Mark LeVine - Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam

For Alessandro and Francesca, who are just discovering musics ferocious joy, and Lola, for helping to nurture it.

In memory of John Henry Bonham, without whom I would have become a lawyer, and Albert Collins and Johnny Copeland, who invited me into their lives and taught me that its not how fast you can play that matters, its how deep you can bend the note.

INTRODUCTION

Rock and Resistance in the Muslim World

We play heavy metal because our lives are heavy metal.

REDA ZINE, one of the founders of the Moroccan heavy metal scene

I stopped trying to define punk around the same time I stopped trying to define Islam. Theyre not as far removed as you might think.

MICHAEL MUHAMMAD KNIGHT, Taqwacores

Music is the weapon of the Future.

FELA KUTI

T he first time I heard the words heavy metal and Islam in the same sentence, I was confused, to say the least. It was around 5:00 p.m. on a hot July day in the city of Fes, Morocco in 2002. I was at the bar of the five-star Palais Jamai Hotel with a group of friends having a drinkand only one drink, considering they were about twenty-five dollars apieceto celebrate a birthday. Out of nowhere the person sitting across from me described a punk performance he had seen not long before we met, in the city of Rabat.

There are Muslim punks? In Morocco? I asked him. The idea of a young Moroccan with a mohawk and a Scottish kilt almost caused me to spill my drink.

Of course, he replied. And the metal scene here is good too. That the possibility of a Muslim heavy-metal scene came as a total surprise to me only underscored how much I still had to learn about Morocco, and the Muslim world more broadly, even after a dozen years studying, traveling, and living in it. If there could be such a thing as a Heavy Metal Islam, I thought, then perhaps the future was far brighter than most observers of the Muslim world imagined less than a year after September 11, 2001.

I shouldnt have been surprised at the notion of Muslim metalheads or punkers. Muslim history is full of characters and movements that seemed far out of the mainstream in their day, but that nevertheless helped bring about far-reaching changes in their societies. As I nursed my drink, I contemplated the various musical, cultural, and political permutations that could be produced by combining Islam and hard rock. I began to wonder: What could Muslim metal artists and their fans teach us about the state of Islam today?

And so began a five-year journey across the Muslim world, from Morocco to Pakistan, with a dozen countries in between, in search of the artists, fans, and activists who make up the alternative music scenes of the Muslim world. My journey was long, and sometimes dangerous. But the more I traveled and the more musicians I met, the more I understood how much insight into Islam today could be gained by getting to know the artists who were working on what might seem to be the edges of their societies. Their imagination and openness to the world, and the courage of their convictions, remind us that Muslim and Western cultures are more heterogeneous, complex, and ultimately alike than the peddlers of the clash of civilizations, the war on terror, and unending jihad would have us believe.

It might seem counterintuitive to Americans, whose images of Islam and the contemporary Muslim world come largely from Fox or CNN, but an eighteen-year-old from Casablanca with spiked hair, or a twenty-year-old from Dubai wearing goth makeup, is as representative of the world of Islam today as the Muslims who look and act the way we expect them to. They can be just as radical, if not more so, in their religious beliefs and politics as their peers who spend their days in the mosque, madrasa, or even an al-Qaeda training camp. In fact, if we think of what radical really meansto offer analyses or solutions that completely break with the existing frameworks for dealing with an issue or problemthen they are far more radical than are the supposed radicals of al-Qaeda, Hamas, or Hezbollah, who are distinctly reactionary in their reliance on violence and conservatively grounded religious and political imaginations.

Follow the Musicians, Not Just the Mullahs

To understand the peoples, cultures, and politics of the Muslim world today, especially the young people who are the majority of the citizens of the region, we need to follow the musicians and their fans as much as the mullahs and their followers. The University of Chicago music professor Philip Bohlman argues that musics impact extends far beyond the cultural realm, for two reasons: first, because more than any other cultural product, music is aesthetically embedded withinreflecting and even amplifyingthe larger social, political, and economic dynamics of a society; and, second, because political and economic power inevitably have an aesthetic property that the most socially relevant music in a society amplifies in order to move its listeners to action.

Music affords power to those who search for meaning, Bohlman argues, but the same music can be amplified in very different ways: heavy metal and hardcore rap are blasted by soldiers going into battle, and used on prisoners as part of enhanced interrogation. But when the metal or rap is played by young people trying to resist or even transcend oppressive governments or societies, its power and potential are much more positive, reverberating far outside the scenes in which the music is embedded.

Ever since 9/11, strategists and commentators on the Middle East have become obsessed with Islams demographics: namely, that young people constitute a far higher percentage of the Muslim worlds populationupward of 65 percent, depending on the age bracket and countryin the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), than they do in any other region of the world. These teenagers, twentysomethings, and thirtysomethings, are not just the future of Islam, but of the West and the world at large. Thats why its so important to listen to what young Muslims, and particularly those on the cultural cutting edge, are playing, and saying, even when theyre playing and saying things the rest of us might not want to hear. Yet the range of voices that are heard today in the Muslim or global public spheres are both too narrow and far too black and white: the bad Muslim extremists versus the good Muslim liberals and moderates. Reality, needless to say, is much more complicatedand hopeful.

The wide variety of music listened to by young people across the MENA reveals that the Muslim world is as diverse as are its music scenes: mainstream and underground, religious and secular, Sunni and Shii, Christian and even Jewish as well as Muslim. Governments in the MENA are naturally wary of the political potential of such hybrid cultural spaces and projects. They understand as well as the regions metalheads and hip-hoppers how the presence of heavy metal, other supposedly Western forms of hard pop music, and alternative cultures more broadly threaten the established order, and through it their political power. Thats why most governments attempt to censor, and when that fails, either to co-opt or more violently repress these scenes. Its also why charting the conflicts between artists, censors, religious authorities, and the secret police (Mukhabarat) provides unique insights into the lives, struggles, and hopes of young Muslims around the world today.