Souad Massi. Photo by Jean Baptiste Millot

A few weeks ago, an article called ‘What can Ibn Arabi do against Daesh?’ appeared in the pages of the Algerian daily El Watan (one of Souad Massi’s favourite newspapers). The question in the title neatly summarizes the ideological struggle that rages in almost every corner of the Muslim world; it also lies at the heart of Souad Massi’s new album El Mutakalllimûn, although she might balk at avowing as much in public.

Daesh hardly need any introduction; many readers might know the organisation by the acronyms more commonly used by non-Arabic speakers: ISIS or IS. This latter-day ‘caliphate’ is busy preparing the ground for the annihilation of all infidels and apostates, and putting anyone who doesn’t agree with their brutally literalist interpretation of Islam to the sword. It already occupies large swathes of eastern Syria and northern Iraq – the prophesied battleground for that final apocalyptic showdown with the non-believers. And though it professes a desire to rewind the human clock back to the 7^th century AD, the organisation has turned a local conflict into a global battle of hearts and minds with its gruesomely brilliant manipulation of modern digital media. In fact, ISIS is a paradigm of modernity, as much a part of the age we live in – like it or not – as Grand Theft Auto or Taylor Swift.

The name Ibn Arabi requires little more clarification perhaps. It belongs to a Muslim mystic and philosopher, many would say ‘saint’, who was born in Murcia, southern Spain, in 1165AD and died in Damascus 75 years later. Posterity bestowed him with the honorifics ‘al-Shaykh al-Akbar’ (‘the great Cheikh’) and ‘Doctor Maximus’. Amongst his many works is the seminal al-Futuhat al-Makkiya (The Meccan Illuminations) which comprises over 7000 pages of densely packed manuscript that elucidate, in language both complex and beautiful, his metaphysical philosophy of Oneness and the divine role of love and mercy in human existence.

Ibn Arabi was both venerated and reviled in the centuries following his death; venerated by those who admired the breadth of his knowledge and the depth of his mystical insight; reviled by those, such as the 13^th century scholar and jurist Ibn Taymiyyah, who were wary of unfettered philosophising of any kind and preferred to adhere to a strict, literal and unquestioning (though selective) interpretation of the Qur’an and the Hadith. Ibn Taymiyyah’s teachings are still revered by Sunni literalists and followers of ISIS to this day.

The article in El Watan was a report of a conference held last June at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Algiers to mark the 850^th anniversary of Ibn Arabi’s birth. The event gathered together eminent professors of philosophy, history, poetry and linguistics from all over the Arab world to venerate the great man, and contemplate the hotly topical question of how his fiqh or ‘philosophy’ of love can be deployed against the bigotry and hatred of ISIS and their ilk. The path to enlightenment propounded by Ibn Arabi is poorly suited to modern lifestyles and expectations; it demands silence, solitude, contemplation and self-abnegation – a retreat from this world rather than a more exhilarating involvement in it. What, in comparison to Daesh’s thrilling brew of guns, adventure, brotherhood and, above all, certainty, can his philosophy possibly offer today’s ardent young Muslim minds, apart from boredom perhaps?

Well, let’s start with peace, tolerance and love. Ibn Arabi and the ‘golden age’ of Islam in al-Andalus (southern Spain) that gave him birth are like beacons that shine a light across the centuries into Islam’s current heart of darkness. They offer examples of how not only Muslims, but all human beings, can live in state of peaceful coexistence and tolerance. Medieval Spain had its share of despots, bigots and jihadists, but it was also, in its heyday, the greatest centre of learning, science and religious tolerance in the western world. Muslim caliphs employed Jewish viziers, philosophers and architects. Christian kings were buried with Arabic inscriptions around their tombs. Poetry, especially Arabic poetry, was prized by all men of education – Muslim, Christian or Jew. Muslim and Jewish philosophers had no fear of assimilating the ‘pagan’ thought of Aristotle and the ancients into their discourse. Reason nourished faith. Tolerance towards the other was matched by a tolerance of inner contradictions and doubts.

Ibn Arabi is often held up as the guide and poet of what is often referred to as jihād al-akhbar, ‘the greater jihad’ – in other words, the endeavour to master the self. In comparison to that immense struggle, in which we’re all engaged, beheading innocents in northern Iraq is, at best, a lesser jihad. It’s this message that those professors and intellectuals who gathered in Algiers to venerate the memory of Ibn Arabi wished to convey. ‘One left the hall astoundingly relieved and calmed,’ wrote the El Watan journalist who covered the conference, ‘with the gentle conviction that another discourse is possible.’

Ibn Arabi’s writings stress the importance of the night as the time best suited for the inner journey. Souad Massi admits that she’s attracted to the silence of nocturnal contemplation. This was especially true when she was a young teenager living in Algiers during the late 1980s and 1990s, a time when her homeland was being ripped apart by political turmoil and religious fanaticism. “I was always very solitary,” she told me. “For me the night was an important time. If you wanted to cry, no one could see you. Because I lived in a large family and you can’t do anything during the day, everybody can see you, but in the night I spent hours looking at the stars, sometimes until three in the morning. Especially in summer, I found it amazingly beautiful.”

