Heavy Metal Islam (7 page)

Indeed, being called a witch puts her in the company of the country’s metalhead–Satan worshippers, as they’ve been dubbed by the government and the courts. One thing is for sure, neither want to “suffer in silence” anymore, and both tend to be loud—the rockers and rappers with blasting music and searing lyrics, Nadia Yassine with her no-holds-barred attacks on Morocco’s political system and her willingness to show up at court with her lips taped shut with an X to demonstrate the government’s desire to silence her. As she defiantly explains, “Witches are witches because they think and act in different ways from other people. When people see a witch behaving differently, they get scared.” Think Alice Cooper, Ozzy, or Marilyn Manson wearing a head scarf.

The difference between how Nadia Yassine and the girls from Mystik Moods view the world became clearer when I met with a group of hard-core activists of the JSA on the second day of the 2006 Boulevard. The first thing that strikes someone used to meeting with “Islamists” around the Muslim world is how much in dress (conservative), demeanor (usually very nice, polite yet formal), and worldview (conservative) they resemble conservative Christians in the United States. And their ideologies and rhetoric are similarly confident, and often hostile to divergent views. Discussions with JSA members are quite different, however; their focus on nonviolence and on critiques of neoliberal globalization make them appear to resemble more closely the long-haired activists of the Boulevard than the more dangerous but in many ways
less
radical groups such as Hamas or Hezbollah.

Because of constant surveillance of JSA members by the Mukhabarat, and standing orders to arrest members who congregate in groups larger than three people, meetings with the movement are usually clandestine, and can involve changing cars or taking circuitous routes to the meeting. Our meeting was in the home of an engineer and his wife, a teacher, who live in a working-class neighborhood of Casablanca. While the building was rather drab, the apartment was large and well furnished, reflecting the family’s middle-class lifestyle. The fifteen or so members who came, most in their mid- to late twenties, were dressed in typical Islamist clothing—the men in off-the-rack suits, sporting closely cropped beards, the women in pantsuits or long skirts with loose-fitting jackets and full hejabs, which cover all their hair and neck, leaving just an oval around their face.

I was there to figure out whether the JSA’s truly radical politics was matched by a more tolerant social ethos than is exhibited by most Islamist movements, regardless of their economic agendas: that is, could the JSA members get along and even work with their more musical peers in the metal scene to build the Morocco they both say they want? “Can you be a good Muslim and a good metalhead?” I asked. “Yes, definitely,” one of the women, a schoolteacher, answered. “It’s quite possible. But it’s not just music, you know. Women should be able to do what they want, go to college, whatever. But…” And here I expected the sort of answer that Islamists often give to questions when they know what you expect to hear, want to say the opposite, but don’t want to anger their guest. Instead, she continued, “The main question is, does music lead you to the Prophet and to God?”

Most of the musicians I know in the Muslim world, including metal and rap artists, feel deeply spiritual about their music even when they’re not particularly orthodox in their belief or practice. It leads them closer to what they believe God to be. And since the JSA at heart is a Sufi—and because of this, a spiritually grounded—organization, the fact that most of the musicians I know approach Islam from a Sufi-like perspective creates more resonance between them. In fact, Layla al-Zubaidi, an Iraqi researcher, cultural critic, and metal fan who directs the Heinrich Böll foundation in Beirut, was astonished at the language of the JSA members when she accompanied me to the meeting. “You’ll never hear the word
ruhani,
or ‘spiritual,’ used by Hamas or Hezbollah!” she exclaimed in the cab on the way to the show. “They’re always too busy attacking Israel and other enemies.”

I was also surprised at what they had to say, which didn’t seem to square with what so many musicians have described as the JSA’s support for repressive measures taken against them. “Why, if you believe musicians aren’t necessarily bad Muslims,” I pressed my hosts, “did you come out in support of the arrest of the Moroccan metal artists and their fans in 2003 by supporting the guilty verdicts against them in your papers?”

At this, the assembled group smiled. My host, the engineer, explained, “That’s very interesting, since we don’t have a newspaper! Our newspaper has been banned for years. Our only presence is on the Web. Look, this is a working-class neighborhood, right? You see all the Internet cafés around here? That’s how we reach our people. And that’s the only way. If you read something in an Islamist newspaper, it’s not ours.” In other words, the metalheads were confusing the JSA with the government-approved Islamist groups such as the Justice and Development Party, who substituted frequent rantings against the supposed moral failings of Moroccan youth for a sustained critique of the failings of the government.

While the vast majority of JSA members, young and older, are clearly not metal or hip-hop fans, most members don’t seem to be working actively against popular music, either. Like the Muslim Brotherhood, its Egyptian counterpart, the JSA has a lot more to worry about today than policing the musical tastes of young Moroccans. And it seems as if many musicians are actually even less discriminating in their understanding of Moroccan Islamism than the average JSA member is about the distinctions among the various subgenres of extreme metal. “That’s the problem,” one young woman at the meeting explained. “People have no idea what we’re about, so [they] accuse us of all types of things or confuse us with other Islamist movements, like the Justice and Development Party, which plays the political game and has members in parliament, but who in fact was the group your friend [that is, the metalheads] was so angry at.” Indeed, the few times I’ve offered to set up meetings between metalheads and JSA members, it’s always been the former, never the latter, who have told me to forget about it.

Such cultural and musical openness don’t extend to the JSA’s most senior leaders, it seems. Unlike younger JSA members, Nadia Yassine has fairly strong opinions against both metal and hip-hop. While she admits in the introduction to her book,
Full Sails Ahead,
that rock and hip-hop can “give vent to the distress in the face of a shattered world,” in the end she argues that such music remains “crude” and “devoid of meaning,” and is composed most notably of “groupies and spaced-out fans” who together represent the grand dismantling of the modern world. “Rap is a succession of desperate yelps; rock, hysteria; hard rock, insanity.” Quoting Proust—rather than the
sharia
or another Islamic source, it’s worth noting—she laments that “music can no longer be a means of communication among souls.”

