Laura Miller reviews "Muhajababes" and "Heavy Metal Islam" | Salon Books
Reuters / Yves Herman
Lebanese singer Haifa Wehbe arrives for the world premiere of “Ocean’s 13″ at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007.
July 10, 2008 | “Rewish,” or “al Rawshana,” is a colloquial Arab term that means “hip” and also “distracted or confused,” according to Allegra Stratton’s “Muhajababes,” a lively (and rewish) exploration of youth culture in several Middle Eastern nations. One of the many people Stratton interviewed for her book — a bike-glove-wearing female member of a dance troupe that inexplicably describes itself as “an R&B band” — told Stratton that the region’s booming under-25 demographic is being made ever more rewish by their exposure to two seemingly opposed forces: racy pop music videos full of gyrating, pulchritudinous singers like Haifa Wehbe and what Stratton calls the “piety trend,” which has more and more young Muslims heeding the call of TV mullahs to abandon smoking, drinking, displays of flesh and premarital sex.
The result is a new breed of mermaid-like creatures, spotted by Stratton all over the streets of Beirut, Amman, Cairo, Dubai and Damascus. These are “muhajababes,” from “muhajabe,” a term for the veil. Zina, a girl Stratton met in a Cairo cafe, is a classic example. Her hair was covered with “a flower-patterned headscarf” but she was also wearing heavy makeup and jeans so tight she couldn’t fasten the top button. When Stratton asked Zina why she also smoked (widely considered “haram,” or forbidden, to observant Muslims), Zina grew “frosty.” Then she explained: “If I smoke and wear the headscarf you know that I’m not one of them [that is, the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's largest Islamist group]. You know that I’m Islamic. That I am devout. But I’m also different … If you know what you’re looking for then you’ll see being a Muslim these days is a different thing.”
Stratton, a British journalist, didn’t begin her research knowing quite what she was looking for, but she had a thesis, taken from Western scholars of the contemporary Middle East. These professors are predicting a major sociopolitical shakeup in the region, based on demographic patterns resembling those seen before in upheavals in Western history, such as the English Civil War and the French Revolution. “What creates unrest,” Stratton writes of this theory, “was not just an increase in the numbers of young people but also in the numbers of educated young people with no increase in jobs.” (Yes, that sentence is grammatically incorrect, as are many in “Muhajababes.” Chalk it up to a combination of Stratton’s attempt at an easy, casual style and the bad habits engendered by the low editing standards in British publishing. Be warned: Participles dangle as plentifully in these pages as vines in a jungle.)
Having spent her own post-collegiate years sharing a big, ramshackle East London house with a bunch of idealistic pals (they dreamed of setting up a printing press in the basement), Stratton decided to wander around a handful of Mideast cities, in search of the “Arab Haight-Ashbury,” where the coming revolution might be brewing. Mark LeVine, author of another new book, “Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam,” also went looking for glimmers of social change, but he took an approach at once more and less comprehensive than Stratton’s. LeVine, who is both a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of California, Irvine, and a profession rock musician, traveled to more countries (including Pakistan and Morocco) than Stratton, but he seems to have hobnobbed with a much narrower range of people.
There’s something irresistible about the idea that LeVine, who according to his author bio has played with such luminaries as Mick Jagger and Dr. John, not only interviewed rock and rap artists from all over the Middle East and North Africa (or MENA, as he calls it), but also put down the notepad and got up onstage to jam with them. The folio of photographs at the center of “Heavy Metal Islam” features a few shots of him rocking out with his subjects at festivals and in nightclubs. Yet LeVine’s account of Muslim rock culture is strangely colorless, mostly because he’s only interested in two things: the music itself and the degree to which a band’s lyrics explicitly criticize the political regimes in their home countries.
Most heavy metal lyrics are aggressive and doomy, and the lines LeVine quotes — “This land is barren, it does not feel/ Our self-made slaughte / by our own hands/ Here lies the orphaned land” from the Israeli band Orphaned Land, for example — can be interpreted as speaking of anything from, say, the conflict over Palestine to environmentalism to free-floating teenage social angst. The people LeVine interviews have ample cause for complaint; besides the general authoritarian, undemocratic nature of their governments, they often come in for extra harassment as a result of their appearance and musical taste. Metalheads in Morocco, Lebanon and Egypt have even been arrested for practicing “satanism.” But their counterparts in the democratic West are often just as disgusted with the adult world for entirely different reasons.
Complaining about their governments isn’t what makes Islam’s metalheads unusual — practically everyone in the Mideast does that (to the extent they can get away with it). What’s interesting is the fact that they’ve chosen heavy metal in spite of its Western roots, and the ways they reconcile this with their own regional and nation identities. Several of the musicians LeVine interviews are religious, even devout, and the author has hopes that rock fans will unite with young Islamists against their authoritarian rulers. To his great disappointment, a meeting he facilitates in a Cairo hotel bar between members of a band called Wyvern and the editor of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Web site turns out to be a dud, mostly because the metalheads don’t seem to believe the Brotherhood’s recent protestations that they are now interested only in political reform, not policing cultural virtue. “So many Egyptians — and Arabs more broadly,” LeVine laments, “prefer to continue dealing with the devil they know (corrupt and autocratic regimes) than to risk the even less appealing alternative
Laura Miller reviews “Muhajababes” and “Heavy Metal Islam” | Salon Books