Many years later, after she had moved to France and become a singer of global renown, Massi chanced across a documentary on TV about the Spanish city of Cordoba and its golden past during another nocturnal vigil, at around 4am in the morning. She was immediately “bewitched by the city”, to use her own words, and fascinated by its former intellectual grandeur, sophistication and spirit of tolerance. She started reading books about the place, wondering why she hadn’t ever paid much attention to its history and legacy, despite her early love of flamenco and Spanish culture. “I was ashamed,” she says. “I’ve been all around the world but I’ve never been there.”

She read about a sort of cultural assembly that existed in Andalusia during the early medieval period, frequented by wise men – ‘masters of the word’ – who were called El Mutakalllimûn. The word is the plural of mutakallim, which means a scholar of Ilm al-Kala – the Islamic science of discourse. The object of the mutakallim is to defend the word of God by means of reasoned argument and reconcile faith with non-Islamic traditions of deductive philosophical reasoning. As such it was and still remains highly controversial. Strict Sunni scholars, of Salafist or Wahabist tendency, consider the kalam to be a dangerous innovation and generally forbid their students to indulge in it. The word of God is uncreated by man and therefore human reason cannot and should not be applied to it, or so they say.

To Souad Massi however, her personal discovery of Cordoba and the tradition of kalam served as a gateway into Islam’s glorious intellectual past and the accumulated cultural wealth of the Arab world. She was infused with a missionary zeal to share what she discovered, and, by celebrating the beauty of Islamic philosophy, poetry and calligraphy, to find “another discourse”. “I think we’re lacking a lot of tolerance,” Souad says, “and I think that we must give the power and the opportunity to the learned people in Islam, the university professors. They’re the ones who will show us the way and who won’t lead us astray. Because when you’re ignorant, anyone can tell you anything they want, and you’ll follow him.”

She prepared to fight her own gentle ‘cultural’ battle with two types of ignorance. The first was the ignorance of non-Arabs who see the Arab world and Arabic culture as a monolithic threat to their well-being; a source either of angry youth who refuse to integrate into the culture of their adopted homes in Europe and prefer to spend their time rinsing violent rap lyrics and stealing cars, or angry bearded zealots whose only purpose in life is sow terror and murder innocents. The second is the ignorance of Arabs, especially the youth in her own adopted country of France, of their own history and cultural heritage.

“How come nobody ever talks about those wise men? Avicenna, Ibn Arabi, great men of learning, writers?” asks Massi, “Why do people always talk about little hoodlums who’ve stolen some nonsense?…We don’t have the right to marginalise and hide away this treasure, and emphasize all the stuff that’s happening right now. We can’t reduce Arabic culture to that.”

Massi tells me that she set to work creating El Mutakallimûn the album “like a police investigator.” She read widely, surfed the net, visited archives and libraries and posted requests for information on Facebook. She corresponded with professors of Arabic literature and translators. She came across the work of the calligraphers Mohamed Bourafai, and his son Ayman Bourafai. Despite her longstanding love of poetry by Leonard Cohen, Mahmoud Darwish and Victor Hugo, she had never considered herself a very ‘literary’ person. Grappling with early medieval Arabic wasn’t easy.

But, as she delved deeper, wonders kept emerging. She discovered the 9th century Iraqi poet Al Mutanabi – ‘The Would-be Prophet’. “There are miracles in his poems,” she says. “No one has scaled the same heights as him. It’s just not possible to come out with beauty like that.” She discovered the ‘hanging odes’ of the pre-Islamic poet Zouhaïr Ibn Abi Salma and the astonishing depth that the Arabic language is capable of in some of the words he used, words like sa’imtou: “It means more than ‘I’m tired’. When you say it, you include all the years you have lived. I remember that when I was a child, it was the only word that really left its mark on me. When I couldn’t go on, I always thought discreetly about sa’imtou.”

She discovered Majnūn Layla – ‘[The Man] Possessed by Layla’ – the Arab world’s answer to Romeo and Juliet, about a young man called Qays who falls in love with a girl called Layla but goes mad and dies of hunger because her father disapproves of him and he cannot have her: “I said to myself that it just wasn’t possible to die of love, just like that. It doesn’t exist. But, well, yes…it does.” She discovered The Song of the Whistling Nightingale (‘Sawtou Safiri el Boulbouli’) by the 9th century poet Asmaï, with its intricate verbal refinements and frankly untranslatable word play. “You think you’ve written, you’ve composed,” says Massi, “but you’ve done nothing at all. They were geniuses who left traces, marvels. We’re nothing in comparison to them.”

