From the NYT
July 20, 2008
Rock the Casbah
By HOWARD HAMPTON
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HEAVY METAL ISLAM
Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam.
By Mark LeVine.
Illustrated. 296 pp. Three Rivers Press. Paper, $13.95.
This professor of Middle Eastern history walks into a bar in Fez, Morocco — right from the get-go, Mark LeVine’s “Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam” is not your typical dry academic slog. (Did I mention he’s also a longhaired Jewish rock guitarist whose bio lists gigs with Mick Jagger and Dr. John?) So when somebody in that hotel bar starts talking up the local punk and metal scenes, an incredulous LeVine is hooked. “There are Muslim punks? In Morocco?” Quicker than you can whistle “Rock the Casbah,” he’s on the trail of Western-influenced underground music movements that have blossomed under authoritarian regimes across the Middle East and North Africa.
Going to meet the seven-string guitarist Marz of Hate Suffocation, a Cairo band, LeVine confesses sheepishly, “I still couldn’t tell the difference between death, doom, black, melodic, symphonic, grind-core, hard-core, thrash and half a dozen other styles.” (Marz explains that his group plays a cross between death and black metal: “But it’s not blackened death metal!”) Despite a certain amount of scholarly dogma that goes with the territory — here any combination of “neoliberal” and “globalization” is as ominous an epithet as Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” — “Heavy Metal Islam” offers the hit-and-run (as well as hit-and-miss) pleasures of a lively road trip. Practicing a first-person brand of shuttle diplomacy as he moves between countries and cultures, musicians and Islamic activists, LeVine manages to unpack enough cross-cultural incongruities to mount his own mosh pit follow-up to “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.”
An ex-Mossad hairdresser is scarcely more anomalous than disheveled Moroccan riot grrrls, virtuoso Egyptian metalheads, Lebanese “muhajababes” (young women wearing full head scarves, army fatigues, tight black T-shirts and Hezbollah wristbands), Tupac-influenced Palestinian M.C.’s, “the Israeli Oriental death-doom metal band Orphaned Land” (complete with a devoted Arab following) and rapt Iranian Iron Maiden acolytes. A participatory, hands-on guy, LeVine not only meets and eats with Muslim headbangers, he jams with them in apartments, studios and outdoor festivals, taking in the food and the noise and the people as if it were all a movable metal feast.
Eagerly seizing on the stereotype-busting possibilities of “an 18-year-old from Casablanca with spiked hair, or a 20-year-old from Dubai wearing goth makeup,” LeVine would like us to see them as the faces of an emerging Muslim world, potentially a much less monochromatic place than the one represented on TV by the usual “Death to America” brigades. “Heavy Metal Islam” turns the notion of irreconcilable differences between Islam and the West on its head, appealing to the universality of youth culture as “a model for communication and cooperation” in the Internet age. LeVine reckons the likes of Metallica and Slayer provide a brute lingua franca that knows no borders, opening up breathing room in cloistered societies, gradually undermining rigid belief systems — a benign, bottom-up brand of globalization as opposed to the ruthless corporate or state-sponsored kind.
It’s that old-time Lennon/Bono rock idealism reimagined for a post-Cannibal Corpse world, and that’s winning on a case-by-case basis. In lands where playing “satanic” music or even attending semi-clandestine concerts can get you thrown in jail (actually charged with things like “shaking the foundations of Islam”), there’s something truly heartening about the Moroccan thrash girls Mystik Moods striving to break through centuries-old sexist taboos, or Hate Suffocation trying to carve out a niche to play music and “be left alone by both the government and society.” In theocratic Iran, when Arthimoth’s leader wears a T-shirt reading “Your God Is Dead,” he’s risking a fate much worse than being suspended from school or getting dirty looks at the mall.
“Heavy Metal Islam” gets trapped by its good intentions whenever it attempts to shoehorn the headbangers’ intransigence into preconceived political slots. Metal music, however you parse it, is dystopian in the extreme: hyper-aggressively embracing the death instinct, regimented chaos, deliriously fetishized morbidity. Call it cathartic, sure, even a way of keeping sane in an insane world (as one performer here says, “We play heavy metal because our lives are heavy metal”), but don’t confuse it with “If I Had a Hammer.” Unless it’s a hammer of the nihilist gods aimed at your forehead — not to hammer out justice or a warning or “the common struggle for democracy and economic equality,” but to crack your skull open, scrape out your pulverized brains and feed them to the wolverines.
Even though these antisocial bands want no part of hard-liners like the mystical Justice and Spirituality Association in Morocco or the spooky Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (and the disdain is often mutual), LeVine thinks if they could all put aside their petty differences and work together, they could start a domino effect in the Middle East like the one that toppled the Eastern bloc. (He’s like the straight arrow in comic books who’d invariably look around at the scene of Armageddon and say with a sigh, “If only we could have harnessed their mutant energy for goodness.”) The punch line of LeVine’s informative, valuable and moderately mad book is twofold: this conscientious anti-imperialist has written a swell tract in favor of large-scale cultural imperialism — a Marshall Amps Plan — and his program is undoubtedly the first to enlist death metal as the spearhead of a new Peace Corps(e).
Howard Hampton is the author of “Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses.”
Showing posts with label middle east. Show all posts
Showing posts with label middle east. Show all posts
Monday, July 21, 2008
Monday, April 21, 2008
Meredith Monk in Syria
Yahoo Music News
Pioneering U.S. singer enthralls Syrian students
04/20/2008 5:00 PM, Reuters
Avant-garde musician and performance artist Meredith Monk enthralled Syrian students on Monday with a lesson on vocal and choreographic techniques in a rare cultural exchange between the two countries.
Monk, an innovative singer, composer, filmmaker and choreographer, gave a workshop at the national conservatoire before a concert in Damascus on Monday with vocalists Theo Blackman and Katie Geissinger.
Washington has imposed sanctions on Syria over its support for anti-U.S. groups in the Middle East.
Politics featured little as Monk and Geissinger gave Syrian singers, dancers and actors lessons in choreography, vocal techniques and how to construct complex singing forms.
"Everybody was nervous and little by little we spoke the same language. I shared some of the discoveries I have made in very direct way. It will help people experience the concert with more knowledge," Monk told Reuters.
"If we come and just perform we will never find out where Syrian artists are coming from and what they know."
Monk was invited by the Syrian government as part of performances to celebrate Damascus as the 2008 capital of Arab culture.
The last U.S. group to perform in Syria was the jazzy Freddie Bryant and Kaleidoscope in 2004.
"Music is fundamental as breathing. It speaks to any body. This is why I am here. The politics does not matter," Monk said.
One of Monk's favorite singers is the Arab diva Umm Kalthoum, who died in 1975. Like Monk, Umm Kalthoum stuck rigorously to traditional forms of music and singing.
Monk said strict practice and adherence to musical forms did not prevent improvisation even if the text, scale and melody hardly changed.
"A piece I sang in 1978 and I sing now is the same, but you will also hear that I have room to play. It is not that different from Arabic music. Umm Kalthoum took one text and did it different ways," she said.
Monk's performance on Monday at the Opera House will span work from her 43-year career, including unaccompanied solo pieces and others with piano and violin.
"I always want to be risky, working on something that I don't know rather than something I do now," she said.
Syrian students gave Monk an enthusiastic reception, although her techniques differed from traditional methods taught at the conservatoire, where classes are influenced by Communist era curricula from Eastern Europe.
"Her whole art is different. The exercises she gave we would not have learned in a year," actress Fatina Laila said.
(Editing by Andrew Dobbie)
Pioneering U.S. singer enthralls Syrian students
04/20/2008 5:00 PM, Reuters
Avant-garde musician and performance artist Meredith Monk enthralled Syrian students on Monday with a lesson on vocal and choreographic techniques in a rare cultural exchange between the two countries.
Monk, an innovative singer, composer, filmmaker and choreographer, gave a workshop at the national conservatoire before a concert in Damascus on Monday with vocalists Theo Blackman and Katie Geissinger.
Washington has imposed sanctions on Syria over its support for anti-U.S. groups in the Middle East.
Politics featured little as Monk and Geissinger gave Syrian singers, dancers and actors lessons in choreography, vocal techniques and how to construct complex singing forms.
"Everybody was nervous and little by little we spoke the same language. I shared some of the discoveries I have made in very direct way. It will help people experience the concert with more knowledge," Monk told Reuters.
"If we come and just perform we will never find out where Syrian artists are coming from and what they know."
Monk was invited by the Syrian government as part of performances to celebrate Damascus as the 2008 capital of Arab culture.
The last U.S. group to perform in Syria was the jazzy Freddie Bryant and Kaleidoscope in 2004.
"Music is fundamental as breathing. It speaks to any body. This is why I am here. The politics does not matter," Monk said.
One of Monk's favorite singers is the Arab diva Umm Kalthoum, who died in 1975. Like Monk, Umm Kalthoum stuck rigorously to traditional forms of music and singing.
Monk said strict practice and adherence to musical forms did not prevent improvisation even if the text, scale and melody hardly changed.
"A piece I sang in 1978 and I sing now is the same, but you will also hear that I have room to play. It is not that different from Arabic music. Umm Kalthoum took one text and did it different ways," she said.
Monk's performance on Monday at the Opera House will span work from her 43-year career, including unaccompanied solo pieces and others with piano and violin.
"I always want to be risky, working on something that I don't know rather than something I do now," she said.
Syrian students gave Monk an enthusiastic reception, although her techniques differed from traditional methods taught at the conservatoire, where classes are influenced by Communist era curricula from Eastern Europe.
"Her whole art is different. The exercises she gave we would not have learned in a year," actress Fatina Laila said.
(Editing by Andrew Dobbie)
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Saudi Rappers Compete in Dubai Hip-hop Contest
Washington Post
'An Earthquake That Shifted the World Around Us'
Beyond a Disapproving Kingdom, Untested Saudi Rappers Find Transformation and Victory, of Sorts, at Hip-Hop Contest in Dubai
By Faiza Saleh Ambah
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 7, 2008; A11
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- Even before they stepped onstage at the MTV Arabia competition finale, members of the Saudi hip-hop group Dark2Men knew they would not win.
The contestants were to be judged on their lyrics, stage presence and performance, but Dark2Men had never performed in public because of strict social and religious codes in their native Saudi Arabia that ban nightclubs, concerts and theaters. The seven other finalists, from the less restrictive Arab countries of Egypt, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates, had rapped live for years.
But backstage before the show, one of the show's co-hosts told the contestants something that made Dark2Men's impending loss seem like victory, the members said. "He said no matter what happened in the competition, we would go down in history when they wrote the book about Arab hip-hop," said Hani Zain, 27, who raps in Arabic for the group.
An Egyptian won the competition, which is being broadcast this month, but the three men of Dark2Men said their lives had been transformed by the experience in ways they had not imagined.
"It was an earthquake that shifted the world around us," said Tamer Farhan, 24, who raps in English. "It gave meaning to all the hardships we faced to get here."
Saudi Arabia, home to Islam's holiest shrines, follows a stringent form of Islam that prohibits alcohol and the mingling of unrelated men and women. The conservative kingdom does not allow the study of music in schools, and many Saudis consider careers in acting, singing or dancing as shameful.
But the advent of satellite television channels such as MTV Arabia, which was launched in the Emirates in November, and social networking Web sites have made it easier for young people to pursue interests deemed contrary to the country's tradition and culture.
The Dark2Men members, for example, met up on a rap Web site and compose their music using online programs. They have posted several songs on YouTube and have a Facebook site.
But even as they rap in praise of Islam and their mothers, and against the war in Iraq and terrorism, their biggest hurdle has been convincing family, friends and Saudi society that they are not simply trying to imitate a decadent Western lifestyle.
Since winning the MTV Arabia hip-hop audition in January, they have struggled with fiancees unhappy about the attention garnered by their television appearances broadcast across the Arab world, bosses angry about their extended leaves from work, and fathers worried that their sons would leave stable jobs and become entertainers.
For a week last month in Dubai, they forgot those pressures as they danced until dawn at nightclubs, stared wide-eyed at a fancy restaurant's glass-enclosed cold room full of wine and champagne bottles, and learned how to move onstage.
Maan Mansour, 25, who sings in Arabic and English and had never traveled outside of Saudi Arabia, said he developed a passion for performing. "There's this unique feeling you get right before you go onstage that's fear and excitement," he said. "Then as soon as you put your foot on that first step, it's as if a cascade of cool water washes over your chest, and it's amazing."
Zain said a highlight of the MTV Arabia experience was spending time with Farid "Fredwreck" Nassar, a Palestinian American music producer who has worked with American rappers 50 Cent and Snoop Dogg.
Zain, Dark2Men's main composer, said he pestered Nassar while he was producing the group's song, asking questions and looking over his shoulder, but was told several times, half-jokingly, to leave the room. "I learned more in two days with Farid than I did in years in Saudi Arabia," Zain said.
Mansour, an equipment sterilization technician, and Farhan, a human resources assistant at a hospital, went back to work a few days after they returned to their home town of Jiddah. But Zain resigned from his job as a bank computer programmer.
Zain said he needed time to concentrate on his rap career and wanted to be available in case the contestants were asked to tour after a CD of their songs is released next month.
Farhan, who now spends an hour a day answering fan mail, sat with his laptop at a coffee shop during his lunch hour last week and sighed as he read a notice from a fellow contestant, Emirati rap group Desert Heat, announcing a performance at a nightclub in Oman, with tickets selling for $26.
"If I could make money rapping like these guys, I would have left my job," Farhan said. But there's nowhere to perform in Saudi Arabia, and leaving his job would mean that Farhan and his family would be without health insurance, a risk he said he was not ready to take.
Farhan has had to postpone his wedding because things are still in flux. Last year, "when I got engaged I was just a normal guy working at a hospital," he said. "Now I'm succeeding at rap, suddenly everybody knows me. Suddenly I'm always busy."
Farhan said his father has made peace with his choice. "He voted for us and made his friends vote, too" in the competition's people's choice award, conducted by text message. The results have not yet been announced.
But for Farhan, the most gratifying part of the experience has been inspiring others. "Young guys come up to us and say: 'We thought that pursuing a dream in Saudi Arabia was impossible. You guys made it in hip-hop with everyone against you. That gives us hope that even here, anything is possible.' "
Dark2Men has met with several advertising and production companies seeking sponsorship and studio space to record a CD. But until that happens, the group is recording a mixtape with aspiring rappers.
During breaks while recording his segment at a local studio, Zain talked to the other rappers about organizing an underground concert to make money.
"I've given myself till the end of March," Zain said. "If I'm able to make some money on this, I'll keep going. If not, I'm going to have to start looking for a job."
'An Earthquake That Shifted the World Around Us'
Beyond a Disapproving Kingdom, Untested Saudi Rappers Find Transformation and Victory, of Sorts, at Hip-Hop Contest in Dubai
By Faiza Saleh Ambah
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 7, 2008; A11
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- Even before they stepped onstage at the MTV Arabia competition finale, members of the Saudi hip-hop group Dark2Men knew they would not win.
The contestants were to be judged on their lyrics, stage presence and performance, but Dark2Men had never performed in public because of strict social and religious codes in their native Saudi Arabia that ban nightclubs, concerts and theaters. The seven other finalists, from the less restrictive Arab countries of Egypt, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates, had rapped live for years.
But backstage before the show, one of the show's co-hosts told the contestants something that made Dark2Men's impending loss seem like victory, the members said. "He said no matter what happened in the competition, we would go down in history when they wrote the book about Arab hip-hop," said Hani Zain, 27, who raps in Arabic for the group.
An Egyptian won the competition, which is being broadcast this month, but the three men of Dark2Men said their lives had been transformed by the experience in ways they had not imagined.
"It was an earthquake that shifted the world around us," said Tamer Farhan, 24, who raps in English. "It gave meaning to all the hardships we faced to get here."
Saudi Arabia, home to Islam's holiest shrines, follows a stringent form of Islam that prohibits alcohol and the mingling of unrelated men and women. The conservative kingdom does not allow the study of music in schools, and many Saudis consider careers in acting, singing or dancing as shameful.
But the advent of satellite television channels such as MTV Arabia, which was launched in the Emirates in November, and social networking Web sites have made it easier for young people to pursue interests deemed contrary to the country's tradition and culture.
The Dark2Men members, for example, met up on a rap Web site and compose their music using online programs. They have posted several songs on YouTube and have a Facebook site.
But even as they rap in praise of Islam and their mothers, and against the war in Iraq and terrorism, their biggest hurdle has been convincing family, friends and Saudi society that they are not simply trying to imitate a decadent Western lifestyle.
Since winning the MTV Arabia hip-hop audition in January, they have struggled with fiancees unhappy about the attention garnered by their television appearances broadcast across the Arab world, bosses angry about their extended leaves from work, and fathers worried that their sons would leave stable jobs and become entertainers.
For a week last month in Dubai, they forgot those pressures as they danced until dawn at nightclubs, stared wide-eyed at a fancy restaurant's glass-enclosed cold room full of wine and champagne bottles, and learned how to move onstage.
Maan Mansour, 25, who sings in Arabic and English and had never traveled outside of Saudi Arabia, said he developed a passion for performing. "There's this unique feeling you get right before you go onstage that's fear and excitement," he said. "Then as soon as you put your foot on that first step, it's as if a cascade of cool water washes over your chest, and it's amazing."
Zain said a highlight of the MTV Arabia experience was spending time with Farid "Fredwreck" Nassar, a Palestinian American music producer who has worked with American rappers 50 Cent and Snoop Dogg.
Zain, Dark2Men's main composer, said he pestered Nassar while he was producing the group's song, asking questions and looking over his shoulder, but was told several times, half-jokingly, to leave the room. "I learned more in two days with Farid than I did in years in Saudi Arabia," Zain said.
Mansour, an equipment sterilization technician, and Farhan, a human resources assistant at a hospital, went back to work a few days after they returned to their home town of Jiddah. But Zain resigned from his job as a bank computer programmer.
Zain said he needed time to concentrate on his rap career and wanted to be available in case the contestants were asked to tour after a CD of their songs is released next month.
Farhan, who now spends an hour a day answering fan mail, sat with his laptop at a coffee shop during his lunch hour last week and sighed as he read a notice from a fellow contestant, Emirati rap group Desert Heat, announcing a performance at a nightclub in Oman, with tickets selling for $26.
"If I could make money rapping like these guys, I would have left my job," Farhan said. But there's nowhere to perform in Saudi Arabia, and leaving his job would mean that Farhan and his family would be without health insurance, a risk he said he was not ready to take.
Farhan has had to postpone his wedding because things are still in flux. Last year, "when I got engaged I was just a normal guy working at a hospital," he said. "Now I'm succeeding at rap, suddenly everybody knows me. Suddenly I'm always busy."
Farhan said his father has made peace with his choice. "He voted for us and made his friends vote, too" in the competition's people's choice award, conducted by text message. The results have not yet been announced.
