminisced about how far the metal scene had come in the last decade. Once upon a time, bands had rehearsed and performed in high schools, broken-down marriage halls, and nightclubs, and had suffered arrests, beatings, and legal prosecution. Now they were on a giant stage with international media attention and tens of thousands of fans.

Reda and Amine are my oldest friends on the Muslim metal scene. I first met Reda, who’s in his late twenties, well over six feet tall, and thin as a reed, while doing Internet research. With his dark olive skin, angular face, and short, loosely wound afro, Reda looks like someone whose ancestors came to Morocco as slaves from Mali or Senegal. At least, I thought, that was the reason he sang and played the music of the Gnawa, who arrived in Morocco as slaves centuries ago, as if it were in his blood for generations. But in fact his family has lived in Dar al-Bayda, as Casablanca is known in Arabic, for as long as they can remember.

Soon after meeting, on the Internet, Reda and I came to understand that we shared what he calls “la même biographie” as musicians, academics, and activists. It was just a matter of time before we went from chat rooms to rehearsal rooms, the recording booth, and ultimately to sharing the stage. I had met Amine the year before, on the first night of the 2005 Boulevard festival, at a midnight jam in the apartment of a mutual friend. We passed around a couple of old acoustic guitars, gimbris, and hand drums, and started talking about the role of music in Morocco. I had long been a fan of Gnawa music, and had performed and recorded with celebrated Moroccan Gnawa artist Hassan Hakmoun. Reda and I had even jammed in Sicily the week before, when we first met at a workshop on heavy metal and Islam that I’d organized in Messina. So I figured I could hold my own in a late-night session.

But I wasn’t prepared for the kind of raw, roots-blues that Amine, Reda, and their friends started to play. As the music droned on and the warm sea air wafted in through the window, the musicians’ voices drifted in and out of harmonies and the unique singsong of Derija (the Moroccan dialect of Arabic that is largely incomprehensible to Arabs east of Tunisia) interlaced with French, Berber, and West African dialects. I tried to imagine how heavy metal fit into this musical equation. A couple of days later, when Reda and Amine hit the stage with their band Reborn and 20,000 kids went crazy, the power and possibility of what Amine calls “Gnawa metal” became perfectly clear.

Reda is a few years older than Amine, and more experienced as a professional musician, but it’s Amine who looks the part of a founder of one of the Muslim world’s best metal scenes. He has the long, wavy black hair that describes the metal look from Morocco to Iran. And he plays guitar the same way he sings Gnawa and plays the gimbri: with a level of skill and authenticity that you’d rarely hear, for example, when an American metal guitarist tries to play the blues.

Like most metalheads, Reda and Amine got hooked on heavy metal in high school. When we first met, they were finishing degrees in Paris: Reda a PhD in Arab Media Studies at the Sorbonne, Amine an MA in the politics of leisure and cultural facilities at the University of Paris. They speak French fluently, as well as respectable English. They move back and forth between metal, Gnawa, jazz, and a variety of other musical genres even more easily.

This fluidity and openness to the world, while remaining rooted in Moroccan culture and concerns, defines the Boulevard festival. Other music festivals, such as the Fes World Sacred Music Festival and the Essaouira Gnawa Music Festival, are better known because they cater to foreigners as well as a large Moroccan audience, and sell an officially sponsored vision of tolerance and dialogue between the Muslim world and the West. The Boulevard is a much less sanitized and more Moroccan affair—a mass of contradictions and incongruities, musical and political. Its goal has always been to use the draw of a few well-known artists to give young Moroccan musicians the chance to gain exposure and experience. That such a festival can attract upward of 150,000 Moroccans over four days is a testament to the power of pop music and youth culture: it’s organized almost entirely by young Moroccans, while dozens of volunteers and an increasing number of music fans come each year from across Europe (particularly France) to listen and perform.