Perhaps most encouraging of all, she discovered that the poetic prowess of the ancients had survived into the modern era, reincarnated in poets like the Tunisian Abou el Kacem Chebbi who wrote the irresistibly stirring hymn ‘To the Tyrants of the World’ (‘Elā Toghat al-Alāam’) with its prophetic lines “You dare to defile the magic of existence / And scatter needles of misfortune at will / Beware! That the springtime doesn’t trick you / Nor the clarity of the sky, nor the light of day.” Although el Chebbi died in 1934 at the age of 25, his verses stoked the passion of the crowds that marched down Avenue Bourguiba and occupied Tahrir Square in the spring of 2011, alongside the rap of El General du Bled, the protest songs of Cheikh Imam and the poems of Ahmed Fouad Negm.

‘Houria’ [‘Freedom’] by Mohammed and Aymen Bourafai

Souad Massi avows an admiration for poets and artists who take risks. “I have a lot of respect for people who can put themselves in danger of death to tell the truth,” she says. She cites the modern Iraqi poet Ahmad Matar as a luminous example. He was forced to flee his adopted city of Kuwait and settle in London in the 1980s. In 2011, he wrote about the power of poetry and words, a power even greater than the forces shaking the Arab world at the time: “Poetry is not an Arab regime that falls with the death of the ruler. And it’s not an alternative to action. It’s an art form whose job is agitating, exposing, and witnessing reality, aspiring beyond the present. Poetry lights the road, and guides our deeds.”

Massi set Ahmed Matar’s poem ‘El Houriya’ (‘Freedom’) to music and included it on El Mutakallimûn. It’s the tale of a teacher who writes the word ‘freedom’ up on the black board only to be met with the blank stares of his pupils. “It’s heartbreaking to see the youth / Who understand nothing about Freedom” says the teacher. The calligraphy by Mohamed Bourafai’s that accompanies the poem looks like the manuscript of a poem that has been saved from the flames, with the word ‘Freedom’ glowing bright at its heart.

There are young Muslim men and women all over the world who are caught in a vortex of identity-politics, weakened, disorientated and prone to apocalyptic rhetoric. In France, where Souad Massi now lives, the problem is acute. “The youth here have nothing. They’re made to feel like foreigners. All they have is football pitches, because the state has cut the funding for all kinds of activities in the housing estates. So either you become a football champion, or you’re nothing. If there was a place to meet and someone who could say ‘Look at your ancestors…like Ibn Firnas, the first guy to try and fly. He was from Muslim Andalusia. Or all those hospitals named after Avicenna. That is ‘Ibn Sinna’, a Muslim.’ That would already give them a little confidence, allow them to gravitate towards something.”

Talking To Souad Massi, it’s clear that she prefers to play the role of educator, sharing the beauty of Arabic culture, rather than risk career, family, life by taking the fight to the bigots and the haters. Her adopted home of France is one of the fiercest battlegrounds in the war of words and ideas that rages through Islam and the Arab world. As a public figure, she already stands exposed. She doesn’t want to become another Charb. Even though the passion with which she talks about the injustices perpetrated against Arabic culture and Islam, both from without and within, is palpable, her strategy is seduction rather than confrontation.

“All I’m trying to do is to make people aware [of all this beauty], by means of pop, of a beautiful poem,” she says. “Then perhaps that person will be attracted by that culture and will make his own way. That’s my aim. I have nothing to prove. I did for love, really, and I was very well supported by musicians. Then again…I’m sure there’ll be those who say that poems are sacred; but poems aren’t sacred. For Muslims, what’s sacred is the Qur’an, and I won’t tamper with that, that’s for sure.”

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2015

This article is an amalgamation of the sleeve notes for the album El Mutakallimûn and an article that was published in Songlines in July 2015

The post SOUAD MASSI – What can Ibn Arabi do against Daesh? appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Hamada ben Amor aka 'El Général du Bled'

It was early morning on Friday 11th February and the streets of central Cairo were throbbing with adrenalin and fear. Long-haired American professor Mark Levine and Shung, founder of the Egyptian extreme metal band Beyond East, were caught in the pyroclastic flow of a million Egyptians who seethed towards Tahrir Square, past tanks, burned out buildings and soldiers with taut faces, through the rubble and detritus of two weeks of revolution.  Mubarak’s surprise announcement that he was holding on to his rotten throne had sent a collective groan of frustration through the nation.  The crowd feared that the time had come for desperate measures.  Marvelling at the mood of coiled rage all around, Mark and Shung looked at each other, wavelengths firmly locked, and said “This is really metal!”

Before the revolution, Egypt’s metal heads lived in fear of arrest. Bullet belts, Iron Maiden T-shirts, horn gestures and sweat ejaculating head banging were closet past-times for foolhardy freaks.  Bands like Bliss, Wyvern, Hate Suffocation, Scarab, Brutus and Massive Scar Era rocked their fans like the priests of a persecuted sect who lived in constant wariness of the ghastly Mukhabarat, Mubarak’s secret police.  Since 1997, when newspapers had ‘exposed’ the metal scene as a sordid sewer of Satanism and western decadence, metal was never a faith for the faint hearted.  “Here in Egypt, everything is Satanic if it’s unknown,” muses Slacker, drummer with Beyond East, and veteran of Egypt’s metal wars.

