Heavy Metal Islam (12 page)

No sooner had Slacker, Seif, Stigma, and I sat down to talk, however, than I got a phone call from someone named Ibrahim, saying he was on his way to meet me. I thought it was one of the metalheads I was trying to meet, but when a clean-cut twentysomething in a suit showed up and introduced himself as an editor of the official website of the Muslim Brotherhood, it was clear that I had been mistaken—but also, I reckoned, quite lucky, as I had long been trying without much success to bring together metalheads and Islamists in the same room.

The metaliens did not share my enthusiasm. In fact, the moment Ibrahim introduced himself, they started fidgeting in their seats and glanced around the room nervously. And yet, Ibrahim’s round, boyish face and British-accented English couldn’t have been more different from the media image of bearded, scowling Islamists.

Slacker seemed surprisingly uncomfortable, considering that earlier in the day he’d explained to me that the Brotherhood wasn’t focused on metal anymore, “because they now have bigger fish to fry.” But he and Ibrahim are more alike than he imagined, and not just because both come from very religious families. They also have many of the same cultural tastes, heavy metal aside, and live their lives through their computers and the virtual worlds they create with them. Seif has even more in common with Ibrahim; they both are graduates of English-language universities with MBAs and hi-tech-related jobs. Equally important, Seif and Ibrahim are both searching for an alternative yet authentic identity to the one offered by the Mubarak regime.

Given these similarities, I wasn’t surprised that Ibrahim was happy and perhaps even anxious to hang out with the artists sitting around the lobby’s shabby coffee table. Seif, Slacker, and Stigma were not, and their wariness is understandable, at least regarding the Brotherhood as an institution. For all its talk of moderation, the “new” Brotherhood can still seem a lot like the old one, as it did in the fall of 2006 when Brotherhood members of Parliament tried to have the minister of culture fired for suggesting to a veiled reporter that the headscarf was a step backward for Egypt. Even if such relapses are infrequent, in Egypt’s still-undemocratic political environment, there’s no way to test whether the movement really is sincere, which is why, much to the disgust of Omar and Ibrahim, so many Egyptians—and Arabs more broadly—prefer to continue dealing with the devil they know (corrupt and autocratic regimes) than to risk the even less appealing alternative of a religious state.

Ibrahim, who was forced to flee to the Gulf in 2007 to avoid arrest, wasn’t unsympathetic to my friends’ fears when I asked him—after Slacker, Stigma, and Seif had left—why he thought they were so nervous around him. “But still, they’re being naïve. They should know that the movement is more diverse and less strictly hierarchical today. Women are more involved, and young members have even started blogs, like ‘Ana Ikhwan’ [I’m a Muslim Brother], where they criticize the leadership.”

As an editor of the Ikhwan website, Ibrahim has himself engaged in some not-so-subtle criticism of the actions of other Ikhwan members—indeed, he would agree with a colleague of mine, Samuli Schielke, who’s spent several years studying youth culture in the Egyptian equivalents of “Smalltown, U.S.A.,” that while a growing number of twenty- to fortysomething Ikhwan members like Omar and particularly Ibrahim exhibit a “very surprising openness” toward more-liberal moral and political ideas, the more conservative Islam of their elders is still “prevalent and powerful, at least in Egypt,” including among a significant share of the Brotherhood’s younger generation.

But for me, it’s the conflict between the two Brotherhoods that’s important, as became apparent when a conservative-reading draft of a potential party platform for the Ikhwan containing troubling language about
sharia
and Egyptian law was leaked to the press, and was immediately criticized by many members, especially younger ones. As important is the personal dimension of the transformation of the Brotherhood’s younger generation. This became clear in my conversations with Ibrahim, when I realized how similar his experiences of alienation and suspicion as a Brother are to those of Marz or Stigma as musicians. For Marz, being a metalhead is “demeaning after a while. We work so hard but get no money, no respect, only harassment by police.” Ibrahim’s experiences are no different: “People don’t see me, as an Islamist, as a man. I am discriminated against because I’m a politically active religious Muslim.”