The crowd is as interesting as the artists. People come dressed in strange combinations of metal, hip-hop, and punk attire. One can see a teenager with green spiky hair and baggy, hip-hop style clothing standing next to one in goth makeup, and a few feet away yet another in a black metal T-shirt who’s watching the show with his mother or aunt, who may be dressed in a black, full-length abaya. The most startling sight of the festival, however, occurs when breakdancing competitions between fans erupt on the field between sets, with toprocks, downrocks, handstands, windmills, and other “power moves” being deployed with as much enthusiasm and proficiency as you might have seen on the streetcorners and basketball courts of New York City a generation ago.

Satan and Schizophrenia in Morocco

As Amine tells it, heavy metal arrived in Morocco in the mid-1990s: “In high school I followed all the trends, watching MTV’s
Headbanger’s Ball,
which was the most important show in the third world for metalheads who had access to satellite channels. Nirvana, Guns N’ Roses, Machine Head, Cannibal Corpse, Morbid Angel, Carcass, In Flames, thrash metal from the Bay Area and New York.” Most of the bands were formed by high-school students like Amine, and by the late 1990s the independent, grassroots spirit that is at the heart of most metal scenes also motivated Amine and other young friends to organize “mini-festivals” featuring the best bands from Casablanca.

Soon bands were forming with names like In the Nightmare, Guardians of the Moonlight, Despotism War, Killer Zone, Paranoia, Necrospiritual, and Tormentor of Souls. Among the best of the first crop of Moroccan metal bands was Immortal Spirit, established in 1996 by Amine and several friends. Immortal Spirit was at the forefront of Moroccan metal’s eclectic and hybrid tendencies. The band was founded to “create a harmony between our Moroccan origins and the underground or avant-garde tendencies of metal.” Think thrash with Dadaist ornaments: fast and dirty guitars, blasting drums synched tightly with the bass, with soundscapes and screamed vocals on top. There was hardly anyplace to rehearse; bands often wound up “squatting” in garages of friends whose parents were out of town, or rehearsing in nightclubs before they opened for the night. The only places to play for audiences were in high schools, rented halls, and the odd private party.

Then in 1999 the first Boulevard was organized; with its success, most big metal shows began to be organized by the grassroots organization that put on the festival. Not everyone stuck with the scene, though. Some metalheads “grew up” and left; a few even became Islamists. As Amine put it, “Our first guitarist was wicked at soloing, he was poor but fanatic, like us. But then he became fanatic about religion. He has a
barb
[beard] and doesn’t play or even listen to music anymore.” Immortal Spirit kept going. In the words of one review, its “pulsating and joyful” music reflected not just a “cultural revolution” for Morocco, but the realization that “music is undoubtedly a subversive language, free and harmonious,” as well.

By the early 2000s, heavy metal was one of the major youth forces in the country. Kids would come from all over Morocco and camp out overnight to get good seats at metal concerts, which saw, according to one reviewer, “the unshaven and cosmopolitan Casablanca youth…coming to hear a music sure to piss off their mothers, who are stuck between Celine Dion and marshmallow pseudo-Lebanese pop…and to develop their own political consciousness.” It wasn’t their mothers who were pissed off, however. Instead, it was the Mukhabarat (security services), as metalheads discovered quite painfully when fourteen heavy-metal musicians and fans were arrested in February 2003, tried, and convicted of the absurd crime of being “satanists who recruited for an international cult of devil-worship,” and of “shaking the foundations of Islam,” “infringing upon public morals,” “undermining the faith of a Muslim,” and “attempting to convert a Muslim to another faith”—as if rock ’n’ roll were a religion on a par with Islam. Similar raids have occurred against heavy-metal-listening “devil worshippers” in Lebanon, Egypt, and Iran.