“The consequences of speaking out could be pretty dire,” explains Levine, author of the recently published ‘Heavy Metal Islam’, a startling look at metal heads, hip hop kids and other musical marginals throughout the Arab world.  “And for what?  What would it get you?”  Jail? Sodomy? The lash?  Any musician contemplating open revolt against one of the Arab world old-school authoritarian dictators, faced some stark choices. Zip up or die, in career terms at least. “We were like in a cocoon,” explains Skander Besbes, aka Skndr, a luminary of Tunisia’s electro and dance scene, “Closed in on ourselves, ignoring the regime and the authorities. You’re angry, but you move on, because you don’t know what to do.  I decided to compromise because I wanted to be involved in the music scene in Tunisia.”

Skndr organised parties and raves with his friends under the moniker Hextradecimal at a bar / restaurant called Boeuf sur le Toit in the town of Soukra.  It was a mecca for Tunisia’s rave scene, regularly hosting dub step, electro and rave nights. There Tunisian party people rubbed shoulders with musicians, artists and hacktivists like the newly anointed King of the Tunisian protest bloggers, Slim Amamou, aka Slim404, who has been made minister of Youth and Culture in the new post-revolutionary government. Mutual rants about the regime were fire walled from government eavesdroppers by the venue’s pumping sound system. “They were rare occasions when people could meet without feeling oppressed by the police or without the usual social barriers,” Skndr says.

However, electro music was a relatively safe option because it was instrumental. Metal and rock were partially protected by English lyrics which the local fuzz didn’t understand.  But if you sung in Arabic, you either cloistered yourself away in anodyne ‘high art’ music, or embraced the banal glitz of the local pop production line, prostituting yourself to conglomerates like Rotana, the huge Gulf-owned media and entertainment conglomerate that more or less controls the music industry in the Middle East.  Alternatively, you could choose to cup your hands around a flickering flame of integrity and fight a lonely battle out in the cold. Some popular Tunisian singers like Baadia had the guts to speak out. She denounced the brutal suppression of Tunisia’s first anti-corruption protests in the town of Redeyef back in 2008, before eventually fleeing Tunisia for the UK, where she was spotted singing alone in front of the Tunisian consulate during the recent revolution.  Others like Emel Mathlouthi and Bendir Man also deserve honourable mentions.

But it took a rapper to light a firecracker and lob it at Tunisia’s youth, whose frustration had been distilled into liquid hydrogen by years of government corruption, nepotism, ineptitude and general state imposed joylessness. Until a few months ago, Hamada Ben Amor, aka El Général du Bled was just a 21-year-old wannabe MC in a Stussy hoodie, leather jacket and baseball cap. He lived with parents and elder brother in a modest flat a drab workaday seaside town south of Tunis called Sfax where his mother runs a bookshop and his father works in the local hospital. El Général didn’t even register on the radar of Tunisian rap’s premier league which was dominated by rappers like Balti, Lak3y, Armada Bizera or Psyco-M.  It was a community riven by the usual jealous spats and dwarfed by the more prolific rap scenes of Morocco and France.

El Général had been quietly honing his very own brand of politically combustible rhyming since 2008 with tracks like ‘Malesh’ (‘Why?’) or ‘Sidi Rais’ (‘Mr President’).  Maybe it was the influence of the books his mother brought home from the shop.  Maybe it was his beloved Tupac Shakur. Whatever the reason, El Général was game for confronting le pouvoir, aka the corrupt regime of dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.  “Before the revolution it was forbidden to do gigs,” he tells me over the phone from Sfax. “We just played our music over the internet, on Facebook, because there was no other way.  The media never talked to me and I didn’t have a label.”

Ramy Essam

On November 7^th, El Général uploaded a piece of raw fury called ‘Rais Le Bled’ (President, Your Country) onto Facebook.  “My President, your country is dead / People eat garbage / Look at what is happening / Misery Everywhere / Nowhere to sleep / I’m speaking for the people who suffer / Ground under feet.”  Within hours the song had lit up the bleak and fearful horizon like an incendiary bomb.  Before being banned, It was picked up by a local TV station, Tunivision, and Al Jazeera.  El Général’s Myspace was closed down, his mobile cut off.  But it was too late.  The shockwaves were felt across the country, and then throughout the Arab world.  That was the power of protesting in Arabic, albeit a locally spiced dialect of Arabic.  El Général’s bold invective broke frontiers and went viral from Casablanca to Cairo and beyond.