But for Farhan, the most gratifying part of the experience has been inspiring others. "Young guys come up to us and say: 'We thought that pursuing a dream in Saudi Arabia was impossible. You guys made it in hip-hop with everyone against you. That gives us hope that even here, anything is possible.' "
Dark2Men has met with several advertising and production companies seeking sponsorship and studio space to record a CD. But until that happens, the group is recording a mixtape with aspiring rappers.
During breaks while recording his segment at a local studio, Zain talked to the other rappers about organizing an underground concert to make money.
"I've given myself till the end of March," Zain said. "If I'm able to make some money on this, I'll keep going. If not, I'm going to have to start looking for a job."
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Saudi Hip-Hop's Painful Birth
Washington Post
Saudi Hip-Hop's Painful Birth
Selection in MTV Contest Brings Joy and Misery for Group Defying Strictures of Muslim Kingdom
By Faiza Saleh Ambah
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, February 22, 2008; A16
JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia -- For many years, the members of the Saudi hip-hop group Dark2Men performed mostly in living rooms for their friends. They hid their pastime from relatives who view singing and dancing as shameful in this strict Muslim kingdom where concerts, theaters and movies are banned.
But that all changed last month after the group auditioned for a hip-hop competition on MTV Arabia -- launched in November as the latest addition to the MTV network -- and became one of eight finalists from the Middle East.
The channel produced a video clip of Dark2Men that aired in late January and flew the finalists to Dubai for the contest finale, which was taped Thursday and will be broadcast across the region next month.
"We used to sing about scratching our way to the surface," said lead rapper Hani Zain, 27, a gangly computer programmer at a bank. "We finally made it to the light."
In a kingdom where the Koran serves as the constitution, Dark2Men's rapid ascent from obscurity to the waiting room of pop fame has brought its three young members a mix of elation and misery.
Saudi Arabia is home to Mecca and Medina, Islam's holiest places, and the group's tenuous leap into the realm of MTV is in many ways the story of the kingdom's own struggle with the effects of intrusive Western-style modernity.
There are no nightclubs or concerts in Saudi Arabia because of social and religious codes that also ban alcohol and the mixing of unrelated men and women. Local radio and television stations play mainly Arabic pop music. With those limitations, the group's biggest ambition had been to cut a CD.
What they got instead was a television appearance viewed by thousands in the Arab world.
Their fathers, who had never seen them perform, were ashamed and angry as they watched them rapping and dancing in the video on television.
Their fiancees, in a country where women are not allowed to drive and must cover their hair and wear a cloak in public, were unhappy about the trip to Dubai, where men and women mix freely and alcohol is readily available.
The time they needed to spend on practicing and attending the competition put them at risk of losing raises and promotions.
"This should be the happiest time of my life, but it's really the most difficult," said Tamer Farhan, 24, a human resources assistant at a hospital who taught himself English by watching American movies and television shows.
The video, for their song "The Journey," was filmed in the studio and around Jiddah's landmarks, and in it, they rap about the group's rise:
"Hard life but I'll be sticking to it. Bad times but I'll be going through it. All I know is that I know I can do it. Be strong and never lean down to it."
Farhan seemed shy in front of the camera. Zain, sporting sunglasses, moved like he had been performing for the cameras for years. Maan Mansour, 25, looked straight into the camera and made the effusive hand gestures of Western rap stars.
"There are a lot of Saudi rappers, but they're underground because of the wrong impression people have of them," Farhan told MTV's "Hip HopNa" co-host Qusai Khidr, a Saudi rapper who has lived in Florida. "We would like people to hear our words and listen to our message before they judge us."
After the video aired, the group members met at a pizza place, and their moods shifted between excitement and despondency.
Farhan said that when hip-hop was just a hobby, his father was tolerant and his fiancee was confident that her parents would not discover he was part of the group. But now that the group has been on television and could win a recording contract, his father fears that his son will leave a steady job to become an entertainer. His fiancee said it was only a matter of time before her parents found out and ended the engagement.
Farhan, the eldest of four siblings who has worked since he was 13 to supplement the family income, said his father's disapproval was especially hard. "All my life, I've tried to make him proud," he said.
Mansour, who raps in English and Arabic, recounted how his father, a retired school principal, threatened to disown him a day after the video clip aired. "He said the whole neighborhood was talking about his son prancing around and dancing and singing like a jester on television," said Mansour, an equipment sterilization technician at a hospital.
Zain said he had agreed with his fiancee that if his music career started to hurt their relationship, he would cut down on performing and concentrate on writing lyrics and composing music. "I love this girl more than I love singing," he said.
The group's biggest challenge, Zain said, was to prove to their friends, families and fiancees that they are as serious about their religion and their culture as they are about hip-hop.
"If you're a rapper, people immediately assume that you are into the things they see on television. We don't want to be them, we want to create our own style. We rap about problems faced by young Saudis and we promote Islamic values," Mansour said.
Zain said the name Dark2Men was about shedding light on the hidden difficulties Saudi youths face. The "2" stood for the number of members in the group when it was founded in 1999. But Zain said the other founding member, a friend of his, left the group because he did not want to hurt his reputation and anger his family.
Zain met Mansour at a mosque, and Farhan joined them later.
The feeling of being under siege and misunderstood by society has turned the group's members into close friends, they said.
"People don't understand us here. They think being part of a rap group means you're less Arab or less Muslim or you want to imitate the West," Zain said.
A song written after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, which were carried out mainly by Saudis, focuses on how the group views faith:
"We're the ones who care about women and family, we're the ones who care about neighbors and community, and after all that how dare you people call us terrorist. I'm proud to be Muslim. Islam is the deepest peace. And no matter what they say or do, I am, I am, I'm Muslim."
At the airport in Jiddah before leaving for Dubai, Farhan said his father had given him a good-luck gift that morning. He stretched out his hand to show a watch with a black leather strap.
Zain, wearing his ubiquitous sunglasses and black hooded sweat shirt, said he had "never been so scared and so excited."
"All my dreams are now staring me in the face," he said before taking off. "Everything depends on what happens in Dubai."
Saudi Hip-Hop's Painful Birth
Selection in MTV Contest Brings Joy and Misery for Group Defying Strictures of Muslim Kingdom
By Faiza Saleh Ambah
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, February 22, 2008; A16
JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia -- For many years, the members of the Saudi hip-hop group Dark2Men performed mostly in living rooms for their friends. They hid their pastime from relatives who view singing and dancing as shameful in this strict Muslim kingdom where concerts, theaters and movies are banned.
But that all changed last month after the group auditioned for a hip-hop competition on MTV Arabia -- launched in November as the latest addition to the MTV network -- and became one of eight finalists from the Middle East.
The channel produced a video clip of Dark2Men that aired in late January and flew the finalists to Dubai for the contest finale, which was taped Thursday and will be broadcast across the region next month.
"We used to sing about scratching our way to the surface," said lead rapper Hani Zain, 27, a gangly computer programmer at a bank. "We finally made it to the light."
In a kingdom where the Koran serves as the constitution, Dark2Men's rapid ascent from obscurity to the waiting room of pop fame has brought its three young members a mix of elation and misery.
Saudi Arabia is home to Mecca and Medina, Islam's holiest places, and the group's tenuous leap into the realm of MTV is in many ways the story of the kingdom's own struggle with the effects of intrusive Western-style modernity.
There are no nightclubs or concerts in Saudi Arabia because of social and religious codes that also ban alcohol and the mixing of unrelated men and women. Local radio and television stations play mainly Arabic pop music. With those limitations, the group's biggest ambition had been to cut a CD.
What they got instead was a television appearance viewed by thousands in the Arab world.
Their fathers, who had never seen them perform, were ashamed and angry as they watched them rapping and dancing in the video on television.
Their fiancees, in a country where women are not allowed to drive and must cover their hair and wear a cloak in public, were unhappy about the trip to Dubai, where men and women mix freely and alcohol is readily available.
The time they needed to spend on practicing and attending the competition put them at risk of losing raises and promotions.
"This should be the happiest time of my life, but it's really the most difficult," said Tamer Farhan, 24, a human resources assistant at a hospital who taught himself English by watching American movies and television shows.
The video, for their song "The Journey," was filmed in the studio and around Jiddah's landmarks, and in it, they rap about the group's rise:
"Hard life but I'll be sticking to it. Bad times but I'll be going through it. All I know is that I know I can do it. Be strong and never lean down to it."
Farhan seemed shy in front of the camera. Zain, sporting sunglasses, moved like he had been performing for the cameras for years. Maan Mansour, 25, looked straight into the camera and made the effusive hand gestures of Western rap stars.
"There are a lot of Saudi rappers, but they're underground because of the wrong impression people have of them," Farhan told MTV's "Hip HopNa" co-host Qusai Khidr, a Saudi rapper who has lived in Florida. "We would like people to hear our words and listen to our message before they judge us."
After the video aired, the group members met at a pizza place, and their moods shifted between excitement and despondency.
Farhan said that when hip-hop was just a hobby, his father was tolerant and his fiancee was confident that her parents would not discover he was part of the group. But now that the group has been on television and could win a recording contract, his father fears that his son will leave a steady job to become an entertainer. His fiancee said it was only a matter of time before her parents found out and ended the engagement.
Farhan, the eldest of four siblings who has worked since he was 13 to supplement the family income, said his father's disapproval was especially hard. "All my life, I've tried to make him proud," he said.
Mansour, who raps in English and Arabic, recounted how his father, a retired school principal, threatened to disown him a day after the video clip aired. "He said the whole neighborhood was talking about his son prancing around and dancing and singing like a jester on television," said Mansour, an equipment sterilization technician at a hospital.
Zain said he had agreed with his fiancee that if his music career started to hurt their relationship, he would cut down on performing and concentrate on writing lyrics and composing music. "I love this girl more than I love singing," he said.
The group's biggest challenge, Zain said, was to prove to their friends, families and fiancees that they are as serious about their religion and their culture as they are about hip-hop.
"If you're a rapper, people immediately assume that you are into the things they see on television. We don't want to be them, we want to create our own style. We rap about problems faced by young Saudis and we promote Islamic values," Mansour said.
Zain said the name Dark2Men was about shedding light on the hidden difficulties Saudi youths face. The "2" stood for the number of members in the group when it was founded in 1999. But Zain said the other founding member, a friend of his, left the group because he did not want to hurt his reputation and anger his family.
Zain met Mansour at a mosque, and Farhan joined them later.
The feeling of being under siege and misunderstood by society has turned the group's members into close friends, they said.
"People don't understand us here. They think being part of a rap group means you're less Arab or less Muslim or you want to imitate the West," Zain said.
A song written after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, which were carried out mainly by Saudis, focuses on how the group views faith:
"We're the ones who care about women and family, we're the ones who care about neighbors and community, and after all that how dare you people call us terrorist. I'm proud to be Muslim. Islam is the deepest peace. And no matter what they say or do, I am, I am, I'm Muslim."
At the airport in Jiddah before leaving for Dubai, Farhan said his father had given him a good-luck gift that morning. He stretched out his hand to show a watch with a black leather strap.
Zain, wearing his ubiquitous sunglasses and black hooded sweat shirt, said he had "never been so scared and so excited."
"All my dreams are now staring me in the face," he said before taking off. "Everything depends on what happens in Dubai."
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Fairouz fans angry over the diva's concert in Syria
Christian Science Monitor
from the January 28, 2008 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0128/p04s02-wome.html
Fairouz fans angry over the diva's concert in Syria
The famous Lebanese singer traveled to Syria last week to appear in a six-day run beginning Monday at the Damascus Opera House.
By Nicholas Blanford | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
BEIRUT, lebanon
Revered throughout the Arab world for five decades, the much beloved and iconic Lebanese diva Fairouz has found herself embroiled in Lebanon's bitter crisis with Syria.
Fairouz, long the doyenne of Arab singers, traveled to Syria last week to appear in a six-day run beginning Monday at the Damascus Opera House of her classic 1970 musical "Sah al-Nom," an Arabic expression for "Did you sleep well?" Her appearance is a highlight of a series of cultural events in Syria this year to mark UNESCO designating Damascus as the 2008 Arab capital of culture.
Her decision to sing in Damascus, however, has caused a split in her huge fan base in Lebanon between those arguing that Fairouz should not perform before the rulers of a country blamed for a string of assassinations in Lebanon over the past three years, and others who maintain that the Lebanese diva is above politics and should sing wherever she wishes.
The spat hardened on Friday when a top Lebanese police officer became the latest victim of the bomb assassinations that have blighted Lebanon for over three years. Capt. Wissam Eid, head of the technical department in the paramilitary Internal Security Forces, died along with five other people when a powerful car bomb exploded beside his vehicle in a Beirut suburb.
Lebanon's gridlocked pro- and anti-Syrian factions have been unable to elect a new president since November, and the crisis continues to defy regional and international mediation.
"Those who love Lebanon do not sing for its jailers," says anti-Syrian legislator Akram Shehayeb. "Our ambassador to the stars, you painted for us the dream nation, so don't scatter that dream like the dictators of Damascus scattered our dreams of a democratic free country."
A poll conducted last week by the "Now Lebanon" Web portal, which is sympathetic to the anti-Syrian March 14 coalition in Lebanon, found that 67 percent of respondents were against Fairouz appearing in Damascus.
"Simply, this is not the moment for a musical love-in," a Now Lebanon editorial said. "Fairouz must decide. She is a Lebanese icon, and, as such she must repay the people who have backed her and who love her with a modicum of solidarity."
Born Nohad Haddad, she was given the stage name Fairouz, Arabic for Turquoise, by an early mentor. Her first major concert was in 1957. She became an instant sensation and, in collaboration with her musician husband, Assi Rahbani, and his brother Mansour, her acclaim rose during the 1960s and 1970s.
Fairouz has consistently remained aloof from politics, saying her music was for the people only. Apart from a single concert in 1978, she famously refused to sing in Lebanon during the 1975-90 civil war in disgust at the warring militias, who continued to adore her nonetheless.
Her songs are regularly played during times of difficulty in Lebanon, and, for older generations, they evoke a nostalgia for Lebanon's golden years in the 1950s and 1960s.
A recluse who has given only three interviews in her five-decade career, Fairouz has not responded to her critics. However, her former musical partner Mansour Rahbani said her decision to sing in Damascus was "a message of love and peace from Lebanon to Syria. A message of friendship, not subservience."
Certainly, Syrians are delighted that Fairouz is back in Damascus, her first appearance in the Syrian capital since 1982.
"The Syrians are thrilled, especially the Damascenes," says Sami Moubayed, a historian of Syria's postindependence period in the 1950s. "She reminds them of the 'good old days'," adding that apart from "nostalgia, talent, her gigantic standing [and] heavenly voice ... everybody is pleased that she is defying the anti-Syrian team in Lebanon and coming."
Still, for most ardent fans, Fairouz is a symbol of unity rather than division and her standing will doubtless outlast the current quarrel. As the famous Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani once wrote: "When Fairouz sings, mountains and rivers follow her voice, the mosque and the church, the oil jar and loaves of bread. Through her, every one of us is made to blossom, and once we were no more than sand; men drop their weapons and apologize. Upon hearing her voice, our childhood is molded anew."
from the January 28, 2008 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0128/p04s02-wome.html
Fairouz fans angry over the diva's concert in Syria
The famous Lebanese singer traveled to Syria last week to appear in a six-day run beginning Monday at the Damascus Opera House.
By Nicholas Blanford | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
BEIRUT, lebanon
Revered throughout the Arab world for five decades, the much beloved and iconic Lebanese diva Fairouz has found herself embroiled in Lebanon's bitter crisis with Syria.
Fairouz, long the doyenne of Arab singers, traveled to Syria last week to appear in a six-day run beginning Monday at the Damascus Opera House of her classic 1970 musical "Sah al-Nom," an Arabic expression for "Did you sleep well?" Her appearance is a highlight of a series of cultural events in Syria this year to mark UNESCO designating Damascus as the 2008 Arab capital of culture.
Her decision to sing in Damascus, however, has caused a split in her huge fan base in Lebanon between those arguing that Fairouz should not perform before the rulers of a country blamed for a string of assassinations in Lebanon over the past three years, and others who maintain that the Lebanese diva is above politics and should sing wherever she wishes.
The spat hardened on Friday when a top Lebanese police officer became the latest victim of the bomb assassinations that have blighted Lebanon for over three years. Capt. Wissam Eid, head of the technical department in the paramilitary Internal Security Forces, died along with five other people when a powerful car bomb exploded beside his vehicle in a Beirut suburb.
Lebanon's gridlocked pro- and anti-Syrian factions have been unable to elect a new president since November, and the crisis continues to defy regional and international mediation.
"Those who love Lebanon do not sing for its jailers," says anti-Syrian legislator Akram Shehayeb. "Our ambassador to the stars, you painted for us the dream nation, so don't scatter that dream like the dictators of Damascus scattered our dreams of a democratic free country."
A poll conducted last week by the "Now Lebanon" Web portal, which is sympathetic to the anti-Syrian March 14 coalition in Lebanon, found that 67 percent of respondents were against Fairouz appearing in Damascus.
"Simply, this is not the moment for a musical love-in," a Now Lebanon editorial said. "Fairouz must decide. She is a Lebanese icon, and, as such she must repay the people who have backed her and who love her with a modicum of solidarity."
Born Nohad Haddad, she was given the stage name Fairouz, Arabic for Turquoise, by an early mentor. Her first major concert was in 1957. She became an instant sensation and, in collaboration with her musician husband, Assi Rahbani, and his brother Mansour, her acclaim rose during the 1960s and 1970s.
Fairouz has consistently remained aloof from politics, saying her music was for the people only. Apart from a single concert in 1978, she famously refused to sing in Lebanon during the 1975-90 civil war in disgust at the warring militias, who continued to adore her nonetheless.
Her songs are regularly played during times of difficulty in Lebanon, and, for older generations, they evoke a nostalgia for Lebanon's golden years in the 1950s and 1960s.
A recluse who has given only three interviews in her five-decade career, Fairouz has not responded to her critics. However, her former musical partner Mansour Rahbani said her decision to sing in Damascus was "a message of love and peace from Lebanon to Syria. A message of friendship, not subservience."
Certainly, Syrians are delighted that Fairouz is back in Damascus, her first appearance in the Syrian capital since 1982.
"The Syrians are thrilled, especially the Damascenes," says Sami Moubayed, a historian of Syria's postindependence period in the 1950s. "She reminds them of the 'good old days'," adding that apart from "nostalgia, talent, her gigantic standing [and] heavenly voice ... everybody is pleased that she is defying the anti-Syrian team in Lebanon and coming."
Still, for most ardent fans, Fairouz is a symbol of unity rather than division and her standing will doubtless outlast the current quarrel. As the famous Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani once wrote: "When Fairouz sings, mountains and rivers follow her voice, the mosque and the church, the oil jar and loaves of bread. Through her, every one of us is made to blossom, and once we were no more than sand; men drop their weapons and apologize. Upon hearing her voice, our childhood is molded anew."
