Authors: Mark LeVine

Heavy Metal Islam (19 page)

As Moe was surveying the huge crowd from the balcony on that beautiful spring day, three things became clear: first, that he and other young Lebanese had a positive obligation to rebel against the system—“our parents’ system,” as many Lebanese have described it to me—that produced Lebanon’s intractable problems; second, that any such challenge had to be spiritually grounded rather than focusing merely on personal or cultural freedoms (“Both rebellion and spirituality are very important for me, and I think for the future of our people,” he explained after one of our gigs together); and, third, that the violence, anger, and false hopes that have defined life for so many of his generation mean that nothing less than the most distorted guitars, the hardest beats, and the most fiery voices will convey what Moe and so many other Lebanese of his generation have felt in growing up as the children of Lebanon’s long and brutal civil war.

“From a very early age we were taught to take sides, to differentiate between ourselves and the other sects and ethnicities,” Moe reflects sadly. “But at the same time that I started to love rock ’n’ roll, I started to ask questions, such as ‘Why are we fighting?’ ‘Why would I hate a Christian?’ ‘What’s the difference between us?’ And this made me doubt everything and question everything, challenging everybody.” As he gazed upon the sea of people below him, Moe felt that “there was really a chance for a sincere change, the kind Bob Marley sang about in ‘Redemption Song,’ which gave me so much hope during the war.”

Artists like the Kordz and their fans were instrumental to the success of the Cedar Spring precisely because the older generation had become so disempowered and depoliticized by decades of Syrian dominance that it no longer believed it could have a critical impact. One well-known professor of history put it this way to me about a year before Hariri’s assassination: “You know, in Lebanon we can say or write almost anything we want to, but that’s because nothing we say or do matters.” For members of the rock scene, this was certainly not believed to be the case.

But the Cedar Revolution never had the chance to transform Lebanese society at large. In good measure this was because the political elite managed to structure the national elections that the marchers demanded so that they were in fact less competitive than those held under Syrian control. The coup de grâce, however, was the Israel-Hezbollah war of 2006, which destroyed whatever momentum was left to the reform movement. In its wake, Hezbollah became the main power in Lebanon.

Even before the 2006 war, the potentially bright future for Lebanon heralded by the Cedar Spring—free elections, more-equitable economic development, the end of Syrian influence, and a more balanced political system—was by no means assured. As Moe explained when I was in Beirut shortly before the Israeli invasion, “The young kids are being brainwashed by their communal leaders and not being exposed to other people or points of view the way we were only a few years ago. They didn’t have the war to force them to question things, so they just follow their leaders blindly because they haven’t been forced to understand the consequences of such an attitude. And this, frighteningly, is giving me flashbacks of what led to the war.”

It was also clear that many of the young and often secular activists (regardless of their religious background) participating in the sit-ins of the Cedar Revolution were there as much out of a desire for personal freedoms as they were to learn about how to transform the political system. There’s nothing wrong with mixing personal and political liberation, or protest and pleasure, as long as the aims of each don’t conflict with the other. But in this case, perhaps, the personal and the hedonistic shared a bit too much space with the political and the revolutionary. The U.S. media dubbed the protests the Cedar Revolution in celebration of its supposedly national character. But according to one Lebanese colleague, an equally if not more apt characterization would have been “the Gucci Revolution,” because, it seemed, so many of the protesters were as interested in high-end fashion as in refashioning a more equitable national arrangement among the country’s various communities and social classes.

Gucci or Cedar, for many of the young people at the heart of the protests of the spring of 2005, they took on the character of a giant dance party. Since the 2006 war, the dance scene is still going strong, but it’s the city’s small experimental music scene that has become most culturally, and politically, significant. Like Palestine’s Ramallah Underground, some of Beirut’s most innovative artists are more interested in creating soundscapes inspired by everything from John Cage to the latest fighting than they are in forging songs out of traditional melodies and harmonies. These soundcatchers and splicers overlap with Lebanon’s hip-hop scene, and particularly Lebanese hip-hop pioneer Rayess Bek. Like other urban locales around the world stricken by poverty and violence, Beirut produces an abundance of artists who are adept at mining their harsh realities for aesthetic gold.

One particularly well-known group is the duo Soap Kills, which made a name for itself in Paris as well as Beirut when singer Jasmin Hamdan and guitarist Seid discovered that they could combine European electronica with Arab melodies, lyrics, and accents to great effect. They then changed styles from rock to the relatively slow-tempo combination of acid house and hip-hop known as trip-hop, and since then have been spreading their music via the Internet, which allows them to be free of the corporate control that would constrain their creativity for commercial considerations.

Photo Insert

“Searching for the Truth,” Moe Hamzeh of the Kordz, looks onto a million-strong crowd at one of the Cedar Spring rallies in Beirut. March 2006.

LYNSEY ADDARIO/CORBIS

Rock ’n’ Roll is the soundtrack of the future. Poster from the 2006 Boulevard of Young Musicians Festival, with its blend of ultramodern and traditional imagery, reflecting the music of Morocco today.

Tens of thousands of fans rock out during the annual “metal night” of the Boulevard of Young Musicians Festival in Casablanca.

PHOTO BY JIF

The first culture jam? Muslim and Christian (or perhaps Jewish) musicians jamming on the Baldosas, a precursor of the guitar, in the golden age of al-Andalus. Detail from the thirteenth-century manuscript known as
Cantigas de Santa Maria
.