Unlike these countries, however, the strategy of scaring musicians into silence did not work in Morocco. Invigorated human rights and youth groups sent hundreds of activists to a metal concert outside the Parliament building in Rabat a week after the Moroccans were sentenced. Even the unthinkable—a metal-yuppie coalition under the banner “Rockers, Dockers, Meme Combat!”—emerged, while one cartoon depicted Satan in a judge’s chair with a red pentagram (which is, after all, part of the Moroccan flag) handing down a
verdict satanique,
a satanic verdict. But the religious community remained either apathetic and silent about the arrests, or spoke out against the young people, something few musicians have been willing to forgive, or forget.

Marock Sans Frontiers (Moroccan rock ’n’ roll without borders) actually printed an open letter on their website to King Mohammed VI, asking him if the thugs who had arrested and jailed them “acted on your orders.” Considering the penalties for insulting the king, the letter’s boldness is reckless: “We want to believe with all our force, no. But in this case, one can’t escape this fact: some among your subordinates escaped your control. That you have reasons not to clamp down…is, to a point, understandable. But to let the psychosis take hold isn’t.”

Reda’s strategy for defeating what he called “the vampires of intolerance and superstition” was simple: “Trust each other, brandish our tolerance against these hideous visages of regression of all kinds.” But the “each other” he’s talking about is much larger than just Morocco. The “we” that needs to trust itself can come about only through a globalization of solidarity and sympathy. Yet however positive the outcome of the satanic metal affair was from an activist perspective, the incident pitted two forces who could and should be working together precisely because they recognize the same disease in Moroccan society and have a similar interest in building greater democracy and tolerance: rock-’n’-rollers and the country’s oppositional Islamist movements. But government repression, coupled with religious conservatism and cultural stereotyping in society at large, succeeded in keeping these groups apart.

Ultimately the affair was resolved when the musicians were cleared—ironically leaving the music scene stronger than before. This is a very different outcome from the Arab world’s first “satanic metal affair,” in Egypt in 1997, which left the local music scene reeling for most of the next decade. In Morocco, however, within a year new bands such as the thrash-metal outfit Imperium began performing at smaller festivals such as the Sidi Rock Fest and Metal Gig 3, and even organized tours of cities like Meknes and Rabat. Each year, more people came to the Boulevard.

In one of the best rock albums in a long time, the Moroccan rock/reggae/African/post-punk band Hoba Hoba Spirit sings that Morocco is a
blad schizo,
a schizophrenic country. When I asked lead singer and respected journalist Reda Allali why he gave the album this title, he responded bluntly, “Because it
is
a schizophrenic country.” Centuries of power wielded by the Makhzen (the name long used to describe the Moroccan political and economic circle around the king), intensified by European imperialism and now globalization, have made it so. “You have to understand,” he continued, “even our language is schizo. [Derija, the Moroccan dialect of Arabic, is a mix of Arabic, Berber, French, and its own grammar.] No one else, from the Middle East, Africa, or Europe, understands us. And our politics are twisted as well. That’s why, in one song from the album, I sing that I just want a TV that will speak to me without twisting words, which is so important because after so many years of twisted words we’ve lost a feeling of social solidarity.”

As Hoba Hoba Spirit’s music makes clear, Morocco’s painful political and economic realities are never far from the minds of artists and organizers. Everyone realizes that long after the stage, lights, and PA system are packed away from the growing number of festivals around the country, the Mukhabarat and the corrupt and still-oppressive system it serves, remain.

A History of Globalization and Exploitation

Although it involved some degree of violence, Morocco’s struggle for independence did not involve anything like the bloody war waged by Algerians to obtain their independence from France. But the first two kings who ruled after independence in 1957, particularly Hassan II (the father of the current monarch, Mohammed VI) were no less corrupt than their counterparts in the Algerian republic. They curtailed the power of the parliament and other potentially democratic forces in order to ensure the survival and power of the monarchy and the Makhzen, which for 800 years has brought together attendants to the royal family, wealthy businessmen and landowners, tribal leaders, senior military and security officials, and politicians in a stable, if sometimes uneasy, set of alliances.