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
Gay Muslims Pack a Dance Floor of Their Own
New York Times
January 1, 2008
Berlin Journal
Gay Muslims Pack a Dance Floor of Their Own
By NICHOLAS KULISH
BERLIN — Six men whirled faster and faster in the center of the nightclub, arms slung over one another’s shoulders, performing a traditional circle dance popular in Turkey and the Middle East. Nothing unusual given the German capital’s large Muslim population.
But most of the people filling the dance floor on Saturday at the club SO36 in the Kreuzberg neighborhood were gay, lesbian or bisexual, and of Turkish or Arab background. They were there for the monthly club night known as Gayhane, an all-too-rare opportunity to merge their immigrant cultures and their sexual identities.
European Muslims, so often portrayed one-dimensionally as rioters, honor killers or terrorists, live diverse lives, most of them trying to get by and to have a good time. That is more difficult if one is both Muslim and gay.
“When you’re here, it’s as if you’re putting on a mask, leaving the everyday outside and just having fun,” said a 22-year-old Turkish man who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear that he would be ostracized or worse if his family found out about his sexual orientation.
Safety and secrecy come up regularly when talking to guests, who laugh and dance, but also frequently look over their shoulders. To be a gay man or lesbian with an immigrant background invites trouble here in two very different ways.
“Depending on which part of Berlin I go to, in one I get punched in the mouth because I’m a foreigner and in the other because I’m a queen,” said Fatma Souad, the event’s organizer and master of ceremonies. Ms. Souad, 43, a transgender performer born in Ankara as a boy named Ali, has put on the party for over a decade.
Ms. Souad came to Berlin in 1983 after leaving home as a teenager. She studied to be a dressmaker and played in a punk band, but discovered Middle Eastern music through a friend and began teaching herself belly dancing. Ms. Souad started Salon Oriental, her first belly dancing theater, in 1988, and threw the first Gayhane party — hane means home in Turkish — in January 1997.
The club was packed by midnight and still had a line out the front door. On stage, Ms. Souad mixed a white turban and white net gloves with a black tuxedo with tails and a silver cummerbund, her face made up with perfectly drawn eyeliner and mascara. Dancing, she was all fluid motion, light on her feet, expressively twisting her hands and swiveling her hips.
Under flashing colored lights, guests, some with dreadlocks and others with carefully gelled coifs, moved to songs by the likes of the Egyptian Amr Diab and the Algerian Cheb Mami. Beats from traditional drums crossed with electronic ones, as melodies from flutes and ouds intertwined. When several circle dances — halay in Turkish — broke out at once, the floor began to shake from the stomping.
One of the regular D.J.’s, Ipek Ipekcioglu, 35, said she got her start rather suddenly, when one of the founders of SO36 walked up to her and said: “You’re Turkish, right? You’re lesbian, right? Bring your cassettes and D.J.”
Ms. Ipekcioglu spins everything from Turkish and Arabic music, to Greek, Balkan and Indian, a style she calls Eklektik BerlinIstan. She has been a full-time professional D.J. for six years and performs all over the world.
The space is decorated with bright yellow wall hangings depicting elephants, camels and even a flying carpet, with an intentional degree of kitsch, Ms. Souad said, and an intentional distance from anything Islamic. “We take care that religion is not mixed in here, not in the music either.”
Outside the boom of loud firecrackers can be heard, the first test rounds for the annual cacophony here that leaves New Year’s revelers ears’ ringing. Kreuzberg has been home for decades to large populations of Turks and Kurds, many of whom have very conservative religious values. Yet they have had to share the neighborhood that formerly abutted the Berlin Wall with many counterculture types, artists and anarchists and also gays and lesbians.
According to the city’s Schwules Museum, partly devoted to the history of gay people in the city and the country, “a lively homosexual subculture had developed in Berlin by the second half of the 18th century or perhaps earlier.” It was known as an oasis for gay men and lesbians in the Weimar period immortalized by the writer Christopher Isherwood and in the period when West Berlin was surrounded by the wall. Today, the city has an openly gay and highly popular mayor, Klaus Wowereit.
But gay men and lesbians from Muslim families say they face extraordinary discrimination at home. A survey of roughly 1,000 young men and women in Berlin, released in September and widely cited in the German press, found much higher levels of homophobia among Turkish youth.
“These differences are there,” said Bernd Simon, who led the study and is a professor of social psychology at Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel. “We can’t deny them. The question is how do we cope with them.”
“The answer is not to replace homophobia with Islamophobia,” he added, pointing out that homophobia is also higher among Russian immigrants and in other, less urban parts of Germany.
Kader Balcik, a 22-year-old Turk from Hamburg, said: “For us, for Muslims, it’s extremely difficult. When you’re gay, you’re immediately cut off from the family.”
He had recently moved to Berlin not long after being cut off from his mother because he is bisexual. “A mother who wishes death for her son, what kind of mother is that?” he asked, his eyes momentarily filling with tears.
Hasan, a 21-year-old Arab man, sitting at a table in the club’s quieter adjoining cafe, declined to give his last name, saying: “They would kill me. My brothers would kill me.” Asked if he meant this figuratively, he responded, “No, I mean they would kill me.”
“I’m living one life here and the other one the way they wish me to be,” Hasan said, referring to his parents. He said he still planned to marry, but when he turned 30 rather than right away, as his parents wished. “I have to have children, to do what Islam wants me to do,” he said. “I would stop with everything in the homosexual life. I would stop it.”
He stood up from the table and called to his two friends. “All right, boys, let’s go dance,” he said. “We’re here to have fun.” And they marched off to the dance floor, smiling.
January 1, 2008
Berlin Journal
Gay Muslims Pack a Dance Floor of Their Own
By NICHOLAS KULISH
BERLIN — Six men whirled faster and faster in the center of the nightclub, arms slung over one another’s shoulders, performing a traditional circle dance popular in Turkey and the Middle East. Nothing unusual given the German capital’s large Muslim population.
But most of the people filling the dance floor on Saturday at the club SO36 in the Kreuzberg neighborhood were gay, lesbian or bisexual, and of Turkish or Arab background. They were there for the monthly club night known as Gayhane, an all-too-rare opportunity to merge their immigrant cultures and their sexual identities.
European Muslims, so often portrayed one-dimensionally as rioters, honor killers or terrorists, live diverse lives, most of them trying to get by and to have a good time. That is more difficult if one is both Muslim and gay.
“When you’re here, it’s as if you’re putting on a mask, leaving the everyday outside and just having fun,” said a 22-year-old Turkish man who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear that he would be ostracized or worse if his family found out about his sexual orientation.
Safety and secrecy come up regularly when talking to guests, who laugh and dance, but also frequently look over their shoulders. To be a gay man or lesbian with an immigrant background invites trouble here in two very different ways.
“Depending on which part of Berlin I go to, in one I get punched in the mouth because I’m a foreigner and in the other because I’m a queen,” said Fatma Souad, the event’s organizer and master of ceremonies. Ms. Souad, 43, a transgender performer born in Ankara as a boy named Ali, has put on the party for over a decade.
Ms. Souad came to Berlin in 1983 after leaving home as a teenager. She studied to be a dressmaker and played in a punk band, but discovered Middle Eastern music through a friend and began teaching herself belly dancing. Ms. Souad started Salon Oriental, her first belly dancing theater, in 1988, and threw the first Gayhane party — hane means home in Turkish — in January 1997.
The club was packed by midnight and still had a line out the front door. On stage, Ms. Souad mixed a white turban and white net gloves with a black tuxedo with tails and a silver cummerbund, her face made up with perfectly drawn eyeliner and mascara. Dancing, she was all fluid motion, light on her feet, expressively twisting her hands and swiveling her hips.
Under flashing colored lights, guests, some with dreadlocks and others with carefully gelled coifs, moved to songs by the likes of the Egyptian Amr Diab and the Algerian Cheb Mami. Beats from traditional drums crossed with electronic ones, as melodies from flutes and ouds intertwined. When several circle dances — halay in Turkish — broke out at once, the floor began to shake from the stomping.
One of the regular D.J.’s, Ipek Ipekcioglu, 35, said she got her start rather suddenly, when one of the founders of SO36 walked up to her and said: “You’re Turkish, right? You’re lesbian, right? Bring your cassettes and D.J.”
Ms. Ipekcioglu spins everything from Turkish and Arabic music, to Greek, Balkan and Indian, a style she calls Eklektik BerlinIstan. She has been a full-time professional D.J. for six years and performs all over the world.
The space is decorated with bright yellow wall hangings depicting elephants, camels and even a flying carpet, with an intentional degree of kitsch, Ms. Souad said, and an intentional distance from anything Islamic. “We take care that religion is not mixed in here, not in the music either.”
Outside the boom of loud firecrackers can be heard, the first test rounds for the annual cacophony here that leaves New Year’s revelers ears’ ringing. Kreuzberg has been home for decades to large populations of Turks and Kurds, many of whom have very conservative religious values. Yet they have had to share the neighborhood that formerly abutted the Berlin Wall with many counterculture types, artists and anarchists and also gays and lesbians.
According to the city’s Schwules Museum, partly devoted to the history of gay people in the city and the country, “a lively homosexual subculture had developed in Berlin by the second half of the 18th century or perhaps earlier.” It was known as an oasis for gay men and lesbians in the Weimar period immortalized by the writer Christopher Isherwood and in the period when West Berlin was surrounded by the wall. Today, the city has an openly gay and highly popular mayor, Klaus Wowereit.
But gay men and lesbians from Muslim families say they face extraordinary discrimination at home. A survey of roughly 1,000 young men and women in Berlin, released in September and widely cited in the German press, found much higher levels of homophobia among Turkish youth.
“These differences are there,” said Bernd Simon, who led the study and is a professor of social psychology at Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel. “We can’t deny them. The question is how do we cope with them.”
“The answer is not to replace homophobia with Islamophobia,” he added, pointing out that homophobia is also higher among Russian immigrants and in other, less urban parts of Germany.
Kader Balcik, a 22-year-old Turk from Hamburg, said: “For us, for Muslims, it’s extremely difficult. When you’re gay, you’re immediately cut off from the family.”
He had recently moved to Berlin not long after being cut off from his mother because he is bisexual. “A mother who wishes death for her son, what kind of mother is that?” he asked, his eyes momentarily filling with tears.
Hasan, a 21-year-old Arab man, sitting at a table in the club’s quieter adjoining cafe, declined to give his last name, saying: “They would kill me. My brothers would kill me.” Asked if he meant this figuratively, he responded, “No, I mean they would kill me.”
“I’m living one life here and the other one the way they wish me to be,” Hasan said, referring to his parents. He said he still planned to marry, but when he turned 30 rather than right away, as his parents wished. “I have to have children, to do what Islam wants me to do,” he said. “I would stop with everything in the homosexual life. I would stop it.”
He stood up from the table and called to his two friends. “All right, boys, let’s go dance,” he said. “We’re here to have fun.” And they marched off to the dance floor, smiling.
Thursday, October 04, 2007
Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones
NYT
October 5, 2007
Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones
By DAVID ROHDE
SHABAK VALLEY, Afghanistan — In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a soft-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy.
Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her team’s ability to understand subtle points of tribal relations — in one case spotting a land dispute that allowed the Taliban to bully parts of a major tribe — has won the praise of officers who say they are seeing concrete results.
Col. Martin Schweitzer, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division unit working with the anthropologists here, said that the unit’s combat operations had been reduced by 60 percent since the scientists arrived in February, and that the soldiers were now able to focus more on improving security, health care and education for the population.
“We’re looking at this from a human perspective, from a social scientist’s perspective,” he said. “We’re not focused on the enemy. We’re focused on bringing governance down to the people.”
In September, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates authorized a $40 million expansion of the program, which will assign teams of anthropologists and social scientists to each of the 26 American combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since early September, five new teams have been deployed in the Baghdad area, bringing the total to six.
Yet criticism is emerging in academia. Citing the past misuse of social sciences in counterinsurgency campaigns, including in Vietnam and Latin America, some denounce the program as “mercenary anthropology” that exploits social science for political gain. Opponents fear that, whatever their intention, the scholars who work with the military could inadvertently cause all anthropologists to be viewed as intelligence gatherers for the American military.
Hugh Gusterson, an anthropology professor at George Mason University, and 10 other anthropologists are circulating an online pledge calling for anthropologists to boycott the teams, particularly in Iraq.
“While often presented by its proponents as work that builds a more secure world,” the pledge says, “at base, it contributes instead to a brutal war of occupation which has entailed massive casualties.”
In Afghanistan, the anthropologists arrived along with 6,000 troops, which doubled the American military’s strength in the area it patrols, the country’s east.
A smaller version of the Bush administration’s troop increase in Iraq, the buildup in Afghanistan has allowed American units to carry out the counterinsurgency strategy here, where American forces generally face less resistance and are better able to take risks.
A New Mantra
Since Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the overall American commander in Iraq, oversaw the drafting of the Army’s new counterinsurgency manual last year, the strategy has become the new mantra of the military. A recent American military operation here offered a window into how efforts to apply the new approach are playing out on the ground in counterintuitive ways.
In interviews, American officers lavishly praised the anthropology program, saying that the scientists’ advice has proved to be “brilliant,” helping them see the situation from an Afghan perspective and allowing them to cut back on combat operations.
The aim, they say, is to improve the performance of local government officials, persuade tribesmen to join the police, ease poverty and protect villagers from the Taliban and criminals.
Afghans and Western civilian officials, too, praised the anthropologists and the new American military approach but were cautious about predicting long-term success. Many of the economic and political problems fueling instability can be solved only by large numbers of Afghan and American civilian experts.
“My feeling is that the military are going through an enormous change right now where they recognize they won’t succeed militarily,” said Tom Gregg, the chief United Nations official in southeastern Afghanistan. “But they don’t yet have the skill sets to implement” a coherent nonmilitary strategy, he added.
Deploying small groups of soldiers into remote areas, Colonel Schweitzer’s paratroopers organized jirgas, or local councils, to resolve tribal disputes that have simmered for decades. Officers shrugged off questions about whether the military was comfortable with what David Kilcullen, an Australian anthropologist and an architect of the new strategy, calls “armed social work.”
“Who else is going to do it?“ asked Lt. Col. David Woods, commander of the Fourth Squadron, 73rd Cavalry. “You have to evolve. Otherwise you’re useless.”
The anthropology team here also played a major role in what the military called Operation Khyber. That was a 15-day drive late this summer in which 500 Afghan and 500 American soldiers tried to clear an estimated 200 to 250 Taliban insurgents out of much of Paktia Province, secure southeastern Afghanistan’s most important road and halt a string of suicide attacks on American troops and local governors.
In one of the first districts the team entered, Tracy identified an unusually high concentration of widows in one village, Colonel Woods said. Their lack of income created financial pressure on their sons to provide for their families, she determined, a burden that could drive the young men to join well-paid insurgents. Citing Tracy’s advice, American officers developed a job training program for the widows.
In another district, the anthropologist interpreted the beheading of a local tribal elder as more than a random act of intimidation: the Taliban’s goal, she said, was to divide and weaken the Zadran, one of southeastern Afghanistan’s most powerful tribes. If Afghan and American officials could unite the Zadran, she said, the tribe could block the Taliban from operating in the area.
“Call it what you want, it works,” said Colonel Woods, a native of Denbo, Pa. “It works in helping you define the problems, not just the symptoms.”
Embedding Scholars
The process that led to the creation of the teams began in late 2003, when American officers in Iraq complained that they had little to no information about the local population. Pentagon officials contacted Montgomery McFate, a Yale-educated cultural anthropologist working for the Navy who advocated using social science to improve military operations and strategy.
Ms. McFate helped develop a database in 2005 that provided officers with detailed information on the local population. The next year, Steve Fondacaro, a retired Special Operations colonel, joined the program and advocated embedding social scientists with American combat units.
Ms. McFate, the program’s senior social science adviser and an author of the new counterinsurgency manual, dismissed criticism of scholars working with the military. “I’m frequently accused of militarizing anthropology,” she said. “But we’re really anthropologizing the military.”
Roberto J. González, an anthropology professor at San Jose State University, called participants in the program naïve and unethical. He said that the military and the Central Intelligence Agency had consistently misused anthropology in counterinsurgency and propaganda campaigns and that military contractors were now hiring anthropologists for their local expertise as well.
“Those serving the short-term interests of military and intelligence agencies and contractors,” he wrote in the June issue of Anthropology Today, an academic journal, “will end up harming the entire discipline in the long run.”
Arguing that her critics misunderstand the program and the military, Ms. McFate said other anthropologists were joining the teams. She said their goal was to help the military decrease conflict instead of provoking it, and she vehemently denied that the anthropologists collected intelligence for the military.
In eastern Afghanistan, Tracy said wanted to reduce the use of heavy-handed military operations focused solely on killing insurgents, which she said alienated the population and created more insurgents. “I can go back and enhance the military’s understanding,” she said, “so that we don’t make the same mistakes we did in Iraq.”
Along with offering advice to commanders, she said, the five-member team creates a database of local leaders and tribes, as well as social problems, economic issues and political disputes.
Clinics and Mediation
During the recent operation, as soldiers watched for suicide bombers, Tracy and Army medics held a free medical clinic. They said they hoped that providing medical care would show villagers that the Afghan government was improving their lives.
Civil affairs soldiers then tried to mediate between factions of the Zadran tribe about where to build a school. The Americans said they hoped that the school, which would serve children from both groups, might end a 70-year dispute between the groups over control of a mountain covered with lucrative timber.
Though they praised the new program, Afghan and Western officials said it remained to be seen whether the weak Afghan government could maintain the gains. “That’s going to be the challenge, to fill the vacuum,” said Mr. Gregg, the United Nations official. “There’s a question mark over whether the government has the ability to take advantage of the gains.”
Others also question whether the overstretched American military and its NATO allies can keep up the pace of operations.
American officers expressed optimism. Many of those who had served in both Afghanistan and Iraq said they had more hope for Afghanistan. One officer said that the Iraqis had the tools to stabilize their country, like a potentially strong economy, but that they lacked the will. He said Afghans had the will, but lacked the tools.
After six years of American promises, Afghans, too, appear to be waiting to see whether the Americans or the Taliban will win a protracted test of wills here. They said this summer was just one chapter in a potentially lengthy struggle.
At a “super jirga” set up by Afghan and American commanders here, a member of the Afghan Parliament, Nader Khan Katawazai, laid out the challenge ahead to dozens of tribal elders.
“Operation Khyber was just for a few days,” he said. “The Taliban will emerge again.”
October 5, 2007
Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones
By DAVID ROHDE
SHABAK VALLEY, Afghanistan — In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a soft-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy.
Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her team’s ability to understand subtle points of tribal relations — in one case spotting a land dispute that allowed the Taliban to bully parts of a major tribe — has won the praise of officers who say they are seeing concrete results.