A few weeks later, El Général recorded another stick of political dynamite called ‘Tounes Bladna’ (‘Tunisia Our Country’), just as the revolution was gathering momentum.  The authorities had had enough.  On January 6^th, at 5am, thirty local cops and state security goons turned up at El General’s family flat in Sfax to arrest him, “on the orders of President Ben Ali himself.”  When his brother asked why, they answered “he knows.”  He was taken to the dreaded Ministry of Interior building in Tunis where he was handcuffed to a chair and interrogated for three days. “They kept asking me which political party I worked for,” he remembers. “”Don’t you know it’s forbidden to sing songs like that,” they said. But I just answered “Why? I’m only telling the truth.”  I was in there for three days, but it felt like three years.”  Eventually, thanks to a storm of public protest, El Général was released and returned to Sfax in triumph. Even the cops were now treating him as a celebrity. “People were proud of me,” he says cheerfully. “I took a risk, with life, with my family.  But I was never scared, because I was talking about reality.”

El Général’s rap broke the spell of fear and showed his peers that it was possible to rebel and survive. Rap’s power is its simplicity. “People can just record songs in their living room,” says Narcycist, an Iraqi born rapper living in Toronto, Canada, who got together with other MCs from the Arabic rap diaspora, like Omar Offendum, and released a tribute track called ‘#Jan25’ which has become a huge viral hit. “It’s something that can be easily done in the middle of a revolution.”

The Cairo massive: Arabian Knightz

Karim Adel, aka ‘Rush’ from Cairo rappers Arabian Knightz stayed up late into the night of Thursday January 27^th recording a new rhyme for the tune ‘Rebel’, which he was determined to release on Facebook and Mediafire.  “Egypt is rising up against the birds of darkness,” spat the rhyme. “It was a direct call for revolution,” Karim says. “Before we’d only used metaphors to talk about corrupt system. But once people were out on the streets, we were just like “Screw it, you know.”  If we’re going down, we’re going down.” He and his crew just about managed to upload the new version of the song before Karim was called away to help with the vigilante security detail who were down in the streets keeping his neighbourhood free from looters and government thugs.

After the uprising of January 25^th, Cairo’s Tahrir Square resounded to the traditional Egyptian frame drum or daff, which pounded out trancelike beats over which the crowd laid slogans full of poetic power and joyful hilarity. As the Egyptian people rediscovered what it felt like to be a Nation, united and indivisible, they reverted to the raw power of their most basic musical instincts to celebrate their mass release from fear – traditional drumming and chanting and patriotic songs from the glory days of yore when Egypt trounced the forces of Imperialism in ’56 or the Israelis in ’73.

During the revolutions of 1919 and 1952, or the mass student protests of 1968, poets used to monopolise the power that rappers now share.  The chain-smoking, cussing, national poet hero Ahmed Fouad Negm, ‘Uncle Ahmed’, was reinstated by the Tahrir protestors as Egypt’s bard of protest par excellence. A man of unbelievable courage, Negm has spent 18 of his 81 years in Egyptian prisons. The word ‘Fearless’ doesn’t begin to do him justice.  In 2006 he was being interviewed by the New York Times when a donkey brayed loudly outside Negm’s ramshackle flat in one of Cairo’s poorer neighbourhoods.  “Ah, Mubarak speaks,” he quipped to the astonished journalist.

‘The Donkey and the Foal’, Negm’s poisoned paean to Mubarak and his son Gamal, was set to music by Ramy Essam, a young engineering student who became the Billy Bragg of Tahrir Square. He sang the song to ecstatic crowds with the ancient Negm beside him, still standing tall.  Essam went to Tahrir early in the uprising with his guitar and cobbled together a song called ‘Leave’ from all the inventive slogans that were flying around the intoxicated air of the square.  It became the hit of the uprising, going viral on YouTube and Huffington Post before being picked up by CNN and then TV Networks around the globe.  Essam lived in Tahrir’s tent village for the entire revolution, composing songs, and playing almost every hour on one of the many stages that had sprouted across the square.

Ahmed Fouad Negm

In that microcosmic temporary utopia, Egypt rediscovered its love of freedom, honesty, joy and simplicity. The Revolution flensed away layers of glamorous sheeny blubber from the fatuous irrelevant body of Egyptian pop to expose a new punk-like directness and integrity in artists like Ramy Essam, Mohammed Mounir or Amir Eid Hawary from the rock band Cairokee, who gathered together other luminaries from the Cairo rock scene to record the rousing hymn-like anthem to the revolution ‘Sout El Houreya’ (‘The Voice of Freedom). The people were tired of bullshit, whether it was political, social, religious or cultural. When the slippery pop star Tamer Hosni was sent into the Square to try and persuade the protestors to go home, he was almost lynched, later issuing a blubbing apology on National TV.  Million selling pop idol Amr Diab fled the country with his family in a private jet bound for the UK at the start of the uprising.  He’ll find hard to look his country in the face again.