It seems that middle-aged bourgeois Moroccans can be as unwilling to accept Marockan roll as their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic have often been when it comes to rock ’n’ roll. Yassine’s hostility to her country’s most political forms of cultural expression is—aside from religion—all the more ironic (not to mention counterproductive) when it becomes clear how similar are both movements’ critiques of the Moroccan government and its economic policies. Whether it’s the activist-metal musicians of the Boulevard or the activist-intellectuals of the JSA, both focus on neoliberal globalization as a central threat to Morocco’s future—“The point is not whether globalization is American or Saudi,” a friend in the JSA put it, “it’s whether it’s neoliberal.” Indeed, in the writings of the JSA’s online publications (which are administered outside of Morocco and are hard for the government to block or filter out), and before that in its print journals, a critique of globalization is offered that is as detailed as those offered by Western scholars.

With their focus on democracy, poverty, corruption, and spirituality, metal artists and rappers could be the allies of the activists of the JSA, not their antagonists. If the JSA has little tolerance for mainstream Islam in Morocco, most of the country’s best rock musicians have little tolerance for what passes for pop music, in Morocco and the Arab world more broadly. As Hoba Hoba Spirit’s Reda Allali put it with a strong measure of exasperation: “We are all fed up with mainstream [music]…How can they still sing about romance, seeing what’s going on in our region?” Nadia Yassine couldn’t agree more, but an unwillingness to reach out to the other, coupled with the Makhzen’s centuries-old policy of divide and rule, makes it unlikely that metalheads and Islamists will set aside their differences to work together toward common goals in the near future.

Satanic Angels
Save Civil Society

While hanging around the stage at the 2006 Boulevard, I heard talk of someone shooting a movie about the satanic-metal affair, but I wasn’t able to find out who was behind the movie. Later in the year I was scrolling through the website for the band Tormentor of Souls, when I noticed a link to
Les Anges de Satan,
French for “The Satanic Angels” (in Arabic,
Mala’ika ash-Shaytan
). I pressed Play, and watched a trailer for a new movie directed by the iconoclastic Moroccan director Ahmed Boulane. It seems I wasn’t the only person who thought heavy metal was a potential savior of Morocco.

The Satanic Angels
is a fictionalized account of the arrest, trial, and civil society campaign to release the fourteen metalheads who were at the core of the 2003 satanic-metal affair. Watching the film, I was shocked that it was even made at all, never mind in Morocco—and in front of the very courthouse and prison where the kids were held and jailed (although Boulane had to shoot the courtroom scenes in a Protestant church, and his permit to film in the prison was canceled after the first day of a two-day shoot). The fact that a Moroccan filmmaker was allowed to make and release a film depicting the torturing of teenagers by cops, protesters staring down the police, and cops and prosecutors making fools out of themselves, is quite remarkable. During one interrogation, a cop tries to get one of the metalheads to admit that he cooks and eats cats (for some reason, secret police across the Muslim world think metalheads eat cats), but he replies, “I don’t eat meat, sir. I’m a vegetarian.” During another interrogation, one of the fourteen is told that “In the seventies we used to stick bottles up the asses of people like you.” I can’t think of another country in the region except perhaps Israel where this would be allowed. Boulane agreed, explaining to me that the government’s failure to stop the film reflects a political reality in Morocco today in which “there are two sides to the government. The justice minister naturally tried to censor the film, but the minister of communications is very progressive and supported us, revealing the delicate democratic balance in Morocco today.”

Certainly Boulane was vindicated once the movie was released. With over 100,000 tickets sold in an unprecedented amount of time, it outperformed every American blockbuster in the theaters. “Kids who’d never think of going to a Moroccan movie because they tend to be boring flocked to mine, even sitting in the aisles,” he said.

The Satanic Angels
was an eye-opening film for Moroccans, owing to its sympathetic and even enthusiastic treatment of the metal scene, which at least until now most Moroccans have assumed was made up of little more than a bunch of drugged-out, dirty sinners. The film not only humanizes an oft-ridiculed group, but also captures the energy of the metal scene and shows how powerful, and much of the time how good, the music really is. More important, the movie offers a lesson to Moroccans, whatever their musical tastes, in how to take on the Makhzen, the police—indeed, the whole political and security and religious establishment—and win.

Boulane argues that when hundreds of metalheads and civil society activists chanted loudly in front of the courthouse, demanding the release of fourteen kids (in fact, when I discussed the film with Amine, whom one of the main characers was based upon, he pointed out that the real protests drew thousands of people), it’s a message to the film’s viewers that “the mobilization of civil society [can] free them. It’s an example for our country to think about for future.” But the most important point of
The Satanic Angels
—indeed, of the whole sordid satanic-metal affair—is expressed in the final words of the lead defense attorney’s closing argument: “Your Honor, Islam can defend itself.”

It’s ironic, and a bit sad, that while Nadia Yassine shares Boulane’s view of Islam, Boulane has little but contempt for Yassine and the other activists of the JSA, while she can’t look past the distorted guitars and long hair to see the revolutionary potential of a bunch of kids who were willing to take on the Makhzen, and, unlike the JSA, won. And most “Marockans” feel, as Hoba Hoba Spirit’s Reda Allali explains it, that religious forces “are antidemocratic and don’t recognize our right to exist.” For Allali, there are no forces in Morocco beyond rockers and their fellow secular activists who really want to “change the system.” For Nadia Yassine, the JSA is “the only real opposition in Morocco today.”