Col. Martin Schweitzer, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division unit working with the anthropologists here, said that the unit’s combat operations had been reduced by 60 percent since the scientists arrived in February, and that the soldiers were now able to focus more on improving security, health care and education for the population.
“We’re looking at this from a human perspective, from a social scientist’s perspective,” he said. “We’re not focused on the enemy. We’re focused on bringing governance down to the people.”
In September, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates authorized a $40 million expansion of the program, which will assign teams of anthropologists and social scientists to each of the 26 American combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since early September, five new teams have been deployed in the Baghdad area, bringing the total to six.
Yet criticism is emerging in academia. Citing the past misuse of social sciences in counterinsurgency campaigns, including in Vietnam and Latin America, some denounce the program as “mercenary anthropology” that exploits social science for political gain. Opponents fear that, whatever their intention, the scholars who work with the military could inadvertently cause all anthropologists to be viewed as intelligence gatherers for the American military.
Hugh Gusterson, an anthropology professor at George Mason University, and 10 other anthropologists are circulating an online pledge calling for anthropologists to boycott the teams, particularly in Iraq.
“While often presented by its proponents as work that builds a more secure world,” the pledge says, “at base, it contributes instead to a brutal war of occupation which has entailed massive casualties.”
In Afghanistan, the anthropologists arrived along with 6,000 troops, which doubled the American military’s strength in the area it patrols, the country’s east.
A smaller version of the Bush administration’s troop increase in Iraq, the buildup in Afghanistan has allowed American units to carry out the counterinsurgency strategy here, where American forces generally face less resistance and are better able to take risks.
A New Mantra
Since Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the overall American commander in Iraq, oversaw the drafting of the Army’s new counterinsurgency manual last year, the strategy has become the new mantra of the military. A recent American military operation here offered a window into how efforts to apply the new approach are playing out on the ground in counterintuitive ways.
In interviews, American officers lavishly praised the anthropology program, saying that the scientists’ advice has proved to be “brilliant,” helping them see the situation from an Afghan perspective and allowing them to cut back on combat operations.
The aim, they say, is to improve the performance of local government officials, persuade tribesmen to join the police, ease poverty and protect villagers from the Taliban and criminals.
Afghans and Western civilian officials, too, praised the anthropologists and the new American military approach but were cautious about predicting long-term success. Many of the economic and political problems fueling instability can be solved only by large numbers of Afghan and American civilian experts.
“My feeling is that the military are going through an enormous change right now where they recognize they won’t succeed militarily,” said Tom Gregg, the chief United Nations official in southeastern Afghanistan. “But they don’t yet have the skill sets to implement” a coherent nonmilitary strategy, he added.
Deploying small groups of soldiers into remote areas, Colonel Schweitzer’s paratroopers organized jirgas, or local councils, to resolve tribal disputes that have simmered for decades. Officers shrugged off questions about whether the military was comfortable with what David Kilcullen, an Australian anthropologist and an architect of the new strategy, calls “armed social work.”
“Who else is going to do it?“ asked Lt. Col. David Woods, commander of the Fourth Squadron, 73rd Cavalry. “You have to evolve. Otherwise you’re useless.”
The anthropology team here also played a major role in what the military called Operation Khyber. That was a 15-day drive late this summer in which 500 Afghan and 500 American soldiers tried to clear an estimated 200 to 250 Taliban insurgents out of much of Paktia Province, secure southeastern Afghanistan’s most important road and halt a string of suicide attacks on American troops and local governors.
In one of the first districts the team entered, Tracy identified an unusually high concentration of widows in one village, Colonel Woods said. Their lack of income created financial pressure on their sons to provide for their families, she determined, a burden that could drive the young men to join well-paid insurgents. Citing Tracy’s advice, American officers developed a job training program for the widows.
In another district, the anthropologist interpreted the beheading of a local tribal elder as more than a random act of intimidation: the Taliban’s goal, she said, was to divide and weaken the Zadran, one of southeastern Afghanistan’s most powerful tribes. If Afghan and American officials could unite the Zadran, she said, the tribe could block the Taliban from operating in the area.
“Call it what you want, it works,” said Colonel Woods, a native of Denbo, Pa. “It works in helping you define the problems, not just the symptoms.”
Embedding Scholars
The process that led to the creation of the teams began in late 2003, when American officers in Iraq complained that they had little to no information about the local population. Pentagon officials contacted Montgomery McFate, a Yale-educated cultural anthropologist working for the Navy who advocated using social science to improve military operations and strategy.
Ms. McFate helped develop a database in 2005 that provided officers with detailed information on the local population. The next year, Steve Fondacaro, a retired Special Operations colonel, joined the program and advocated embedding social scientists with American combat units.
Ms. McFate, the program’s senior social science adviser and an author of the new counterinsurgency manual, dismissed criticism of scholars working with the military. “I’m frequently accused of militarizing anthropology,” she said. “But we’re really anthropologizing the military.”
Roberto J. González, an anthropology professor at San Jose State University, called participants in the program naïve and unethical. He said that the military and the Central Intelligence Agency had consistently misused anthropology in counterinsurgency and propaganda campaigns and that military contractors were now hiring anthropologists for their local expertise as well.
“Those serving the short-term interests of military and intelligence agencies and contractors,” he wrote in the June issue of Anthropology Today, an academic journal, “will end up harming the entire discipline in the long run.”
Arguing that her critics misunderstand the program and the military, Ms. McFate said other anthropologists were joining the teams. She said their goal was to help the military decrease conflict instead of provoking it, and she vehemently denied that the anthropologists collected intelligence for the military.
In eastern Afghanistan, Tracy said wanted to reduce the use of heavy-handed military operations focused solely on killing insurgents, which she said alienated the population and created more insurgents. “I can go back and enhance the military’s understanding,” she said, “so that we don’t make the same mistakes we did in Iraq.”
Along with offering advice to commanders, she said, the five-member team creates a database of local leaders and tribes, as well as social problems, economic issues and political disputes.
Clinics and Mediation
During the recent operation, as soldiers watched for suicide bombers, Tracy and Army medics held a free medical clinic. They said they hoped that providing medical care would show villagers that the Afghan government was improving their lives.
Civil affairs soldiers then tried to mediate between factions of the Zadran tribe about where to build a school. The Americans said they hoped that the school, which would serve children from both groups, might end a 70-year dispute between the groups over control of a mountain covered with lucrative timber.
Though they praised the new program, Afghan and Western officials said it remained to be seen whether the weak Afghan government could maintain the gains. “That’s going to be the challenge, to fill the vacuum,” said Mr. Gregg, the United Nations official. “There’s a question mark over whether the government has the ability to take advantage of the gains.”
Others also question whether the overstretched American military and its NATO allies can keep up the pace of operations.
American officers expressed optimism. Many of those who had served in both Afghanistan and Iraq said they had more hope for Afghanistan. One officer said that the Iraqis had the tools to stabilize their country, like a potentially strong economy, but that they lacked the will. He said Afghans had the will, but lacked the tools.
After six years of American promises, Afghans, too, appear to be waiting to see whether the Americans or the Taliban will win a protracted test of wills here. They said this summer was just one chapter in a potentially lengthy struggle.
At a “super jirga” set up by Afghan and American commanders here, a member of the Afghan Parliament, Nader Khan Katawazai, laid out the challenge ahead to dozens of tribal elders.
“Operation Khyber was just for a few days,” he said. “The Taliban will emerge again.”
Friday, August 31, 2007
A Dylan on the Persian Lute, With a Songbook of Sly Protest
September 1, 2007
A Dylan on the Persian Lute, With a Songbook of Sly Protest
By NAZILA FATHI
TEHRAN
He plays the setar, a traditional Persian lute, and is a master of classical Persian literature and poetry. But the sounds he draws from the instrument, along with his deep voice and his playful but subtly cutting lyrics about growing up in an Islamic state have made Mohsen Namjoo the most controversial, and certainly the most daring, figure in Persian music today.
Some call him a genius, a sort of Bob Dylan of Iran, and say his satirical music accurately reflects the frustrations and disillusionment of young Iranians. His critics say his music makes a mockery of Persian classical and traditional music as he constantly blends it with Western jazz, blues and rock.
Mr. Namjoo, 31, is a singer, composer and musician, but most of all, his fans say, he is a great performer.
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“I wanted to save Persian music,” he said in an interview at one of his studios in Tehran. “It does not belong to the present time and cannot satisfy the younger generation. The fact is that Persian music is very close to other styles, and it is possible to mix in other styles with a little shrewdness.”
His blending of Western and Persian music produces unexpected moments that jar the traditionalists but are thrilling to his fans, who are mostly young artists and intellectuals. His music sounds Persian, but the melodies take away the melancholy that often suffuses classical Persian music.
But it is Mr. Namjoo’s lyrics, his fans say, that make his music so important. He sings old Persian poetry, such as works by the 13th-century mystic poet Rumi or the 14th-century poet Hafiz, with its connotations of love and lust. But with his mastery of Persian literature, he is able to write his own lyrics into the accepted forms, adding layers of meaning.
“The first time I listened to his music I found it unexpected,” said Mahsa Vahdat, a 33-year-old singer. “It started with a laugh for me and ended with a cry. His music and his lyrics express the bitter situation of my generation and they represent the society we live in.”
Defying Iran’s cultural police, he does not shy away from contemporary issues.
“What belongs to us is an apologetic government,” he sings in a song called Neo-Kanti. “What belongs to us is a losing national team.” Those were references to the widespread disappointment with the government of the former reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, and the constant losses of Iran’s soccer teams.
“What belongs to us, maybe, is the future,” he adds, in a voice that is more resigned than hopeful.
In another popular song he sings, “One morning you wake up and realize that you are gone by the wind, there is no one around you and a few more of your hairs have gone gray, your birthday is a mourning ceremony again.”
After throwing in an unexpected Western melody, he goes on in a lower voice, saying, “that you are born in Asia is called the oppression of geography, you are up in the air and your breakfast has become tea and a cigarette.”
Atabak Elyassi, a musician and a professor of music at Music College at Art University in Tehran, said there was protest and satire in Mr. Namjoo’s music. “In the meantime, it is very Iranian,” he said, “because he constantly points to issues that are about the lives of Iranians.”
Mr. Namjoo was raised in the religious city of Mashhad in northeastern Iran, where he started learning classical Persian music when he was 12.
As he grew older, he said, he listened to Western music and became interested in Jim Morrison, Eric Clapton and the Irish pop singer, Chris de Burgh. He read philosophy and Persian literature, and developed a fondness for a strain of modern Persian poetry that stresses phonetics over the meanings of words.
But what changed his approach more than anything, he said, was his experience in the theater. When he was admitted to the University of Fine Art in 1994, he was told that he had to wait a year before starting classes. So he decided to pass the time studying theater.
“A musical instrument is a medium for a musician to play music,” he said. “So is the voice of a singer, it is like a medium to sing through it. But neither of them is involved in building relations with a living creature.
“But when I studied theater I learned to connect with my audience, and that was when my poems changed,” he said.
It is hard to gauge Mr. Namjoo’s popularity, for he has come of age in a time of intense pressure on Iranian music.
Most music was banned after the 1979 Islamic revolution, with only religious and revolutionary songs deemed appropriate. To this day, women are not allowed to sing. Over time the restrictions were eased, first on classical Iranian music and then, in the mid-1990s, on pop music. But after the election of Iran’s current, conservative president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, music came under a cloud once again.
The authorities canceled a concert of rock and jazz music in Tehran in July. In August, more than 200 people who attended a private rock concert in Karadj, 30 miles west of Tehran, were arrested. The public prosecutor in Karaj, Ali Fallahi, called the concert “satanic,” local news agencies reported.
Mr. Namjoo himself has not yet been able to give a live, public performance, and he has not received a government license to sell his CDs. But he is able to perform privately, his CDs are sold on the black market and, in an inexplicable twist, his songs are played on Iranian radio stations. As of three weeks ago, his manager said, 1.6 million people had downloaded his music from YouTube.
In July, he did receive an invitation to a government ceremony to sing a few songs in praise of Imam Ali, the martyred son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad and the man whom Shiite Muslims consider Muhammad’s legitimate successor. Yet, the room was filled with artists and musicians, rather than government officials.
Because of his cutting-edge style, Mr. Namjoo is under another kind of pressure. Most classical musicians are purists, insisting that the music not be altered in any fashion. They dismiss Mr. Namjoo’s music as absurd because of the way he has incorporated Western influences.
If you take Iranian classical music on one side, and Western music on the other, said one critic, Reza Ismailinia, who runs a small art gallery in Tehran, “then I think Mr. Namjoo’s music is like a caricature in between, or a kind of fantasy.”
But many disagree with Mr. Ismailinia.
“I think he will be remembered as a courageous artist who opened a window toward creating something new and for going beyond traditional barriers,” said Alireza Samiazar, the former director the Contemporary Museum of Art in Tehran. “I think his contribution to our music will be great.”
Undeterred by the critics, Mr. Namjoo says his next ambition is to study music abroad.
“I want to be challenged and get acquainted with Western music,” he said. “I was accepted too easily here.”
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
LA Times Reporter Describes Being a Woman in Saudi Arabia
Los Angeles Times
COLUMN ONE
In Saudi Arabia, a view from behind the veil
As a woman in the male-dominated kingdom, Times reporter Megan Stack quietly fumed beneath her abaya. Even beyond its borders, her experience taints her perception of the sexes.
By Megan K. Stack
Times Staff Writer
June 6, 2007
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — THE hem of my heavy Islamic cloak trailed over floors that glistened like ice. I walked faster, my eyes fixed on a familiar, green icon. I hadn't seen a Starbucks in months, but there it was, tucked into a corner of a fancy shopping mall in the Saudi capital. After all those bitter little cups of sludgy Arabic coffee, here at last was an improbable snippet of home — caffeinated, comforting, American.
I wandered into the shop, filling my lungs with the rich wafts of coffee. The man behind the counter gave me a bemused look; his eyes flickered. I asked for a latte. He shrugged, the milk steamer whined, and he handed over the brimming paper cup. I turned my back on his uneasy face.
Crossing the cafe, I felt the hard stares of Saudi men. A few of them stopped talking as I walked by and watched me pass. Them, too, I ignored. Finally, coffee in hand, I sank into the sumptuous lap of an overstuffed armchair.
"Excuse me," hissed the voice in my ear. "You can't sit here." The man from the counter had appeared at my elbow. He was glaring.
"Excuse me?" I blinked a few times.
"Emmm," he drew his discomfort into a long syllable, his brows knitted. "You cannot stay here."
"What? Uh … why?"
Then he said it: "Men only."
He didn't tell me what I would learn later: Starbucks had another, unmarked door around back that led to a smaller espresso bar, and a handful of tables smothered by curtains. That was the "family" section. As a woman, that's where I belonged. I had no right to mix with male customers or sit in plain view of passing shoppers. Like the segregated South of a bygone United States, today's Saudi Arabia shunts half the population into separate, inferior and usually invisible spaces.
At that moment, there was only one thing to do. I stood up. From the depths of armchairs, men in their white robes and red-checked kaffiyehs stared impassively over their mugs. I felt blood rushing to my face. I dropped my eyes, and immediately wished I hadn't. Snatching up the skirts of my robe to keep from stumbling, I walked out of the store and into the clatter of the shopping mall.
--
THAT was nearly four years ago, a lesson learned on one of my first trips to the kingdom. Until that day, I thought I knew what I was doing: I'd heard about Saudi Arabia, that the sexes are wholly segregated. From museums to university campuses to restaurants, the genders live corralled existences. One young, hip, U.S.-educated Saudi friend told me that he arranges to meet his female friends in other Arab cities. It's easier to fly to Damascus or Dubai, he shrugged, than to chill out coeducationally at home.
I was ready to cope, or so I thought. I arrived with a protective smirk in tow, planning to thicken the walls around myself. I'd report a few stories, and go home. I had no inkling that Saudi Arabia, the experience of being a woman there, would stick to me, follow me home on the plane and shadow me through my days, tainting the way I perceived men and women everywhere.
I'm leaving the Middle East now, closing up years spent covering the fighting and fallout that have swept the region since Sept. 11. Of all the strange, scary and joyful experiences of the past years, my time covering Saudi Arabia remains among the most jarring.
I spent my days in Saudi Arabia struggling unhappily between a lifetime of being taught to respect foreign cultures and the realization that this culture judged me a lesser being. I tried to draw parallels: If I went to South Africa during apartheid, would I feel compelled to be polite?
I would find that I still saw scraps of Saudi Arabia everywhere I went. Back home in Cairo, the usual cacophony of whistles and lewd coos on the streets sent me into blind rage. I slammed doors in the faces of deliverymen; cursed at Egyptian soldiers in a language they didn't speak; kept a resentful mental tally of the Western men, especially fellow reporters, who seemed to condone, even relish, the relegation of women in the Arab world.
In the West, there's a tendency to treat Saudi Arabia as a remote land, utterly removed from our lives. But it's not very far from us, nor are we as different as we might like to think. Saudi Arabia is a center of ideas and commerce, an important ally to the United States, the heartland of a major world religion. It is a highly industrialized, ultramodern home to expatriates from all over the world, including Americans who live in lush gated compounds with swimming pools, drink illegal glasses of bathtub gin and speak glowingly of the glorious desert and the famous hospitality of Saudis.
The rules are different here. The same U.S. government that heightened public outrage against the Taliban by decrying the mistreatment of Afghan women prizes the oil-slicked Saudi friendship and even offers wan praise for Saudi elections in which women are banned from voting. All U.S. fast-food franchises operating here, not just Starbucks, make women stand in separate lines. U.S.-owned hotels don't let women check in without a letter from a company vouching for her ability to pay; women checking into hotels alone have long been regarded as prostitutes.
As I roamed in and out of Saudi Arabia, the abaya, or Islamic robe, eventually became the symbol of those shifting rules.
I always delayed until the last minute. When I felt the plane dip low over Riyadh, I'd reach furtively into my computer bag to fish out the black robe and scarf crumpled inside. I'd slip my arms into the sleeves without standing up. If I caught the eyes of any male passengers as my fingers fumbled with the snaps, I'd glare. Was I imagining the smug looks on their faces?
The sleeves, the length of it, always felt foreign, at first. But it never took long to work its alchemy, to plant the insecurity. After a day or two, the notion of appearing without the robe felt shocking. Stripped of the layers of curve-smothering cloth, my ordinary clothes suddenly felt revealing, even garish. To me, the abaya implied that a woman's body is a distraction and an interruption, a thing that must be hidden from view lest it haul the society into vice and disarray. The simple act of wearing the robe implanted that self-consciousness by osmosis.
In the depths of the robe, my posture suffered. I'd draw myself in and bumble along like those adolescent girls who seem to think they can roll their breasts back into their bodies if they curve their spines far enough. That was why, it hit me one day, I always seemed to come back from Saudi Arabia with a backache.