The difference between them is in how they respond to this situation. While Marz wants a space to be left alone, Ibrahim argues, “Here’s the thing I know: If I fight just for myself and my rights, then I’ll never get them. Only if and when I’m ready to fight for everyone’s rights can I hope to have my full rights as a religious Muslim in Egypt.” This is a radically different approach to politics from the one that has traditionally existed among Islamists in the Muslim world, who haven’t been very interested in the rights of other oppressed groups in their societies, particularly those that don’t follow their conservative views on religion and morality. It’s also quite different from the depoliticized metalheads, who have given up on the idea that their struggles could be society’s. Yet giving up on society is precisely what has made the metaliens’ music so dark and their sense of possibility so narrow. “We want to confront the regime,” Ibrahim continued, “not to impose
sharia
or wage jihad against the West or Israel—but to bring real democracy and social justice to Egypt and the region as a whole.”

Such an attitude puts him in direct confrontation with extremist versions of Islam, but also with an “air-conditioned Islam” that is both depoliticized and very accommodating toward consumerist lifestyles. As Ibrahim explains, “Air-conditioned Islam is creating a culture of shadows. Take this new advertisement from the Gulf that’s regularly on TV. It shows two kids playing on their PlayStations when the call to prayer comes. They jump up, and while they run to pray, their joysticks stay floating in the air until they come back and pick up right where they left off. What message is this supposed to send? Is this Islam? The Kuwaiti Ministry of Religion [which sponsored the TV spot] has become more secular than the communists!”

Enough Is Enough! Egypt’s Bloggers Enter the Fray

Egypt’s metalheads are not on the Brotherhood’s radar screen at the moment—and that’s fine with them. But in the last two years the Brotherhood has been reaching out to other secular groups within civil society, most notably the movement of civil society and political activists and bloggers that have coalesced around Kefaya, which has justly received a lot of attention and praise in the Western media for its advocacy of real democratic reforms. But most commentators don’t realize that as reasonable as its goals seem, the movement’s roots are much more radical.

What makes Kefaya dangerous to the Egyptian government and the political elite more broadly is its combined critique of Western foreign policy. It calls for an end to the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the “Zionist devastation wreaked” upon the Palestinian people, and, even more threatening, for an end to the monopoly on political power by Mubarak and his cronies and the establishment of the rule of law. The government has gone to great lengths to weaken Kefaya, from jailing Ayman Nour to arresting, imprisoning, and sometimes torturing hundreds of activists involved in the high-profile protests in support of incarcerated judges.

Perhaps the core of the Kefaya movement is the burgeoning blogger community, which has become the most compelling and threatening social force in the country by bringing together Egyptians of vastly different political, social, and economic backgrounds. But bloggers aren’t just operating in a virtual terrain. They train fellow activists in computer technologies, attend demonstrations and pass out new website information, and—especially important—have energized what was a moribund mainstream opposition with their defiant attitudes and willingness to go to working-class neighborhoods and involve people normally ignored by the country’s opposition elite.

Some of the most important bloggers in Egypt emerged out of the country’s metal scene. Prime among them is Alaa Abdel Fatah, who, along with his wife, Manal Hassan, runs what is likely the best-known blog in Egypt, “Manal and Alaa’s Bit Bucket.” Alaa’s arrest in 2006 and jailing (forty-five days for protesting without a permit) earned him international recognition, awards from groups such as Reporters Without Borders, and regular appearances on Egyptian and Arab TV. He has one uniform whether he’s meeting you at a café or appearing on al-Jazeera: a T-shirt (usually with some form of political symbolism or slogan on it) and a pair of old jeans. His uncombed hair and days-old beard remind me of the twentysomething computer geeks who were at the core of the anti–corporate globalization movements in the 1990s, which is not surprising, since that’s exactly what Alaa is.

But long before he started blogging, Alaa was headbanging. He’s a longtime metal and hard-rock fan, and traces his love of music and computers back to the bands he was turned on to as a precocious thirteen-year old: Pink Floyd, Nirvana, Portishead, Radiohead, Prodigy and, of course, Metallica. “I was mildly harassed when they cracked down on the blackclads and long-hairs in the infamous satanic incident,” he explained as we sipped cappuccino in yet another overpriced coffee bar populated by students and
Lonely Planet
–lugging tourists. “While [the abuse was] comparatively minor, I felt firsthand what my parents tried hard to explain to me: you can’t avoid politics, you can’t just pretend this country is not fucked up. I developed a strong hate of those who wronged the metalheads, and I still fantasize about fragging them all with bazookas.”