Zakaria Ibrahim, founder of the traditional street music ensemble El Tanbura, from Port Said, remembers the student protests of the late sixties and early seventies.  “I was very happy to see a second revolution in my life,” he tells me in his gentle wistful voice. Despite the head wounds received by his son Hassan when government good squads invaded Tahrir Square on horses and camels half way through the revolution, Zakaria went down to Tahrir with El Tanbura, and several other bands affiliated to the folk centre that Zakaria has founded in Cairo, to play regularly.  “People were completely excited to hear something new that they were never used to hearing before on state media,” he says proudly.  “Under Mubarak, Egyptians had become selfish and aggressive,” he continues. “But In Tahrir, you suddenly saw the other side of people, the kindness, the forgiveness and many things like that.”

All in all, as Noor Ayman, son of a famous dissident Egyptian politician, and founder of the legendary Egyptian metal band Bliss told me, “this was a very artistic revolution.”  Political freedom and cultural freedom danced hand in hand.  To be young, to be alive was bliss, but to rediscover the thrill of banging your head to the sound of a raw pummelling guitar, or spitting a rhyme to the mic, or strumming out the truth in simple chords, without fear or compromise…that was very heaven!

This article is dedicated to the memory of artist and musician Ahmed Bassiouni, who died in Cairo on January 28^th 2011, from injuries sustained fighting the police and government militias.

A collection of clips relevant to the article can be found here

POSTSCRIPT: On March 10th Ramy Essam took part in a demonstration in Tahrir Square.  He was arrested and severely beaten, even tortured, by the security forces.  The fight for freedom of expression in Egypt is far from over.

Ramy Essam tortured

The post THE SOUNDTRACK TO THE ARAB REVOLUTIONS – From Fear to Fury appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

The future? Hypothetical? Not if you’re a Palestinian living in the West Bank. Today, musicians from towns like Ramallah, Bethlehem or Jericho face precisely this kind of soul-destroying ordeal every time they play a concert in Jerusalem. And if they live further away in Nablus, Jenin, Hebron or Gaza… forget it. Their only live appearance is likely to be an evening with friends and family in their own front room, and during a curfew even that’s out of the question. Moreover it’s not only musicians who have to play cat and mouse with the Israeli border guards. Everybody does – sound engineers, stagehands, brochure distributors, music teachers, doctors, students, butchers, bakers, candlestick makers or simply concert-goers. Moving from A to B in modern-day Palestine is tortuous. It’s a wonder that people promote music events or even go out at all. But they do.

Yair Dalal

In Jerusalem’s Tomb of the Kings the crowd is standing, stabbing the air with fists and ‘V’ for Victory signs, singing the words of a radical Palestinian anthem by the late, great Egyptian protest singer Sheikh Imam: “PHALASTEEN! PHALASTEEN!” The director of the annual Jerusalem Festival, Rania Elias, is cheerleading the crowd, her fine dark features and Nefertiti jaw focusing in on the joyous sense of unity. Even the foreigners in the crowd – consuls, diplomats, heads of NGOs and journalists – have little trouble plugging into the power of the moment, even though the non-Arabic speakers find the song frustratingly meaningless. On stage, the group Awj from Ramallah are feasting on the collective euphoria. Their usual stage reserve, so typical of ‘quality’ Middle Eastern ensembles, is cracking at the seams. Palestinians are generally reserved people, and under the dark clouds of occupation, their reserve can sometimes be as stony as the sheer granite walls of this ancient catacomb. But the opening night of the 2003 Jerusalem Festival is like a resurrection, a heaven-sent tonic which, for just an hour or two, dulls despair and spreads joy among the 400-strong crowd.

When I interview Awj before their concert, they’re good-humoured, despite their individual journeys from Ramallah to Jerusalem. Why is it important to play in Jerusalem? “Simple, because it’s our capital city.” Did any of you have problems getting here? “Yes, all of us. We had to get through four checkpoints. It’s dangerous and very risky. The journey should take 45 minutes but it can take four hours, maybe even a whole day. But for us it’s a dream to perform in Jerusalem. Even if we have to get through 1,000 checkpoints, even if they kill us, we will still come and say to the whole world, ‘this is my capital and I will perform here.’ That’s what we and all the music groups have to do.”

Yabous Productions, the non-profit Palestinian organisation behind the Jerusalem festival, has been organizing cultural events in Jerusalem and the West Bank since 1995. After the second intifada started in 2001, they were one of the few cultural organisations in Palestine to survive the Israeli crackdown. Their small offices in Arabic East Jerusalem buzz with activity on the day before Awj’s opening concert. Spirits are up because tickets are selling quicker than last year and the pre-launch excitement is palpable. The office team are all women; young, good-humoured, determined and staggeringly efficient. At their helm is the indefatigable Elias, who combines a disarmingly sweet nature with the toughness of galvanised steel. “Our major aim is to revive Palestinian cultural life in Jerusalem,” she says. “We want to present different cultures to our Palestinian people who cannot leave and travel around.” Sure enough, this year’s festival line-up includes a mix of Palestinian stalwarts like Awj, the all-star Oriental Music Ensemble, Zimar, female diva Rim Banna, and a varied assortment of global attractions including French electro-jazzers Erik Truffaz and band, South African songstress Sibongile Khumalo and Black Umfolosi from Zimbabwe.