The kingdom made me slouch.
--
SAUDI men often raised the question of women with me; they seemed to hope that I would tell them, either out of courtesy or conviction, that I endorsed their way of life. Some blamed all manner of Western ills, from gun violence to alcoholism, on women's liberation. "Do you think you could ever live here?" many of them asked. It sounded absurd every time, and every time I would repeat the obvious: No.
Early in 2005, I covered the kingdom's much-touted municipal elections, which excluded women not only from running for office, but also from voting. True to their tribal roots, candidates pitched tents in vacant lots and played host to voters for long nights of coffee, bull sessions and poetry recitations. I accepted an invitation to visit one of the tents, but the sight of a woman in their midst so badly ruffled the would-be voters that the campaign manager hustled over and asked me, with lavish apologies, to make myself scarce before I cost his man the election.
A few days later, a female U.S. official, visiting from Washington, gave a press appearance in a hotel lobby in Riyadh. Sporting pearls, a business suit and a bare, blond head, she praised the Saudi elections.
The election "is a departure from their culture and their history," she said. "It offers to the citizens of Saudi Arabia hope…. It's modest, but it's dramatic."
The American ambassador, a bespectacled Texan named James C. Oberwetter, also praised the voting from his nearby seat.
"When I got here a year ago, there were no political tents," he said. "It's like a backyard political barbecue in the U.S."
One afternoon, a candidate invited me to meet his daughter. She spoke fluent English and was not much younger than me. I cannot remember whether she was wearing hijab, the Islamic head scarf, inside her home, but I have a memory of pink. I asked her about the elections.
"Very good," she said.
So you really think so, I said gently, even though you can't vote?
"Of course," she said. "Why do I need to vote?"
Her father chimed in. He urged her, speaking English for my benefit, to speak candidly. But she insisted: What good was voting? She looked at me as if she felt sorry for me, a woman cast adrift on the rough seas of the world, no male protector in sight.
"Maybe you don't want to vote," I said. "But wouldn't you like to make that choice yourself?"
"I don't need to," she said calmly, blinking slowly and deliberately. "If I have a father or a husband, why do I need to vote? Why should I need to work? They will take care of everything."
Through the years I have met many Saudi women. Some are rebels; some are proudly defensive of Saudi ways, convinced that any discussion of women's rights is a disguised attack on Islam from a hostile Westerner. There was the young dental student who came home from the university and sat up half the night, writing a groundbreaking novel exploring the internal lives and romances of young Saudi women. The oil expert who scolded me for asking about female drivers, pointing out the pitfalls of divorce and custody laws and snapping: "Driving is the least of our problems." I have met women who work as doctors and business consultants. Many of them seem content.
Whatever their thoughts on the matter, they have been assigned a central, symbolic role in what seems to be one of the greatest existential questions in contemporary Saudi Arabia: Can the country opt to develop in some ways and stay frozen in others? Can the kingdom evolve economically and technologically in a global society without relinquishing its particular culture of extreme religious piety and ancient tribal code?
The men are stuck, too. Over coffee one afternoon, an economist told me wistfully of the days when he and his wife had studied overseas, how she'd hopped behind the wheel and did her own thing. She's an independent, outspoken woman, he said. Coming back home to Riyadh had depressed both of them.
"Here, I got another dependent: my wife," he said. He found himself driving her around, chaperoning her as if she were a child. "When they see a woman walking alone here, it's like a wolf watching a sheep. 'Let me take what's unattended.' " He told me that both he and his wife hoped, desperately, that social and political reform would finally dawn in the kingdom. He thought foreign academics were too easy on Saudi Arabia, that they urged only minor changes instead of all-out democracy because they secretly regarded Saudis as "savages" incapable of handling too much freedom.
"I call them propaganda papers," he said of the foreign analysis. "They come up with all these lame excuses." He and his wife had already lost hope for themselves, he said.
"For ourselves, the train has left the station. We are trapped," he said. "I think about my kids. At least when I look at myself in the mirror I'll say: 'At least I said this. At least I wrote this.' "
--
WHEN Saudi officials chat with an American reporter, they go to great lengths to depict a moderate, misunderstood kingdom. They complain about stereotypes in the Western press: Women banned from driving? Well, they don't want to drive anyway. They all have drivers, and why would a lady want to mess with parking?
The religious police who stalk the streets and shopping centers, forcing "Islamic values" onto the populace? Oh, Saudi officials say, they really aren't important, or strict, or powerful. You hear stories to the contrary? Mere exaggerations, perpetuated by people who don't understand Saudi Arabia.
I had an interview one afternoon with a relatively high-ranking Saudi official. Since I can't drive anywhere or meet a man in a cafe, I usually end up inviting sources for coffee in the lobby of my hotel, where the staff turns a blind eye to whether those in the "family section" are really family.
As the elevator touched down and the shiny doors swung open onto the lobby, the official rushed toward me.
"Do you think we could talk in your room?" he blurted out.
I stepped back. What was this, some crazy come-on?
"No, why?" I stammered, stepping wide around him. "We can sit right over here." I wanted to get to the coffee shop — no dice. He swung himself around, blocking my path and my view.
"It's not a good idea," he said. "Let's just go to your room."
"I really don't think … I mean," I said, stuttering in embarrassment.
Then, peering over his shoulder, I saw them: two beefy men in robes. Great bushes of beards sprang from their chins, they swung canes in their hands and scanned the hotel lobby through squinted eyes.
"Is that the religious police?" I said. "It is!" I was a little mesmerized. I'd always wanted to see them in action.
The ministry official seemed to shrink a little, his shoulders slumped in defeat.
"They're not supposed to be here," he muttered despondently. "What are they doing here?"
"Well, why don't we go to the mall next door?" I said, eyes fixed on the menacing men. "There's a coffee shop there, we could try that."
"No, they will go there next." While he wrung his hands nervously, I stepped back a little and considered the irony of our predicament. To avoid running afoul of what may be the world's most stringent public moral code, I was being asked to entertain a strange, older man in my hotel room, something I would never agree to back home.
I had to do something. He was about to walk away and cancel the meeting, and I couldn't afford to lose it. Then I remembered a couple of armchairs near the elevator, up on my floor. We rode up and ordered room-service coffee. We talked as the elevators chimed up and down the spine of the skyscraper and the roar of vacuum cleaners echoed in the hallway.
--
ONE glaring spring day, when the hot winds raced in off the plains and the sun blotted everything to white, I stood outside a Riyadh bank, sweating in my black cloak while I waited for a friend. The sidewalk was simmering, but I had nowhere else to go. As a woman, I was forbidden to enter the men's half of the bank to fetch him. Traffic screamed past on a nearby highway. The winds tugged at the layers of black polyester. My sunglasses began to slip down my glistening nose.
The door clattered open, and I looked up hopefully. But no, it was a security guard. And he was stomping straight at me, yelling in Arabic. I knew enough vocabulary to glean his message: He didn't want me standing there. I took off my shades, fixed my blue eyes on him blankly and finally turned away as if puzzled. I think of this as playing possum.
He disappeared again, only to reemerge with another security guard. This man was of indistinct South Asian origin and had an English vocabulary. He looked like a pit bull — short, stocky and teeth flashing as he barked: "Go! Go! You can't stand here! The men can SEE! The men can SEE!"
I looked down at him and sighed. I was tired. "Where do you want me to go? I have to wait for my friend. He's inside." But he was still snarling and flashing those teeth, arms akimbo. He wasn't interested in discussions.
"Not here. NOT HERE! The men can SEE you!" He flailed one arm toward the bank.
I lost my temper.
"I'm just standing here!" I snapped. "Leave me alone!" This was a slip. I had already learned that if you're a woman in a sexist country, yelling at a man only makes a crisis worse.
The pit bull advanced toward me, making little shooing motions with his hands, lips curled back. Involuntarily, I stepped back a few paces and found myself in the shrubbery. I guess that, from the bushes, I was hidden from the view of the window, thereby protecting the virtue of all those innocent male bankers. At any rate, it satisfied the pit bull, who climbed back onto the sidewalk and stood guard over me. I glared at him. He showed his teeth. The minutes passed. Finally, my friend reemerged.
A liberal, U.S.-educated professor at King Saud University, he was sure to share my outrage, I thought. Maybe he'd even call up the bank — his friend was the manager — and get the pit bull in trouble. I told him my story, words hot as the pavement.
He hardly blinked. "Yes," he said. "Oh." He put the car in reverse, and off we drove.
--
DRIVING to the airport, I felt the kingdom slipping off behind me, the flat emptiness of its deserts, the buildings that rear toward the sky, encased in mirrored glass, blank under a blaring sun. All the hints of a private life I have never seen. Saudis are bred from the desert; they find life in what looks empty to me.
Even if I were Saudi, would I understand it? I remember the government spokesman, Mansour Turki, who said to me: "Being a Saudi doesn't mean you see every face of Saudi society. Saudi men don't understand how Saudi women think. They have no idea, actually. Even my own family, my own mother or sister, she won't talk to me honestly."
I slipped my iPod headphones into my ears. I wanted to hear something thumping and American. It began the way it always does: an itch, an impatience, like a wrinkle in the sock, something that is felt, but not yet registered. The discomfort always starts when I leave.
By the time I boarded the plane, I was in a temper. I yanked at the clasps, shrugged off the abaya like a rejected embrace. I crumpled it up and tossed it childishly into the airplane seat.
Then I was just standing there, feeling stripped in my jeans and blouse. My limbs felt light, and modesty flashed through me. I was aware of the skin of my wrists and forearms, the triangle of naked neck. I scanned the eyes behind me, looking for a challenge. But none came. The Saudi passengers had watched my tantrum impassively.
I sat down, leaned back and breathed. This moment, it seems, is always the same. I take the abaya off, expecting to feel liberated. But somehow, it always feels like defeat.
--
megan.stack@latimes.com
Stack reported in Saudi Arabia repeatedly during her tenure as The Times' Cairo Bureau chief from September 2003 until last month.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Rappers in Iran
from WORLD MUSIC CENTRAL
The Loneliness of an Iranian Rapper
05/31/2007 01:11AM
Contributed by: WMC_News_Dept.
Articles Contributed by Amir Azizmohamadi
[Warning: This article contains sexually explicit language. If you are offended by such language, please do not continue reading the rest of the article]
Why d'you hate my guts?
'Cause I'm a rapper?
'Cause my voice is not tame?
Or 'cause the streets' deed's in my name?
Gotta mind your business
'Cause in this wilderness
The rule's hard and fast:
"The ones with power
Will the weak devour." (rap singer Hichkas)
About two hundred years ago in Iran, Moshtagh Ali Shah, a mystic musician, was stoned to death when caught singing the Koran to the tunes of his setar, a traditional Iranian musical instrument. Trying to digest the shock of listening to the noise that Iranian rappers call "Rap-e Fars" (Persian Rap), you are doomed to ask whether the climate is any better today for a musician fiddling around with musical and social norms. Their message is no softer than Moshtagh Ali Shah's heretical combination of music and the Koran. Erfan in "One Hundred Oaths" sums up their manifesto:
Gonna make mock of every limit.
Gonna overstep every mark.
Yes, after two millenniums
It's time we broke the cast.
To date no "rap kown" (Iranian rapper) has been stoned, tortured, flogged, or jailed. But only these are what they haven't been going through. Iranian society has employed all the means of silencing and all the silence of indifference to fight back Iranian rap. From every direction all sorts of knives are out against these street bards.
Rap-e Fars is underground, unofficial, and illegal. It is uncompromising, vigorous, and prolific. It is frank, fresh, experimental, and, most of the time, musically stunning. Even if it sometimes has its musical imperfections, Rap-e Fars is still unbelievably popular. It is everywhere in the Iranian teenage world. Pouring out of the windows of cars speeding on Tehran motorways, brightening up teenage parties, and palely leaking out of teenage headphones where there are infidel ears around. The music and words of Rap-e Fars flow quite audibly in most teenage conversations.
Yet even if it were not popular, Iranian rappers would still have to be given the right to produce and sell their songs freely. The right to be watched and heard and talked about publicly. Their failure would have to be left to the public to decide about and to best-seller lists. The prospect of a boisterous rap vanity fair, however, is what dramatically disturbs the inscriptions carved deep in the Iranian psyche.
The Iranian government has never had a brilliant track record in its dealings with music in general. During the Islamic revolution in Iran, pop singers accounted for a big proportion of political exiles and escapees. Over the last three decades, not even once a musical instrument has been displayed on the state TV. More socially accepted forms of music than rap, like pop and rock, are aging in lengthy queues "before the law" for concert permits. No. The government does not seem to be willing to even start flirting with the idea of legalizing rap even in the far future.
And indeed, the words that Iranian rappers are penning make the prospect of an official rap in Iran out of the question. In an interview with Article 19, a London based human rights organization, Sefryan, an Iranian writer, explains that one of his philosophical works "was rejected because of its failure to reference Islam as a factor in the attainment of human happiness." An Iranian national newspaper, the Hambastegi reported on 18 Jan 2007 that the Farsi translation of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying had been denied a publication license and considered "unpublishable." Meticulous censorship has, edition after edition, replaced the word "breasts" with ellipses in the line "I'll hide you between my …," from a poem by Forogh Farokhzad, one of the biggest names in contemporary Persian poetry.
Such a system will never tolerate the lyrics of Rap-e Fars, whose dictionary does not contain the word "taboo."
Hichkas, one of the founders of Iranian rap addresses the issue in "The Law":
There is an unwritten law
That no one recorded, no one saw:
"Silently silence the bad voice
Voicelessness is the only choice."
Rap-e Fars, however has broken this law. They "won't stand ceremony," says Yas, an outspoken critic of the follies of society, in a podcast interview mushrooming on fan blogs. Shayan in "Lord" sings: "Let's define a young Iranian: Prison, stick, and flog." Nor does Shayan shy away from singing about alcohol and teenage parties and the consequent punishment:
It's evening and party starts
You get drunk and they flog out
All the booze you had tonight.
And Tigheh in "From Yesterday Until Today" shouts:
You, God.
It's time you stepped down
It's time, the turn is mine
Iranian rappers do not really bite their tongue when it comes to sexual taboos either. Canbean in "Hey, Hooker" advises Tehran prostitutes:
They'll tear your cunt
Rip open your bum
Feed you a pecker
But won't give you a penny.
The unofficial nature of Iranian rap will keep it financially vulnerable and half dead. According to Wikipedia, Zed Bazi, one of the most popular Iranian rap bands, has had more than eight million free downloads. The money they could have made would be enough to revolutionize Iranian pop culture.
However, to consider the government as the only hindrance Iranian rap has faced is an error. Next to "the oppressor's wrong" and "the insolence of office," one should not underestimate "the proud man's contumely."
A respected pillar of traditional Iranian music, Majid Kiani, in his article "A Comprehensive Categorization of Different Types of Music in Iran," published on the official website of The House Of Music—a union-like gathering of influential musicians—does not even make a passing reference to anything called Persian Rap. Ironically, if googled in Farsi, his name will be found on 1680 websites, which in comparison with Zed Bazi's google results, 12500, is not very impressive.
Ali Reza Hejazi, one of the managers of Neinava, a prosperous traditional music school in Tehran, does recognize the existence of Iranian rap but calls it "a load of crap" and labels its fans as "music-illiterate." "It's a silly imitation of American rap and nothing else," he asserts. I remind him of the attempts Iranian rappers have made to Iranify their tunes, for example using traditional instruments in their pieces. Indignation runs all over his face: "These instruments deserve reverence. This is musical blasphemy." I ask him if they should be allowed to have a music school like Neinava to teach their music and make money. He bursts laughing: "Teaching what? Yelling and swearing?"
Rap kowns are well aware of this criticism. In "I Said" Hichkas raps:
People who know about rap zilch
But keep wagging their chins
Make me feel sick, sick, sick.
Some of these bastard masters
Have called my rapping artless.
So please rap for us once
With my voice and my style.
Surprisingly, the members of the political opposition's musical wing, based mostly in Los Angeles with a dozen of international TV channels, who sometimes dabble in making anti-government political songs apart from bad quality pop they mass produce, have not been eager to welcome Rap-e Fars either, even to exploit their anti-system potentialities.
In a massive Las Vegas concert for the Iranian diaspora in December 2006, not even one single Iranian rapper was given the chance to appear on stage. Their music videos are not broadcast on their channels and no interviews are granted by their patriotic hosts.
An exiled pre-revolution pop star, Sattar, in an interview on Voice of America Persian on 20 January 2007, while admiring the music his generation produced, did not hesitate to attack the music made in Iran stating that in Iran anybody could sing. "What they need in Iran is an experienced committee to approve of the music and lyrics of every song before their release," he prescribed. I ask Ali Reza Hejazi, the traditionalist teacher at Neinava, why he thinks Los Angeles producers have ignored Persian rap. "As soon as Hichkas and Zed Bazi are established on TV screens, they'll have to kiss show business goodbye," he puts it bluntly.
Disappointed with musicians, one might as well try to see if anybody else in the Iranian elite has taken any notice of Persian rap as, to say the least, a cultural or sociological phenomenon. You flip through piles of writings by critics, intellectuals, thinkers, philosophers, and you are only stranded in deafening silence. Iranian thinkers have turned a deaf ear to their children's heroes.
On a chat show broadcast on 16 Jan 2007 by Jam-e Jam, a state run international TV channel, Reza Kianian, a praised Iranian film star and a respected academic teaching theatre and cinema gave a description of Iranian underground cinema which could also echo what he might have said about underground rap too. He said, "They are a bunch of opportunists who stir the filth in society to make a name. It's not difficult to criticize. A true artist would show a gem in squalor."
Ali Zarnegar, 25, a young poet whose book was not given a publication license by the government, doe not see any literary merit in the rappers' lyrics. "If I were to give them a mark, it would be 1 out of 10," he speculates. I ask him if he would let them sell their music freely, and he answers "only under a strict word-by-word supervision of their lyrics."
Despite all the venomous self-righteousness around them, these teenage songsters—in the claustrophobic room they live—are fostering some precious values that their critics and oppressors have hardly happened to respect—some values desperately needed in today's Iran.
Apart from their party raps, songs about their everyday life, and descriptions of their neighborhoods, which are a rich source of detailed documents reflecting the true picture of daily life in Iran—including details as minute as the brands of bootlegged booze Iranian teenagers consume—Iranian rappers enjoy the possession of a sensitive social conscience and determined moral commitment, and at the same time, the bravery of expressing what they are concerned about. They have sung about poverty, unemployment, addiction, prostitution, child labor, economic corruption, homelessness, Iran-Iraq war and the soldiers killed in the fronts. They have also been quick to react to what is happening around them in the world; they have rapped about George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, terrorism, 9/11, the massacre of civilians in the Middle East, peace, and strong defense against possible American military measures against Iran.