Alaa and Manal were among the major advocates for free/open source computing in Egypt. For Manal and Alaa, the Web serves the same function as does the Brotherhood for Ibrahim: it’s a vehicle and a movement through which they can reach a lot of people and help bring about much-needed social change.

Hossam El-Hamalawy, another of the top bloggers on the Egyptian scene and a core member of Kefaya, has been investigating what happens to people who wind up on the receiving end of the government’s “pinpoint violence” for several years. As a journalist and researcher with the
Los Angeles Times,
AP, Human Rights Watch, and now his blog, “El-3Arabawy” (the 3 represents the Arabic letter
ayn
), Hossam has helped break several stories about the routine abuse experienced by democracy activists at the hands of the Mukhabarat.

Although his shaved head and sloppy-chic clothes place him more readily in SoHo than at a metal concert, Hossam’s formative experiences were, like Alaa’s, immersed in heavy metal. “I went to Islamic school, even though my parents were secular, because it was the best in the area. Yet despite being religious it was known as the most metalien school in Cairo, with its own gang, the Immortals of Doom, who had access to the best metal, because we knew stewardesses who’d buy it for us.” But however exciting the scene was for a teenager in 1990s Egypt, it was ultimately too upper-class and apolitical for Hossam. “It was pathetic. And politics and street protests were dead because the government broke the back of the insurgency by cracking down on everyone.” Having no desire to become a musician, he turned his energies to journalism and activism.

Metal may have been too apolitical for Hossam, but his metal background and attitude have helped shape the philosophy behind Kefaya, which he describes as being “very in your face.” This position has no doubt helped make Kefaya fairly popular with more-militant young activists, secular and religious alike. If you surf around Hossam’s site, you’ll see why: exposés on the corruption of the Mubarak regime, photos of the “other Cairo”—the city’s vast shantytowns that the president doesn’t want you to see—and most recently, disturbing video of people being tortured and sodomized by the police.

One of the comments on Hossam’s blog read: “All I can say is Fuck to the silent people.” Yet among the many groups who are remaining publicly silent are, of course, most of the metalheads. Not because they don’t care, but because they’re too scared that the next torture video could feature one of them. As Stigma explained, “Making music is the best we can do.”

The Future Wears Black…

One night after a marathon six-hour rehearsal with Marz (which was so loud my ears hurt after jamming with them for only twenty minutes), I walked the few blocks from my hotel to the home of Shady and Noor Nour. Shady met me halfway to his family’s penthouse apartment. On the way we passed the local Hardee’s, which—as in New Jersey when I was growing up—has become the place for Cairo’s metal population to meet after dark. At 1:00 a.m. on any given night, at least a dozen kids with long hair and black T-shirts hang out in front of the restaurant, while half a dozen military policemen look on with bemused detachment. A few kids semi-clandestinely drink beer bought from a nearby store or smoke hashish-spiked cigarettes.

A metalhead came up to us and announced that he had just finished his thirteenth beer. I had to laugh. How many times in high school had friends and bandmates announced a similarly ludicrous accomplishment? It seems that metalheads are truly the same the world over.

Well, perhaps not exactly. Growing up, I don’t remember any metalheads playing music to deal with their father dying in jail after being imprisoned by their country’s dictatorial leader. But somehow Shady and Noor seemed to get stronger each time we met, even as the prospect for their father’s release dwindled, despite his increasingly dire medical condition. “We listened to metal before our father’s arrest, but it helps us deal with the anger since then, and to convert it to useful forms.” It also seems to have had a therapeutic effect for their mother, Gamila, a well-known journalist, who went to all their shows and stood in the middle of the mosh pit, videotaping her sons.

Shady and Noor are certainly unique in the metal scene, and not just because of their age and precocious talent. Although their band, Bliss, broke up soon after we met, the name remains the best way to describe the expressions on their faces when they’re playing guitar or singing. What is truly different about Shady and Noor, however, is that they are openly, though not conservatively, religious. Shady’s Friday-afternoon ritual is to go to Juma’ (Friday afternoon) prayer at the local mosque with his band and then rehearse for four hours. “We go pray, and then play black metal,” he said with a laugh, knowing how that probably sounded to a foreigner.