The problems Elias and her crew have to overcome to get these artists into Jerusalem and on stage are terrifying. The challenge starts with funding. “For most organizations and companies here the priorities are to distribute food and rebuild houses in places like Gaza, Nablus and Jenin,” Elias explains. “Approaching them with something called ‘culture’ is like talking Chinese. They don’t understand it.” A large proportion of the funding comes from overseas. The revenue from ticket sales, at just under $10 per seat, and contributions from a few local businesses make up the rest of the budget.

Woman protesting at Israeli Checkpoint

Then there is the marketing. Getting posters and flyers through checkpoints is just one of the many minor skirmishes of Yabous’ annual campaign. Persuading the hard-news-obsessed media, especially the all-important Arabic satellite news channels like Al-Jazeera and Abu-Dhabi TV, to devote airtime to culture is another struggle. “The coverage of most Arabic cable channels is of the intifada or Iraq,” says Nazmi Al-Jubeh, a portly and genial Palestinian professor of history and secretary of Yabous’ board of trustees. “Most of the world isn’t used to seeing us as a country of music but rather one of explosions. This image has to be changed.”

Then there are the visas and the Kafkaesque machinations of the Israeli Interior Ministry. Just hours before the opening of this year’s festival, news arrives that Marwan Abado, a musician of Palestinian origin resident in Austria, has been forbidden entry by the security guards at Tel Aviv’s airport. As an Austrian national and passport holder, Abado shouldn’t even need a visa to enter Israel. But Yabous decided to go through the bureaucratic agony of applying to the Interior Ministry for an entry visa, a process involving hundreds of phone calls, hours of queuing and, in this case, intervention from the Austrian embassy in Tel Aviv. Despite a reception party consisting of Yabous representatives, the Austrian cultural attaché and Abado’s wife and all his paperwork, the hapless musician was denied entry, detained for 24 hours and deported on the first plane. The same thing happened to Black Umfolosi a few days later.

“It makes me feel angry,” says Suhail Khoury, one of Palestine’s most prominent musicians and artistic director of the festival. “But it doesn’t surprise me. It’s a game they play. The Israelis try to look democratic but then they use these tools. What threat is a musician to the security of Israel? But this is Shin Beit, the secret service. They have this guy’s name on a computer and they don’t care what politicians or the Interior Ministry say. We sorted all the papers, visas, stamps, everything. But then Israel just says ‘for security reasons’. If Christ came back they would say he couldn’t enter into the country ‘for security reasons’.”

Every year Yabous navigate a veritable ocean of troubles. Even the decision whether to search people as they enter the Tomb of the Kings becomes crucial and visceral. “We took the decision not to search,” Al-Jubeh tells me. “The risk is there but we are not going to imitate the occupation. We don’t want people to feel like they are crossing another checkpoint in order to join a musical evening.” In a world where the simplest brush with bureaucracy can be like some existential parody of hell, the basic acts of listening to music and having fun acquire an elemental potency. I ask Elias why culture is so important at a time when teenagers are throwing stones at tanks and blowing themselves up on buses. “Because it’s part of our struggle,” she answers in a clear, determined voice. “Our struggle is not just political or economic. It’s a cultural struggle, too, to exist in Jerusalem, to be here as Palestinians; to give Palestinians something bright and enjoyable. There are no other places to go in Jerusalem, no cinemas, no venues, no cultural centres. We are human beings – in the end we want to enjoy our lives like any other person.”

Al-Jubeh supports Elias with his own eloquence. “Last year on the fourth or fifth day of the festival, the Israeli Army attacked an area of Gaza and killed 17 people including women and children. I had to address the audience that night and I told them that, in my opinion, there is no conflict between pleasure, music, relaxation, relief and struggle.”

On one issue Elias and Yabous take a hard line – the boycott of Israeli artists and musicians. “I’m not against any Israeli person; I respect them all,” she stresses. “But I feel that now is not the right time to invite Israeli artists to the festival. Jerusalem is still under occupation. We have people in prison. They are demolishing houses and confiscating land. If you have a good relationship with the Israelis and you present a good image of cooperation, the media and public will interpret it as if everything is normal and OK.” “Everything is not OK,” blurts out Yair Dalal – one of the most open-minded peacenik Jewish musicians working in Israel today – when I recount Elias’ opinions to him a few days later. “If I was in Yabous’ shoes I would invite a radical, peace-making Israeli artist to participate in this festival. It would be even stronger. Because there are many artists with left-wing views in Israel. I would invite one of these people: come and see how tough it is. Play in our festival, then go back to Israel and talk about it.”