They are honest. They are democratically frank in their dialogues and criticism of one another's rap. They gang up, pan each other in their songs, go solo, and come together again. Their supremacy in rap and credit in society, when claimed in their songs, stem from the power of people and their popularity among their zakhars and baks (fans and friends), not a big boss or a guru. They are self-assertive and individualistic and there is nothing humble in their ways, nothing meek and obedient.
Rap-e Fars has been round for about seven years now with rap kowns struggling underground. It is difficult to predict what future holds for Iranain rappers. They are realistic. Pishro in "Prisoner" weighs the situation: "They stroked me with nightsticks / A rapper with a blind and deaf audience." But he is still optimistic: "You will crowd me some day soon for autographs." So are Hayoola & Felakat:
Let me tell you what the truth is
My rap is not gonna cease.
No one can crack Persian rap
It will aspire like a firm spire.
Hichkas also echoes his fellow rappers:
There will be a day
When cover captions say
The biggest rapper of the world
Is rapping in the third world.
Iranian rappers are as lonely as the last minutes of Moshtagh Ali Shah. But they won't give up without a fight. They have a dream.
The Loneliness of an Iranian Rapper
05/31/2007 01:11AM
Contributed by: WMC_News_Dept.
Articles Contributed by Amir Azizmohamadi
[Warning: This article contains sexually explicit language. If you are offended by such language, please do not continue reading the rest of the article]
Why d'you hate my guts?
'Cause I'm a rapper?
'Cause my voice is not tame?
Or 'cause the streets' deed's in my name?
Gotta mind your business
'Cause in this wilderness
The rule's hard and fast:
"The ones with power
Will the weak devour." (rap singer Hichkas)
About two hundred years ago in Iran, Moshtagh Ali Shah, a mystic musician, was stoned to death when caught singing the Koran to the tunes of his setar, a traditional Iranian musical instrument. Trying to digest the shock of listening to the noise that Iranian rappers call "Rap-e Fars" (Persian Rap), you are doomed to ask whether the climate is any better today for a musician fiddling around with musical and social norms. Their message is no softer than Moshtagh Ali Shah's heretical combination of music and the Koran. Erfan in "One Hundred Oaths" sums up their manifesto:
Gonna make mock of every limit.
Gonna overstep every mark.
Yes, after two millenniums
It's time we broke the cast.
To date no "rap kown" (Iranian rapper) has been stoned, tortured, flogged, or jailed. But only these are what they haven't been going through. Iranian society has employed all the means of silencing and all the silence of indifference to fight back Iranian rap. From every direction all sorts of knives are out against these street bards.
Rap-e Fars is underground, unofficial, and illegal. It is uncompromising, vigorous, and prolific. It is frank, fresh, experimental, and, most of the time, musically stunning. Even if it sometimes has its musical imperfections, Rap-e Fars is still unbelievably popular. It is everywhere in the Iranian teenage world. Pouring out of the windows of cars speeding on Tehran motorways, brightening up teenage parties, and palely leaking out of teenage headphones where there are infidel ears around. The music and words of Rap-e Fars flow quite audibly in most teenage conversations.
Yet even if it were not popular, Iranian rappers would still have to be given the right to produce and sell their songs freely. The right to be watched and heard and talked about publicly. Their failure would have to be left to the public to decide about and to best-seller lists. The prospect of a boisterous rap vanity fair, however, is what dramatically disturbs the inscriptions carved deep in the Iranian psyche.
The Iranian government has never had a brilliant track record in its dealings with music in general. During the Islamic revolution in Iran, pop singers accounted for a big proportion of political exiles and escapees. Over the last three decades, not even once a musical instrument has been displayed on the state TV. More socially accepted forms of music than rap, like pop and rock, are aging in lengthy queues "before the law" for concert permits. No. The government does not seem to be willing to even start flirting with the idea of legalizing rap even in the far future.
And indeed, the words that Iranian rappers are penning make the prospect of an official rap in Iran out of the question. In an interview with Article 19, a London based human rights organization, Sefryan, an Iranian writer, explains that one of his philosophical works "was rejected because of its failure to reference Islam as a factor in the attainment of human happiness." An Iranian national newspaper, the Hambastegi reported on 18 Jan 2007 that the Farsi translation of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying had been denied a publication license and considered "unpublishable." Meticulous censorship has, edition after edition, replaced the word "breasts" with ellipses in the line "I'll hide you between my …," from a poem by Forogh Farokhzad, one of the biggest names in contemporary Persian poetry.
Such a system will never tolerate the lyrics of Rap-e Fars, whose dictionary does not contain the word "taboo."
Hichkas, one of the founders of Iranian rap addresses the issue in "The Law":
There is an unwritten law
That no one recorded, no one saw:
"Silently silence the bad voice
Voicelessness is the only choice."
Rap-e Fars, however has broken this law. They "won't stand ceremony," says Yas, an outspoken critic of the follies of society, in a podcast interview mushrooming on fan blogs. Shayan in "Lord" sings: "Let's define a young Iranian: Prison, stick, and flog." Nor does Shayan shy away from singing about alcohol and teenage parties and the consequent punishment:
It's evening and party starts
You get drunk and they flog out
All the booze you had tonight.
And Tigheh in "From Yesterday Until Today" shouts:
You, God.
It's time you stepped down
It's time, the turn is mine
Iranian rappers do not really bite their tongue when it comes to sexual taboos either. Canbean in "Hey, Hooker" advises Tehran prostitutes:
They'll tear your cunt
Rip open your bum
Feed you a pecker
But won't give you a penny.
The unofficial nature of Iranian rap will keep it financially vulnerable and half dead. According to Wikipedia, Zed Bazi, one of the most popular Iranian rap bands, has had more than eight million free downloads. The money they could have made would be enough to revolutionize Iranian pop culture.
However, to consider the government as the only hindrance Iranian rap has faced is an error. Next to "the oppressor's wrong" and "the insolence of office," one should not underestimate "the proud man's contumely."
A respected pillar of traditional Iranian music, Majid Kiani, in his article "A Comprehensive Categorization of Different Types of Music in Iran," published on the official website of The House Of Music—a union-like gathering of influential musicians—does not even make a passing reference to anything called Persian Rap. Ironically, if googled in Farsi, his name will be found on 1680 websites, which in comparison with Zed Bazi's google results, 12500, is not very impressive.
Ali Reza Hejazi, one of the managers of Neinava, a prosperous traditional music school in Tehran, does recognize the existence of Iranian rap but calls it "a load of crap" and labels its fans as "music-illiterate." "It's a silly imitation of American rap and nothing else," he asserts. I remind him of the attempts Iranian rappers have made to Iranify their tunes, for example using traditional instruments in their pieces. Indignation runs all over his face: "These instruments deserve reverence. This is musical blasphemy." I ask him if they should be allowed to have a music school like Neinava to teach their music and make money. He bursts laughing: "Teaching what? Yelling and swearing?"
Rap kowns are well aware of this criticism. In "I Said" Hichkas raps:
People who know about rap zilch
But keep wagging their chins
Make me feel sick, sick, sick.
Some of these bastard masters
Have called my rapping artless.
So please rap for us once
With my voice and my style.
Surprisingly, the members of the political opposition's musical wing, based mostly in Los Angeles with a dozen of international TV channels, who sometimes dabble in making anti-government political songs apart from bad quality pop they mass produce, have not been eager to welcome Rap-e Fars either, even to exploit their anti-system potentialities.
In a massive Las Vegas concert for the Iranian diaspora in December 2006, not even one single Iranian rapper was given the chance to appear on stage. Their music videos are not broadcast on their channels and no interviews are granted by their patriotic hosts.
An exiled pre-revolution pop star, Sattar, in an interview on Voice of America Persian on 20 January 2007, while admiring the music his generation produced, did not hesitate to attack the music made in Iran stating that in Iran anybody could sing. "What they need in Iran is an experienced committee to approve of the music and lyrics of every song before their release," he prescribed. I ask Ali Reza Hejazi, the traditionalist teacher at Neinava, why he thinks Los Angeles producers have ignored Persian rap. "As soon as Hichkas and Zed Bazi are established on TV screens, they'll have to kiss show business goodbye," he puts it bluntly.
Disappointed with musicians, one might as well try to see if anybody else in the Iranian elite has taken any notice of Persian rap as, to say the least, a cultural or sociological phenomenon. You flip through piles of writings by critics, intellectuals, thinkers, philosophers, and you are only stranded in deafening silence. Iranian thinkers have turned a deaf ear to their children's heroes.
On a chat show broadcast on 16 Jan 2007 by Jam-e Jam, a state run international TV channel, Reza Kianian, a praised Iranian film star and a respected academic teaching theatre and cinema gave a description of Iranian underground cinema which could also echo what he might have said about underground rap too. He said, "They are a bunch of opportunists who stir the filth in society to make a name. It's not difficult to criticize. A true artist would show a gem in squalor."
Ali Zarnegar, 25, a young poet whose book was not given a publication license by the government, doe not see any literary merit in the rappers' lyrics. "If I were to give them a mark, it would be 1 out of 10," he speculates. I ask him if he would let them sell their music freely, and he answers "only under a strict word-by-word supervision of their lyrics."
Despite all the venomous self-righteousness around them, these teenage songsters—in the claustrophobic room they live—are fostering some precious values that their critics and oppressors have hardly happened to respect—some values desperately needed in today's Iran.
Apart from their party raps, songs about their everyday life, and descriptions of their neighborhoods, which are a rich source of detailed documents reflecting the true picture of daily life in Iran—including details as minute as the brands of bootlegged booze Iranian teenagers consume—Iranian rappers enjoy the possession of a sensitive social conscience and determined moral commitment, and at the same time, the bravery of expressing what they are concerned about. They have sung about poverty, unemployment, addiction, prostitution, child labor, economic corruption, homelessness, Iran-Iraq war and the soldiers killed in the fronts. They have also been quick to react to what is happening around them in the world; they have rapped about George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, terrorism, 9/11, the massacre of civilians in the Middle East, peace, and strong defense against possible American military measures against Iran.
They are honest. They are democratically frank in their dialogues and criticism of one another's rap. They gang up, pan each other in their songs, go solo, and come together again. Their supremacy in rap and credit in society, when claimed in their songs, stem from the power of people and their popularity among their zakhars and baks (fans and friends), not a big boss or a guru. They are self-assertive and individualistic and there is nothing humble in their ways, nothing meek and obedient.
Rap-e Fars has been round for about seven years now with rap kowns struggling underground. It is difficult to predict what future holds for Iranain rappers. They are realistic. Pishro in "Prisoner" weighs the situation: "They stroked me with nightsticks / A rapper with a blind and deaf audience." But he is still optimistic: "You will crowd me some day soon for autographs." So are Hayoola & Felakat:
Let me tell you what the truth is
My rap is not gonna cease.
No one can crack Persian rap
It will aspire like a firm spire.
Hichkas also echoes his fellow rappers:
There will be a day
When cover captions say
The biggest rapper of the world
Is rapping in the third world.
Iranian rappers are as lonely as the last minutes of Moshtagh Ali Shah. But they won't give up without a fight. They have a dream.
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Wafaa Bilal's "Domestic Tension" Interactive Art Installation
From the Installation website:
In DOMESTIC TENSION, viewers can log on the internet to contact, or SHOOT, Bilal with paintball guns. Bilal’s objective is to raise awareness of virtual war and privacy, or lack thereof, in the digital age. During the course of the exhibition, Bilal will confine himself to the gallery space. During the installation, people will have 24-hour virtual access to the space via the Internet. They will have the ability to watch Bilal and interact with him through a live web-cam and chat room. Should they choose to do so, viewers will also have the option to shoot Bilal with a paintball gun, transforming the virtual experience into a very physical one. Bilal’s self imposed confinement is designed to raise awareness about the life of the Iraqi people and the home confinement they face due to the both the violent and the virtual war they face on a daily basis. This sensational approach to the war is meant to engage people who may not be willing to engage in political dialogue through conventional means. DOMESTIC TENSION will depict the suffering of war not through human displays of dramatic emotion, but through engaging people in the sort of playful interactive-video game with which they are familiar.
Gallery Link: http://www.flatfilegalleries.com/
Installation Link (Wafaacam): http://75.57.160.175/
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Theater empowers Palestinians
Christian Science Monitor
From the February 28, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0228/p13s03-almp.html
Theater empowers Palestinians
Within the West Bank's impovershed Jenin camp, the Freedom Theater provides troubled youths with a grounding in performing arts.
By Amelia Thomas | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
JENIN, WEST BANK
It's early morning in the troubled Jenin refugee camp, an isolated, impoverished stronghold for Palestinian resistance movements in the West Bank. Deep within the camp, a lively meeting is in progress in a freshly painted backroom. Its participants, however, are armed neither with Kalashnikovs nor hand grenades, but solely with the power of theater.
Presiding is Juliano Mer-Khamis, a well-known actor in Israel, the son of an Israeli mother and Palestinian father. His mother, Arna Mer, began working with the children of Jenin camp in 1988, eventually earning the Alternative Nobel Prize – the Right Livelihood Award, bestowed annually by Sweden's Parliament – for her work in 1993. The prize money was put toward financing a children's theater named "Arna's House." But when Arna died in 1995, the theater was shut down.
Later, during the violent 2002 "Battle of Jenin" – when Israeli troops clashed with Palestinian militants for several days – the camp was left in ruins and with it, the building containing "Arna's House." But in 2006, Mr. Mer-Khamis returned to Jenin to follow in his mother's footsteps. He launched the Freedom Theater to provide Jenin camp's troubled youths with a grounding in the performing arts.
"This is just the prologue," says the charismatic Mer-Khamis. "There has never been any theater in this area. There is no culture of theater or even art in general. So our most important work is not theatrical performance in the traditional sense, but to create a ground for future generations, so that they can one day speak in a clear theatrical language."
Most children here don't even know what a theatrical performance is, Mer-Khamis continues. They have "never seen a clown or been a member of an audience." Moreover, he says, theater has a negative, almost Victorian image within the traditional, sometimes reactionary, camp population. "It's thought of as something dark, unsavory, and for the lower ranks of society," he says. "We want to turn this prejudice upside down."
This morning's meeting is to welcome Israeli-Arab actress and director Valentina Abu Oqsa, who hopes to run a summer theater workshop that will culminate in a performance. It is illegal for Israeli citizens to enter the Jenin camp, and both Mer-Khamis and Ms. Abu Oqsa, along with many other Israeli visitors to the theater, are risking weighty fines, even imprisonment, simply by being here. But this, says Mer-Khamis, is "one way of opposing the occupation, by disregarding the physical barriers constraining us, as well as the psychological ones."
As the meeting ends and Abu Oqsa prepares to meet her rehearsal group in the newly completed theater space, she considers what lies ahead. "I think it's going to be very difficult," she says. "I don't know how easy it will be to get boys to open up or work together with the girls. And I must be very careful with the ideas we talk about onstage; we can't be very free in this society. My job is to accept the children as they are, because theater comes from the inside. I really hope that I can do it....
"Theater has healing power," she adds. "And it's important that the kids feel what it's like to be on stage. It's what we live for as actors, to stand up under the lights and communicate with an audience. It gives us space to dream."
Dreams, for the children of Jenin, are thin. The camp is subject to Israeli army incursions almost nightly. Poverty, unemployment, and isolation are at high levels. Many children have witnessed violence of one kind or another: homes destroyed by Israeli army bulldozers during the Battle of Jenin, the death of parents or siblings during hostilities. Except for the Freedom Theatre, there is little to do and barely even a place to play.
"We take in the broken people," says Mer-Khamis, "the neglected, the outsiders, those with nothing to lose. The intelligent 'upper class' is not here yet; the group of boys we have here now are car thieves, bandits, and petty criminals."
This group, about 15 boys between the ages of 12 and 18, are the ones Abu Oqsa now welcomes into the theater. Slowly, she takes them through a series of warm-up exercises. The boys, at first rowdy and laughing, eventually simmer down and listen to her instructions, concentrating and becoming increasingly cooperative.
"These boys," says Mer-Khamis proudly, watching from the sidelines, "were the ones everyone said we shouldn't take in. Members of the camp's committee itself told me to refuse them, that they were bad news. I've been working with them for a month now, and the difference is astonishing. They're learning about respect, cooperation, togetherness. Even I was surprised by their progress; this is the magic of the stage."
But theater projects in Jenin have not always managed to make a lasting, positive impact on participants' lives. Many of the boys of Arna Mer's original theater group – featured in Mer-Khamis's 2003 documentary, "Arna's Children" – are now dead. One, Ashraf Abu el-Haje, was killed in fighting in 2002; a second, Ala'a Sabagh, joined the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, before also being killed in battle. A third, Yussef Swetty, died during a 2001 suicide mission in Israel when he opened fire on civilians in the town of Hadera, killing four women. His brother, Nidal Swetty, became a member of the Islamic Jihad group and died fighting Israeli troops in the Battle of Jenin.
Today, one of the boys participating in Abu Oqsa's workshop is 18-year-old Yasin Swetty, brother of Yussef and Nidal. Not long after the deaths of his two elder brothers, Yasin's home was demolished by the Israeli army. Mr. Swetty is unemployed, and has been attending the theater for the last month. It has changed his life, he says.
"I feel empowered on stage," he says, "It's given my life some sort of meaning. I have a goal to become something, and suddenly I'm part of a group. Since I stepped on stage, my only dream is to become a great actor. I want to play Romeo."
His brothers, too, both dreamed of becoming professional actors. "But they ended up dead, defending our people. If I will be forced to defend my people, I will do the same – by acting."
Faris Juradat, also 18, was initially identified by Mer-Khamis as "the biggest bandit of them all." Now, he says, he wants to become a professional actor and travel to Europe to perform. "Before, I spent a lot of time on the street," he explains, "but now I feel my future is here. Through theater, I can cross walls; I see there's more to life than soldiers shooting at Palestinians."
After a long day on stage, the theater workshop draws to a close. Abu Oqsa emerges, exhilarated, as dusk settles in and a melancholy call to prayer begins to trill out from the camp's central mosque.
"It was wonderful," she exclaims. "At first they were a bit hard to control, but they're only boys, after all. I got through to them eventually, and they were responding very well. I now feel very positive about the future of my project; really, this is excellent!"
Onstage, the boys now rig up a microphone and launch into an impromptu musical performance, leaping joyfully around, arms linked, in a traditional Palestinian dabke dance.
But is Mer-Khamis concerned that these boys, in just a few years, might be armed fighters or suicide bombers? "The boys will be exposed to theater, art, and culture, and will learn more about the outside world, so it's very natural that in the future, they'll become leaders, perhaps locally, or in Palestine as a whole. What kind of leadership – with a gun or a guitar – is their choice. I really hope it's a guitar. But in the end," he adds, "this is the Freedom Theatre."
