Muslim Metal
Bands crank up multiculturalism in the Islamic world
By MARK LEVINE, The Chronicle Review, July 4, 2008
The 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 p.m. on a hot July day in the city of Fez, Morocco. I was at the bar of a five-star hotel with a group of friends having a drink — at $25 a piece, only one — to celebrate a birthday. The person sitting across from me described a punk performance he had seen in Rabat not long before we had met.
The idea of a young Moroccan with a Mohawk and a Scottish kilt almost caused me to spill my drink. 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 it, and traveling and living across 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 shouldn’t have been surprised. 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?
Their imagination, openness to the world, and the courage of their convictions remind us that Muslim as well as 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 image of Islam and the contemporary Muslim world come largely from the Fox or CNN cable channels, but an 18-year-old from Casablanca who loves hip-hop or a 20-year-old from Dubai with spiked hair are 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, madrassa, or even Al Qaeda training camp.
The University of Chicago music professor Philip Bohlman argues that music’s impact extends far beyond the cultural realm for two reasons. First, because more than any other cultural product, music reflects, even amplifies, the larger social, political, and economic dynamics of a society. Second, because political and economic power inevitably have “an aesthetic property” that mobilizes listeners into action. The same music can be amplified in very different ways: Heavy metal and hard-core rap are blasted by soldiers going into battle, and bombarded at prisoners as part of “enhanced interrogation.” But when the metal or rap is played by young people trying to resist and even transcend oppressive governments or societies, its power and potential are much more positive, reverberating afar.
Ever since 9/11, strategists and commentators on the Middle East have become obsessed with Islam’s demographics; namely, that young people constitute a far higher percentage of the Muslim world’s population in the Middle East and North Africa — upward of 65 percent, depending on the age bracket and country — than in any other region of the world. These teenagers, twentysomethings, and thirtysomethings are not just the future of Islam; they’re ours as well. That’s why it’s so important to listen to what young Muslims, and particularly those on the cultural cutting edge, are playing and saying.
Indeed, if the wide variety of music listened to by young people across the region is any indication, its future will be as diverse as its rock scenes: mainstream and underground, religious and secular, Sunni and Shiite, Christian and Jewish as well as Muslim. Governments in the Middle East and North Africa are naturally wary of the political potential of such hybrid cultural spaces and projects. They understand as well as the region’s metalheads and hip-hoppers that the presence of heavy metal, other Euro-American forms of hard pop music, and other forms of alternative culture can threaten the established order.
Talking to Muslim heavy-metal, rock, hip-hop, and even punk artists and fans, listening to their music, and exploring their interactions with their families, neighbors, and larger societies reveals the Janus-faced nature of globalization. Globalization has long gotten a bad rap in the Muslim world, and among many citizens of the West as well. The reality is much more ambiguous: It’s true that globalization has reinforced the economic and political marginalization of most of the Middle East and North Africa, generating various forms of negative, resistance identities in response. But it also has enabled, in fact encouraged, greater cultural openness, communication, and solidarity across the region, and between Muslims and the West.
Nowhere is globalization’s positive potential more evident than in the media and popular culture of the region today. Globalization may have brought Baywatch, late-night German soft-core porn, and Britney Spears to the Middle East; but it also brought Al-Jazeera, Iron Maiden, and Tupac Shakur. If the region functions as the primary global source of petroleum, arms purchases, and jihadis, it is also home to some of the most innovative cultural products and political discourses of the global era. And most of the people I’ve met are as discriminating in what they pick and choose from the innumerable cultural and political choices offered by globalization as the average American. In fact, they are often more open to new ideas or products that challenge their identities and sensibilities. They have to be; the cultural and political chauvinism that has been the source of so much of America’s troubles since 9/11 is not a luxury they can afford.
Metalheads and rappers were among the first Middle Eastern communities to plug into the globalized cultural networks that emerged in the late 1980s. From the start, some have been fanatical about replicating the sound and styles of the American and European progenitors of metal or rap. Others gleefully violate the boundaries separating the global from the local, the religiously appropriate from the secularly profane, the exotic from the mundane, and the hip from what those in the know deride as hopelessly outdated.
Cultural sophistication and musical innovation are not traits normally associated with heavy metal. Indeed, say “heavy metal” to the average American or European, and you are likely to conjure up an image of slightly deranged-looking white guys with long, crimped blond hair and leather outfits, whose primary talents are sleeping with underage girls and destroying hotel rooms. Certainly there were plenty of bands like that, especially in the inglorious days of 1980s glam metal. But to define a genre as rich and varied as heavy metal by its MTV-lite version is equivalent to defining 1.5 billion Muslims by a few thousand turban- and djellaba-wearing jihadis running around Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province hunting infidels and apostates. Both have given their respective cultures a very bad name, and deservedly so. But each constitutes only a small minority of believers.
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Mark LeVine is a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of California at Irvine. This essay is adapted from his book Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam, published this month by Three Rivers Press. Copyright 2008 by Mark LeVine.