Full HTML version of this story which may include photos, graphics, and related links
From the February 28, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0228/p13s03-almp.html
Theater empowers Palestinians
Within the West Bank's impovershed Jenin camp, the Freedom Theater provides troubled youths with a grounding in performing arts.
By Amelia Thomas | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
JENIN, WEST BANK
It's early morning in the troubled Jenin refugee camp, an isolated, impoverished stronghold for Palestinian resistance movements in the West Bank. Deep within the camp, a lively meeting is in progress in a freshly painted backroom. Its participants, however, are armed neither with Kalashnikovs nor hand grenades, but solely with the power of theater.
Presiding is Juliano Mer-Khamis, a well-known actor in Israel, the son of an Israeli mother and Palestinian father. His mother, Arna Mer, began working with the children of Jenin camp in 1988, eventually earning the Alternative Nobel Prize – the Right Livelihood Award, bestowed annually by Sweden's Parliament – for her work in 1993. The prize money was put toward financing a children's theater named "Arna's House." But when Arna died in 1995, the theater was shut down.
Later, during the violent 2002 "Battle of Jenin" – when Israeli troops clashed with Palestinian militants for several days – the camp was left in ruins and with it, the building containing "Arna's House." But in 2006, Mr. Mer-Khamis returned to Jenin to follow in his mother's footsteps. He launched the Freedom Theater to provide Jenin camp's troubled youths with a grounding in the performing arts.
"This is just the prologue," says the charismatic Mer-Khamis. "There has never been any theater in this area. There is no culture of theater or even art in general. So our most important work is not theatrical performance in the traditional sense, but to create a ground for future generations, so that they can one day speak in a clear theatrical language."
Most children here don't even know what a theatrical performance is, Mer-Khamis continues. They have "never seen a clown or been a member of an audience." Moreover, he says, theater has a negative, almost Victorian image within the traditional, sometimes reactionary, camp population. "It's thought of as something dark, unsavory, and for the lower ranks of society," he says. "We want to turn this prejudice upside down."
This morning's meeting is to welcome Israeli-Arab actress and director Valentina Abu Oqsa, who hopes to run a summer theater workshop that will culminate in a performance. It is illegal for Israeli citizens to enter the Jenin camp, and both Mer-Khamis and Ms. Abu Oqsa, along with many other Israeli visitors to the theater, are risking weighty fines, even imprisonment, simply by being here. But this, says Mer-Khamis, is "one way of opposing the occupation, by disregarding the physical barriers constraining us, as well as the psychological ones."
As the meeting ends and Abu Oqsa prepares to meet her rehearsal group in the newly completed theater space, she considers what lies ahead. "I think it's going to be very difficult," she says. "I don't know how easy it will be to get boys to open up or work together with the girls. And I must be very careful with the ideas we talk about onstage; we can't be very free in this society. My job is to accept the children as they are, because theater comes from the inside. I really hope that I can do it....
"Theater has healing power," she adds. "And it's important that the kids feel what it's like to be on stage. It's what we live for as actors, to stand up under the lights and communicate with an audience. It gives us space to dream."
Dreams, for the children of Jenin, are thin. The camp is subject to Israeli army incursions almost nightly. Poverty, unemployment, and isolation are at high levels. Many children have witnessed violence of one kind or another: homes destroyed by Israeli army bulldozers during the Battle of Jenin, the death of parents or siblings during hostilities. Except for the Freedom Theatre, there is little to do and barely even a place to play.
"We take in the broken people," says Mer-Khamis, "the neglected, the outsiders, those with nothing to lose. The intelligent 'upper class' is not here yet; the group of boys we have here now are car thieves, bandits, and petty criminals."
This group, about 15 boys between the ages of 12 and 18, are the ones Abu Oqsa now welcomes into the theater. Slowly, she takes them through a series of warm-up exercises. The boys, at first rowdy and laughing, eventually simmer down and listen to her instructions, concentrating and becoming increasingly cooperative.
"These boys," says Mer-Khamis proudly, watching from the sidelines, "were the ones everyone said we shouldn't take in. Members of the camp's committee itself told me to refuse them, that they were bad news. I've been working with them for a month now, and the difference is astonishing. They're learning about respect, cooperation, togetherness. Even I was surprised by their progress; this is the magic of the stage."
But theater projects in Jenin have not always managed to make a lasting, positive impact on participants' lives. Many of the boys of Arna Mer's original theater group – featured in Mer-Khamis's 2003 documentary, "Arna's Children" – are now dead. One, Ashraf Abu el-Haje, was killed in fighting in 2002; a second, Ala'a Sabagh, joined the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, before also being killed in battle. A third, Yussef Swetty, died during a 2001 suicide mission in Israel when he opened fire on civilians in the town of Hadera, killing four women. His brother, Nidal Swetty, became a member of the Islamic Jihad group and died fighting Israeli troops in the Battle of Jenin.
Today, one of the boys participating in Abu Oqsa's workshop is 18-year-old Yasin Swetty, brother of Yussef and Nidal. Not long after the deaths of his two elder brothers, Yasin's home was demolished by the Israeli army. Mr. Swetty is unemployed, and has been attending the theater for the last month. It has changed his life, he says.
"I feel empowered on stage," he says, "It's given my life some sort of meaning. I have a goal to become something, and suddenly I'm part of a group. Since I stepped on stage, my only dream is to become a great actor. I want to play Romeo."
His brothers, too, both dreamed of becoming professional actors. "But they ended up dead, defending our people. If I will be forced to defend my people, I will do the same – by acting."
Faris Juradat, also 18, was initially identified by Mer-Khamis as "the biggest bandit of them all." Now, he says, he wants to become a professional actor and travel to Europe to perform. "Before, I spent a lot of time on the street," he explains, "but now I feel my future is here. Through theater, I can cross walls; I see there's more to life than soldiers shooting at Palestinians."
After a long day on stage, the theater workshop draws to a close. Abu Oqsa emerges, exhilarated, as dusk settles in and a melancholy call to prayer begins to trill out from the camp's central mosque.
"It was wonderful," she exclaims. "At first they were a bit hard to control, but they're only boys, after all. I got through to them eventually, and they were responding very well. I now feel very positive about the future of my project; really, this is excellent!"
Onstage, the boys now rig up a microphone and launch into an impromptu musical performance, leaping joyfully around, arms linked, in a traditional Palestinian dabke dance.
But is Mer-Khamis concerned that these boys, in just a few years, might be armed fighters or suicide bombers? "The boys will be exposed to theater, art, and culture, and will learn more about the outside world, so it's very natural that in the future, they'll become leaders, perhaps locally, or in Palestine as a whole. What kind of leadership – with a gun or a guitar – is their choice. I really hope it's a guitar. But in the end," he adds, "this is the Freedom Theatre."
Full HTML version of this story which may include photos, graphics, and related links
Friday, January 05, 2007
Arab American Producer Building Musical Bridges
WEST-EAST
An Arab American producer uses the power of music to narrow the gap between cultures
By Joseph Braude, Joseph Braude is the author of "The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World."
LA Times Magazine
November 26, 2006
Dawn Elder grew up in San Francisco in the '70s on a diet of rock 'n' roll and her mother's Lebanese cooking. Her bedroom was the one with the Eagles and Beatles blaring from it. She hit clean octaves on the piano in the living room and skated neat figure eights at the local ice rink. Her exacting personality, teachers said, ensured her a promising career as a chemist.
Neither her science textbooks nor her taste in pop could explain the profound impact a strange musical experience would have the night her father, of Palestinian descent, took her to see a Lebanese diva perform in a San Francisco concert hall. Elder's lab partners in chemistry class never could have guessed that the California native was destined to fuse Middle Eastern music and American pop in recording studios all over Los Angeles. FOR THE RECORD:
Photographer: The last name of photographer Shay Peretz is misspelled as Perez on the opening page of today's West magazine story on Arab American music producer Dawn Elder. —
"It was, like, a moment out of the space-time continuum," Elder says of that long-ago night in the concert hall. "This exotic woman singing these ancient sounds, and thousands of Arab Americans from all over California singing along and cheering her like she was a rock star."
The melodies Elder and most Americans grew up with have their roots in the music of the Middle East, where the early ancestors of the electric guitar and saxophone were invented. But the East-West aesthetic divide is wide, due as much to political tensions between America and the Muslim world as to a basic harmonic difference. Although songs by Bach and the Beatles use just two eight-tone scales—major and minor—there are more than a dozen in the freewheeling musical landscape spanning eastward from Morocco's Atlantic shores. The music Elder heard that night in San Francisco was sung in scales with names such as Hijaz and Rast, denoting subtly different combinations of quarter-tone intervals that can color the mood of any song. The scales, or maqamat, were interwoven in an elaborate modal system, which can be traced back to ancient Mesopotamia and Greece.
Today, American pop stars are embracing these foreign musical styles, due in no small part to Elder's prodding. Take the bilingual dance track "Love to the People," a duet with Carlos Santana and Algerian vocalist Cheb Khaled that Elder co-produced. The song opens with the breathy sound of the nay, an Arabic shepherd's flute, wailing a dark melody along the angular Hijaz scale—at first slow, low and tentative, then picking up speed and urgency. Just when the mind's eye begins to conjure shifting desert sands or Arab street scenes, a more familiar Latin rock groove kicks in on percussion, followed by the unmistakable sting of Santana's electric guitar and "Smooth"-style chord fills from his rhythm section. These Arabic and Latino colors blend easily, to be upstaged only by lyrics from California reggae singer Elan, in a whiskey-stained voice that echoes the breathy blasts of the nay:
Summer sun floating on the hill
There's something magic in the sky
She flutters free on a jasmine breeze
Gentle like a butterfly
As Elan approaches the refrain—Calling everyone/Changing body, soul and mind—he's joined by lead vocalist Khaled, whose Arabic- and French-language hits have stirred millions in Arab and European countries. On this track, he sings in English for the first time in his career, the conventions of Arab pop surviving the transition intact. He lingers on the long vowels as if he were crooning in his native tongue, ornamenting English words with North African-style melodic trills wound tightly around the edges of his favorite Arabic scales. Hybrid sounds like these have long been relegated to the World Music section of a record store. But they typify a new style of American ethnic fusion that's largely emanating from California. With a mounting sense of urgency since 9/11, Elder has worked to persuade top L.A. producers and recording artists to reach out musically to the Arab world. The presence of Arab, Iranian and South Asian immigrants—who together number more than 1 million in Greater Los Angeles—has created both a talent pool of ethnic artists and a reliable audience for their hybrid music. And given the widespread disaffection with the Bush administration's foreign policy, some of L.A.'s leading entertainers have been attracted by the chance to make a political statement by teaming up with Arab and Muslim artists.
"It's about making music to help Americans humanize the Middle East," Elder explains, "and keeping American pop growing and evolving."
Even before 9/11, daring mainstream artists were demonstrating that a musical fusion of East and West could transcend the conflict and resonate deeply—and romantically—with American pop audiences. Sting's landmark hit "Desert Rose," for example, from the 1999 album "Brand New Day," has the British performer crooning about the mysteries of the Sahara, while in between verses the piercing voice of Algerian pop star Cheb Mami winds rapid trills around an old Algerian scale. The lyrics Mami sings may be incomprehensible to most American listeners, but his otherworldly vocal riffs helped "Desert Rose" sweep pop charts around the globe, including America's Top 40.
More recently, Arabic pop sounds have been migrating from the background to the foreground. When DJ Cheb i Sabbah, another Elder client and collaborator, shows up to spin discs at Temple Bar in Santa Monica, the line outside the club looks as if it could stretch to his native North Africa. Anxious speculation over the availability of tickets buzzes in Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, English and Spanish. "He's this high-energy little guy who's transforming American dance music," Elder says. Pulsating trance music indoors blends the disparate sounds of Arabia, Africa and Asia—the heartlands of the Muslim world—courtesy of an Algerian Jewish DJ with a cult following that spans L.A.'s manifold ethnicities and sects.
Scenes like that are no accident.
I watch Elder shuffle into Elias Arts studios in Santa Monica one evening with an armful of CD jewel cases labeled in Arabic, Farsi and French. She greets an Egyptian percussionist in the lobby with traditional twin kisses on the cheeks and makes small talk in her American-accented Lebanese dialect. Then for producer Jonathan Elias, a leading composer of movie trailer and TV commercial soundtracks, she offers a muscular handshake.
"I brought you some show and tell," she says, tapping her world music stack. What follows, for hours into the night, feels like a cross between a Def Jam session and a United Nations Security Council debate. Dueling percussionists with a language barrier require Elder's mediation skills to settle whether a Pakistani rhythm could be grafted over a standard rock beat. As an Arabic flute player struggles to tame the stand-up mike in a glass-enclosed soundproof chamber, Elder simultaneously keeps her eyes on him, motioning with her hands the solution to his problem, while launching into an impromptu show-and-tell lecture for Elias.
"Just to kind of give you an idea where I'm going with this," she says, "here's a sample of Umm Kulthum in the '50s." At the touch of a button, surrounding speakers pipe in Elder's CD mix of Cairo's most famous diva, dubbed "the voice of Egypt," wailing an epic poem to a live audience, backed by a string-heavy 32-piece orchestra.
"I love that," Elias says. "All the instruments seem to be playing in unison, though."
Elder nods her head slowly. "We do not have harmonies in traditional Arabic music."
Elias says he has called in Elder and her clients to "internationalize" the ensemble mix for his forthcoming trance album, "Prayer Cycle 2." He envisions exotic instruments and singers in more than a dozen languages using traditional song to ask a higher being for peace and protection from nuclear war. Over this backdrop, Sting, Robert Downey Jr. and other celebrities will read poems about the perils of the atomic age.
"I can get you an Indian Pakistani raga singer," Elder tells Elias, "because both countries have the bomb now, right?"
She explains that one of her clients, Riffat Sultana, is the scion of a singing dynasty that dates back 500 years to India's Mughal Muslim empire. She's also the first woman in her esteemed family to be allowed to perform—a cultural breakthrough in South Asian Muslim culture for which Elder takes partial credit.
Elias says: "Make it happen, Dawn."
How Elder ended up connecting professionally with her faraway roots is a story of delayed surrender to destiny, and a fateful migration southward along the Pacific coastline. Like many Californians of Middle Eastern ancestry, Elder has wrestled with her multicultural identity amid strained relations between the United States and her parents' native lands. Harmonizing these often discordant influences can be harder in life than it is in a recording studio. She might still be avoiding her Arab American heritage today, but for an idealistic song.
In the early '80s, Elder stopped pursuing her biochemistry degree at Berkeley and eventually got a job in Santa Barbara promoting rock 'n' roll and Latino acts, fusing authentic sounds and worthy community causes, as long as they weren't her own.
"My father and I went together to an Arab wedding in Detroit around that time," she remembers, "and everything at this wedding was done up badly. The PA system, the dancers, the singer. It got to the point where the star performer was doing this dance with a candelabra on her head. I looked at my dad and said, 'Baba, there's just no way I'm going to get involved with this kind of stuff.'"
She teamed up with Mike Love and the Beach Boys to plan fundraising concerts for a scholarship program and took on George Clinton and the Funkadelics and several other rock groups as a representative and artistic manager. When Latin rock took off as a popular strain in California music, she pioneered a Spanish dance festival and concert events to celebrate the Latino history of the Central Coast.
It was songwriter Michael Sembello, a Grammy Award-winning protégé of Stevie Wonder, who in late 1996 asked Elder to help him plan a video shoot in Long Beach based on a new song he'd written, "One Planet One People." What became known as the International Friendship Festival aspired to bring to one California venue as many ethnicities and bands as possible. "We saw it as an opportunity to build bridges," Elder recalls. "This idea that no matter what race a person may be—if you can see him, hear him, reach out and touch him, then you won't be afraid."
L.A.'s Jewish, Irish, Italian, Latino and South Asian elite lost little time in lining up dance troupes and bands to make their mark on the festival. But when it came to North African and Middle Eastern musicians, Elder was disappointed to find that the community was divided and lacking in leadership despite the large numbers of immigrants and abundance of performing acts. In a development meeting for the festival, some event planners offered to import a small herd of camels to stock a tent exhibition on the Middle East. Elder remembers fuming to herself: The part of the world that gave birth to civilization and invented melody was going to be represented by a Middle Eastern stereotype—unless she did something about it.
"It was the last straw for me, no pun intended," she says. "I remembered the world-class concert my father took me to see when I was a girl. I realized I was going to have to make this happen myself."
Elder steered clear of L.A.'s belly dance and cabaret scene and turned for advice to some of the city's Arab American cultural cognoscenti. She was introduced to the Kan Zaman Community Ensemble, an all-volunteer Arabic orchestra based in Arcadia whose concerts re-create symphonic sounds that go back more than 1,000 years. Adam Basma, a Beirut-born dancer and choreographer, befriended the promoter and volunteered his Rolodex. And when Elder mentioned that her parents had named her after the famous Lebanese diva Sabah (it means early morning in Arabic), Basma let slip some community gossip:
"You know, she's here in California right now," he told her. "Her children live around San Diego, and she comes to visit every year. Let's meet her."
For Arab music lovers, meeting Sabah is a privilege akin to meeting Barbra Streisand.
"I'll never forget sitting down with that charming 73-year-old woman," Elder recalls. "Blond hair, a grand dress, a heart of gold. My parents fell in love to the sound of her voice. When I told her I was trying to introduce Arabic music to a massive L.A. audience, she didn't hesitate. She said, 'I'll do it. I'll do it for free.'"
For the festival, Sabah assembled an all-Arab American orchestra to back her up, performed to a packed Southern California crowd and added her voice, along with the Kan Zaman players, to a live rendition of Sembello's song about global oneness. The moving event was a turning point in Elder's career, and a milestone for L.A.'s Arab American community. Says Elder: "Middle Eastern and North African music is basically what I've been doing ever since."
She maintains her headquarters in Santa Barbara—a small office with a personal assistant—and commutes to L.A. most weeks. She frequently travels to Arab countries with her clients, though since the war in Lebanon and Israel in July there have been numerous tour cancellations in the region. In an e-mail I received from Elder in September, she seemed caught up in the violence engulfing her ancestral homelands. "We have a few things cooking hopefully that will bring on a positive spin to all that has been so negative lately in the world," she writes. "Music and Arts are Spiritual & Emotional healers[.] I only hope I have enough of it around to bring a few smiles to people['s] faces and a better outlook on tomorrow."
Pop music producers who find their way into Elder's creative circle are an eclectic bunch, but uniformly devoted to pushing the limits of pop. One of them is KC Porter, Santana's co-producer on "Love to the People."
"I've just felt such a responsibility to give," he explains. "The Middle Eastern world has been getting this message from America of force and aggression, and I feel like, what better response than to send back a message of love and compassion?" Hence the bilingual duet Porter co-produced after the start of the Iraq war, aptly titled "Love and Compassion," which brings together Grammy Award-winning vocalist Paula Cole with Iraq's top singing heartthrob, Kazem Al Sahir, among others.
Porter's parents, both California natives, were converts to the Bahá'í faith, a young religion whose 19th century prophet hailed from Iran. Their missionary work throughout Guatemala when Porter was a child exposed him to the sounds of South American music and language—an upbringing he put to use producing a young Ricky Martin's first album in English. "The Bahá'í view on life, and the basic principle of the Bahá'í faith, is the oneness of humankind," he says. "That's something I've really tried to focus on—how can I further that? But now, that means my interest is shifting from Latin America to the Middle East."
While Porter reflects on his work, his assistant is shuttling in and out of the house with two cellphones and a scratch pad as they prepare for a new multicultural musical experiment. Seventy or so culturally diverse musicians and songwriters will converge on a sound stage at the Jim Henson studios in Hollywood in a few days. Each act will spend the afternoon in a soundproof room writing a song together. Elder, seated across from Porter at a picnic table in his backyard, is hellbent on stocking the talent pool with as many Middle Eastern musicians as possible.
"You really should get Gamal Gomaa for this," Elder suggests, scrolling down the little PDA screen in her hand. "He's a fabulous percussion player from Egypt. Played with all the great belly dancers. And he lives here now."
"Gamal," the assistant replies, taking notes, "We'll add him to the drum circle."
"I wish this thing weren't happening so soon," Elder says. "We've got Kazem Al Sahir coming in next month, and I would have loved to bring in Simon Shaheen on oud."
"What's an oud?"
A mainstay of Arabic, Armenian and Turkish music, it is the 11-stringed antecedent to the European lute, shaped like a giant pear sliced down the middle and traditionally strummed, mandolin-style, with a feather pick. A.J. Racy, professor of ethnomusicology at UCLA, says the instrument is known in the Arab world as "Amir al-Tarab, which means the prince of ecstasy, in reference to the enchanting quality of his sound." Its hollow wood body resonates with every nuance of finger pressure on the neck or friction between the pick and string.
"I could tell you stories about the oud," Elder says. "I'll never forget this guy I know at Clear Channel telling me that American radio won't accept the sound of the oud. He just couldn't see any of his DJs picking up on it."
One song featuring the oud that Clear Channel radio stations haven't aired is Lenny Kravitz's kicking antiwar track, "We Want Peace"—another Kazem Al Sahir duet. Rock the Vote, a Redondo Beach-based youth empowerment organization, released the song exclusively on its website in February 2003, more than a month before the American-led invasion of Iraq. The Palestinian American oud player Simon Shaheen starts off the track with a feverish solo run down the neck of his instrument, melding the flash of a Spanish flamenco guitar riff with a somber Arabic scale. The trademark Kravitz R&B groove takes over, flavored with tambourine and Levantine-style percussion fills by Lebanese American drummer Jamey Haddad. Kravitz and Al Sahir take turns crooning for peace, then jointly power the chorus: "We want peace we want it yes we want peace we want it yes we want peace yeah we want it nowww!"
A version of the song with an Arabic refrain wasn't released in the U.S. Elder explains why: "It hadn't been long since Condoleezza Rice was warning the media about coded messages on satellite television broadcasts from Osama bin Laden," she says.
"After the Dixie Chicks got in trouble, we didn't want to take any chances."
It's interesting that, like Elder, the secretary of State grew up skating figure eights and practicing classical music on the piano. And that both women went on to pursue careers largely dominated by Middle East concerns.
"Don't push it," Elder says. "She does her thing, I do mine."
An Arab American producer uses the power of music to narrow the gap between cultures
By Joseph Braude, Joseph Braude is the author of "The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World."
LA Times Magazine
November 26, 2006
Dawn Elder grew up in San Francisco in the '70s on a diet of rock 'n' roll and her mother's Lebanese cooking. Her bedroom was the one with the Eagles and Beatles blaring from it. She hit clean octaves on the piano in the living room and skated neat figure eights at the local ice rink. Her exacting personality, teachers said, ensured her a promising career as a chemist.
Neither her science textbooks nor her taste in pop could explain the profound impact a strange musical experience would have the night her father, of Palestinian descent, took her to see a Lebanese diva perform in a San Francisco concert hall. Elder's lab partners in chemistry class never could have guessed that the California native was destined to fuse Middle Eastern music and American pop in recording studios all over Los Angeles. FOR THE RECORD:
Photographer: The last name of photographer Shay Peretz is misspelled as Perez on the opening page of today's West magazine story on Arab American music producer Dawn Elder. —
"It was, like, a moment out of the space-time continuum," Elder says of that long-ago night in the concert hall. "This exotic woman singing these ancient sounds, and thousands of Arab Americans from all over California singing along and cheering her like she was a rock star."
The melodies Elder and most Americans grew up with have their roots in the music of the Middle East, where the early ancestors of the electric guitar and saxophone were invented. But the East-West aesthetic divide is wide, due as much to political tensions between America and the Muslim world as to a basic harmonic difference. Although songs by Bach and the Beatles use just two eight-tone scales—major and minor—there are more than a dozen in the freewheeling musical landscape spanning eastward from Morocco's Atlantic shores. The music Elder heard that night in San Francisco was sung in scales with names such as Hijaz and Rast, denoting subtly different combinations of quarter-tone intervals that can color the mood of any song. The scales, or maqamat, were interwoven in an elaborate modal system, which can be traced back to ancient Mesopotamia and Greece.
Today, American pop stars are embracing these foreign musical styles, due in no small part to Elder's prodding. Take the bilingual dance track "Love to the People," a duet with Carlos Santana and Algerian vocalist Cheb Khaled that Elder co-produced. The song opens with the breathy sound of the nay, an Arabic shepherd's flute, wailing a dark melody along the angular Hijaz scale—at first slow, low and tentative, then picking up speed and urgency. Just when the mind's eye begins to conjure shifting desert sands or Arab street scenes, a more familiar Latin rock groove kicks in on percussion, followed by the unmistakable sting of Santana's electric guitar and "Smooth"-style chord fills from his rhythm section. These Arabic and Latino colors blend easily, to be upstaged only by lyrics from California reggae singer Elan, in a whiskey-stained voice that echoes the breathy blasts of the nay:
Summer sun floating on the hill
There's something magic in the sky
She flutters free on a jasmine breeze
Gentle like a butterfly
As Elan approaches the refrain—Calling everyone/Changing body, soul and mind—he's joined by lead vocalist Khaled, whose Arabic- and French-language hits have stirred millions in Arab and European countries. On this track, he sings in English for the first time in his career, the conventions of Arab pop surviving the transition intact. He lingers on the long vowels as if he were crooning in his native tongue, ornamenting English words with North African-style melodic trills wound tightly around the edges of his favorite Arabic scales. Hybrid sounds like these have long been relegated to the World Music section of a record store. But they typify a new style of American ethnic fusion that's largely emanating from California. With a mounting sense of urgency since 9/11, Elder has worked to persuade top L.A. producers and recording artists to reach out musically to the Arab world. The presence of Arab, Iranian and South Asian immigrants—who together number more than 1 million in Greater Los Angeles—has created both a talent pool of ethnic artists and a reliable audience for their hybrid music. And given the widespread disaffection with the Bush administration's foreign policy, some of L.A.'s leading entertainers have been attracted by the chance to make a political statement by teaming up with Arab and Muslim artists.
"It's about making music to help Americans humanize the Middle East," Elder explains, "and keeping American pop growing and evolving."
Even before 9/11, daring mainstream artists were demonstrating that a musical fusion of East and West could transcend the conflict and resonate deeply—and romantically—with American pop audiences. Sting's landmark hit "Desert Rose," for example, from the 1999 album "Brand New Day," has the British performer crooning about the mysteries of the Sahara, while in between verses the piercing voice of Algerian pop star Cheb Mami winds rapid trills around an old Algerian scale. The lyrics Mami sings may be incomprehensible to most American listeners, but his otherworldly vocal riffs helped "Desert Rose" sweep pop charts around the globe, including America's Top 40.
More recently, Arabic pop sounds have been migrating from the background to the foreground. When DJ Cheb i Sabbah, another Elder client and collaborator, shows up to spin discs at Temple Bar in Santa Monica, the line outside the club looks as if it could stretch to his native North Africa. Anxious speculation over the availability of tickets buzzes in Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, English and Spanish. "He's this high-energy little guy who's transforming American dance music," Elder says. Pulsating trance music indoors blends the disparate sounds of Arabia, Africa and Asia—the heartlands of the Muslim world—courtesy of an Algerian Jewish DJ with a cult following that spans L.A.'s manifold ethnicities and sects.
Scenes like that are no accident.
I watch Elder shuffle into Elias Arts studios in Santa Monica one evening with an armful of CD jewel cases labeled in Arabic, Farsi and French. She greets an Egyptian percussionist in the lobby with traditional twin kisses on the cheeks and makes small talk in her American-accented Lebanese dialect. Then for producer Jonathan Elias, a leading composer of movie trailer and TV commercial soundtracks, she offers a muscular handshake.
"I brought you some show and tell," she says, tapping her world music stack. What follows, for hours into the night, feels like a cross between a Def Jam session and a United Nations Security Council debate. Dueling percussionists with a language barrier require Elder's mediation skills to settle whether a Pakistani rhythm could be grafted over a standard rock beat. As an Arabic flute player struggles to tame the stand-up mike in a glass-enclosed soundproof chamber, Elder simultaneously keeps her eyes on him, motioning with her hands the solution to his problem, while launching into an impromptu show-and-tell lecture for Elias.
"Just to kind of give you an idea where I'm going with this," she says, "here's a sample of Umm Kulthum in the '50s." At the touch of a button, surrounding speakers pipe in Elder's CD mix of Cairo's most famous diva, dubbed "the voice of Egypt," wailing an epic poem to a live audience, backed by a string-heavy 32-piece orchestra.
"I love that," Elias says. "All the instruments seem to be playing in unison, though."
Elder nods her head slowly. "We do not have harmonies in traditional Arabic music."
Elias says he has called in Elder and her clients to "internationalize" the ensemble mix for his forthcoming trance album, "Prayer Cycle 2." He envisions exotic instruments and singers in more than a dozen languages using traditional song to ask a higher being for peace and protection from nuclear war. Over this backdrop, Sting, Robert Downey Jr. and other celebrities will read poems about the perils of the atomic age.
"I can get you an Indian Pakistani raga singer," Elder tells Elias, "because both countries have the bomb now, right?"
She explains that one of her clients, Riffat Sultana, is the scion of a singing dynasty that dates back 500 years to India's Mughal Muslim empire. She's also the first woman in her esteemed family to be allowed to perform—a cultural breakthrough in South Asian Muslim culture for which Elder takes partial credit.
Elias says: "Make it happen, Dawn."
How Elder ended up connecting professionally with her faraway roots is a story of delayed surrender to destiny, and a fateful migration southward along the Pacific coastline. Like many Californians of Middle Eastern ancestry, Elder has wrestled with her multicultural identity amid strained relations between the United States and her parents' native lands. Harmonizing these often discordant influences can be harder in life than it is in a recording studio. She might still be avoiding her Arab American heritage today, but for an idealistic song.
In the early '80s, Elder stopped pursuing her biochemistry degree at Berkeley and eventually got a job in Santa Barbara promoting rock 'n' roll and Latino acts, fusing authentic sounds and worthy community causes, as long as they weren't her own.
"My father and I went together to an Arab wedding in Detroit around that time," she remembers, "and everything at this wedding was done up badly. The PA system, the dancers, the singer. It got to the point where the star performer was doing this dance with a candelabra on her head. I looked at my dad and said, 'Baba, there's just no way I'm going to get involved with this kind of stuff.'"
She teamed up with Mike Love and the Beach Boys to plan fundraising concerts for a scholarship program and took on George Clinton and the Funkadelics and several other rock groups as a representative and artistic manager. When Latin rock took off as a popular strain in California music, she pioneered a Spanish dance festival and concert events to celebrate the Latino history of the Central Coast.
It was songwriter Michael Sembello, a Grammy Award-winning protégé of Stevie Wonder, who in late 1996 asked Elder to help him plan a video shoot in Long Beach based on a new song he'd written, "One Planet One People." What became known as the International Friendship Festival aspired to bring to one California venue as many ethnicities and bands as possible. "We saw it as an opportunity to build bridges," Elder recalls. "This idea that no matter what race a person may be—if you can see him, hear him, reach out and touch him, then you won't be afraid."
L.A.'s Jewish, Irish, Italian, Latino and South Asian elite lost little time in lining up dance troupes and bands to make their mark on the festival. But when it came to North African and Middle Eastern musicians, Elder was disappointed to find that the community was divided and lacking in leadership despite the large numbers of immigrants and abundance of performing acts. In a development meeting for the festival, some event planners offered to import a small herd of camels to stock a tent exhibition on the Middle East. Elder remembers fuming to herself: The part of the world that gave birth to civilization and invented melody was going to be represented by a Middle Eastern stereotype—unless she did something about it.
"It was the last straw for me, no pun intended," she says. "I remembered the world-class concert my father took me to see when I was a girl. I realized I was going to have to make this happen myself."
Elder steered clear of L.A.'s belly dance and cabaret scene and turned for advice to some of the city's Arab American cultural cognoscenti. She was introduced to the Kan Zaman Community Ensemble, an all-volunteer Arabic orchestra based in Arcadia whose concerts re-create symphonic sounds that go back more than 1,000 years. Adam Basma, a Beirut-born dancer and choreographer, befriended the promoter and volunteered his Rolodex. And when Elder mentioned that her parents had named her after the famous Lebanese diva Sabah (it means early morning in Arabic), Basma let slip some community gossip:
"You know, she's here in California right now," he told her. "Her children live around San Diego, and she comes to visit every year. Let's meet her."
For Arab music lovers, meeting Sabah is a privilege akin to meeting Barbra Streisand.
"I'll never forget sitting down with that charming 73-year-old woman," Elder recalls. "Blond hair, a grand dress, a heart of gold. My parents fell in love to the sound of her voice. When I told her I was trying to introduce Arabic music to a massive L.A. audience, she didn't hesitate. She said, 'I'll do it. I'll do it for free.'"
For the festival, Sabah assembled an all-Arab American orchestra to back her up, performed to a packed Southern California crowd and added her voice, along with the Kan Zaman players, to a live rendition of Sembello's song about global oneness. The moving event was a turning point in Elder's career, and a milestone for L.A.'s Arab American community. Says Elder: "Middle Eastern and North African music is basically what I've been doing ever since."
She maintains her headquarters in Santa Barbara—a small office with a personal assistant—and commutes to L.A. most weeks. She frequently travels to Arab countries with her clients, though since the war in Lebanon and Israel in July there have been numerous tour cancellations in the region. In an e-mail I received from Elder in September, she seemed caught up in the violence engulfing her ancestral homelands. "We have a few things cooking hopefully that will bring on a positive spin to all that has been so negative lately in the world," she writes. "Music and Arts are Spiritual & Emotional healers[.] I only hope I have enough of it around to bring a few smiles to people['s] faces and a better outlook on tomorrow."
Pop music producers who find their way into Elder's creative circle are an eclectic bunch, but uniformly devoted to pushing the limits of pop. One of them is KC Porter, Santana's co-producer on "Love to the People."
"I've just felt such a responsibility to give," he explains. "The Middle Eastern world has been getting this message from America of force and aggression, and I feel like, what better response than to send back a message of love and compassion?" Hence the bilingual duet Porter co-produced after the start of the Iraq war, aptly titled "Love and Compassion," which brings together Grammy Award-winning vocalist Paula Cole with Iraq's top singing heartthrob, Kazem Al Sahir, among others.
Porter's parents, both California natives, were converts to the Bahá'í faith, a young religion whose 19th century prophet hailed from Iran. Their missionary work throughout Guatemala when Porter was a child exposed him to the sounds of South American music and language—an upbringing he put to use producing a young Ricky Martin's first album in English. "The Bahá'í view on life, and the basic principle of the Bahá'í faith, is the oneness of humankind," he says. "That's something I've really tried to focus on—how can I further that? But now, that means my interest is shifting from Latin America to the Middle East."
While Porter reflects on his work, his assistant is shuttling in and out of the house with two cellphones and a scratch pad as they prepare for a new multicultural musical experiment. Seventy or so culturally diverse musicians and songwriters will converge on a sound stage at the Jim Henson studios in Hollywood in a few days. Each act will spend the afternoon in a soundproof room writing a song together. Elder, seated across from Porter at a picnic table in his backyard, is hellbent on stocking the talent pool with as many Middle Eastern musicians as possible.
"You really should get Gamal Gomaa for this," Elder suggests, scrolling down the little PDA screen in her hand. "He's a fabulous percussion player from Egypt. Played with all the great belly dancers. And he lives here now."
"Gamal," the assistant replies, taking notes, "We'll add him to the drum circle."
"I wish this thing weren't happening so soon," Elder says. "We've got Kazem Al Sahir coming in next month, and I would have loved to bring in Simon Shaheen on oud."
"What's an oud?"
A mainstay of Arabic, Armenian and Turkish music, it is the 11-stringed antecedent to the European lute, shaped like a giant pear sliced down the middle and traditionally strummed, mandolin-style, with a feather pick. A.J. Racy, professor of ethnomusicology at UCLA, says the instrument is known in the Arab world as "Amir al-Tarab, which means the prince of ecstasy, in reference to the enchanting quality of his sound." Its hollow wood body resonates with every nuance of finger pressure on the neck or friction between the pick and string.
"I could tell you stories about the oud," Elder says. "I'll never forget this guy I know at Clear Channel telling me that American radio won't accept the sound of the oud. He just couldn't see any of his DJs picking up on it."
One song featuring the oud that Clear Channel radio stations haven't aired is Lenny Kravitz's kicking antiwar track, "We Want Peace"—another Kazem Al Sahir duet. Rock the Vote, a Redondo Beach-based youth empowerment organization, released the song exclusively on its website in February 2003, more than a month before the American-led invasion of Iraq. The Palestinian American oud player Simon Shaheen starts off the track with a feverish solo run down the neck of his instrument, melding the flash of a Spanish flamenco guitar riff with a somber Arabic scale. The trademark Kravitz R&B groove takes over, flavored with tambourine and Levantine-style percussion fills by Lebanese American drummer Jamey Haddad. Kravitz and Al Sahir take turns crooning for peace, then jointly power the chorus: "We want peace we want it yes we want peace we want it yes we want peace yeah we want it nowww!"
A version of the song with an Arabic refrain wasn't released in the U.S. Elder explains why: "It hadn't been long since Condoleezza Rice was warning the media about coded messages on satellite television broadcasts from Osama bin Laden," she says.
"After the Dixie Chicks got in trouble, we didn't want to take any chances."
It's interesting that, like Elder, the secretary of State grew up skating figure eights and practicing classical music on the piano. And that both women went on to pursue careers largely dominated by Middle East concerns.
"Don't push it," Elder says. "She does her thing, I do mine."
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