Rim Banna

Just as the Palestinians have been made pariahs in the land of their birth, Israeli artists and musicians have become pariahs in the eyes of the world, thanks to the policies of successive Israeli governments, which these artists have never voted for nor supported – quite the opposite. Sitting on a couch in the funky little cabaret-cum-studio which he’s just opened in Jaffa’s old port, Dalal can barely conceal his hurt and anger caused by the gathering international boycott of Israeli artists. He and his manager wife Yvonne still smart at the rejections they have received from festivals in France, Japan and Zanzibar. You can see his point. Here’s an artist who has worked extensively with Bedouin nomads in the Negev desert and organised concerts and tours with various Palestinian and Arabic musicians throughout his long career. When I meet him he’s just returned from a peace tour in Germany, involving musical collaborations with Palestinian musicians from Bethlehem. It’s as if Billy Bragg were told that he couldn’t play at a festival in Morocco thanks to the dubious policies of the British government on Iraq. You can imagine what Bragg’s reaction would be. And that’s precisely Dalal’s reaction to the international boycott of Israeli artists. “I mean, when we’re rejected or boycotted by some festival… does Sharon care about it?” he asks with his own mellow rhetorical flair. “Will he withdraw from Jenin because Yair Dalal is not performing in Zanzibar? Come on! Maybe he’ll withdraw from Jenin because Yair Dalal is performing in Zanzibar, not the other way round.”

The problems that Dalal and other Israeli musicians face at home are troubling, although not nearly as blunt and immediate as those that Yabous and the Palestinians have to grapple with. The Israeli economy is in ruins. People are either too fearful or too skint to go out and listen to music. Tel Aviv, a city which used to be the party capital of the Middle East is now little more than a ghost town. People can’t afford CDs. The boycott is growing abroad. Despite these afflictions, Dalal and his ilk continue to celebrate the multiculturalism of Israel in their music. Admittedly, applied to Israel, the term ‘multiculturalism’ sounds somehow strange. And yet, if you put the monocultural Jewish faith to one side, Israel is definitely and chaotically multicultural, more so than any other nation. Dalal himself comes from a family of Iraqi Jews who emigrated in the 50s. He works to promote the Arabic Jewish music heritage and to affirm the Middle Eastern and North African roots of over half of Israel’s population. He takes great pains to stress the wonderful and historic collaborations between Jewish and Arabic musicians which flowered in not too distant times and places like Iraq, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. “There’s a beautiful poem by the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish,” he tells me. “It says something like, ‘The time when the conflict will be almost resolved is the time when the Israeli Jew recognises the ‘other’ part in him: Arabic, Jewish, Christian, Roman, Greek, Ottoman. I am a person who belongs to all these traditions. Is my mother a whore? No, my mother is the earth of this country and my fathers are all those cultures.’ This is very strong. This is where the richness of our culture and our art comes from.”

At Kalandya checkpoint, north of Jerusalem, that mother earth has been transformed into a hot, dusty, polluted hell- hole. Forlorn lines of Palestinians trudge past the tooled-up Israeli soldiers in their mirror shades. The anger, frustration and hatred of the Palestinian people shimmers over the scene like a lowering haze. It’s a place where music and joy are like faint gnawing memories, lost and irretrievable. As an outsider, once you’ve had your fill of suffering and its cheap voyeuristic thrills, you quickly become enveloped by the choking melancholy all around you. Only then does it dawn, that when life itself is little more than one long struggle, maybe there’s nothing more radical than music nor more revolutionary than joy.

Many thanks to David Codling of the British Council in Jerusalem; Rania Elias, Juliet Tourma and all at Yabous Productions, and Yvonne and Yair Dalal for their help in the preparation of this article.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2004

First published in Songlines – June 2004

For more information:

www.yabous.org

www.yairdalal.com

The post MUSIC UNDER FIRE – There’s nothing more revolutionary than joy. appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Omar Souleyman is a magnet for controversy, for virgin wonder, loud guffaws, unwary bafflement and clandestine giggles, for the incredulous anger of cultural elites or the amazed delight of unsuspecting hipsters from Frisco to Frankfurt on the Oder.   To the hip he’s an adorable techno-naif, a strange apparition from another world, an Arab trance-merchant with a spiky sound, whose music cruises and cavorts with grit, hedonism, impossible scales and vertiginous beats.  For them, the very fact of his improbable existence is already half the charm.  To certain culturati however, especially the nomenklatura of Syria’s cultural community and some more conservatively minded ‘world music’ folk in the west, Omar Souleyman smacks of gross cultural misappropriation, a kind of conspiracy of trash.   I mean, is he and are his backers at the Sublime Frequencies label just taking the piss, demoniacally sucking the gullible into a great cross-cultural pop-art happening, like Syria’s answer to Malcolm McLaren or the KLF?

Step No 1:  invent some shite tinny keyboard pop muzak.  Step 2:  Get a couple of mates to form a super-cheap touring unit.  Step 3:  Foist your artless head-banging fizz on the world like it’s the new dawn of popular Syrian music, making sure you concentrate your fire on clueless young technoheads and audio-exotica freaks.  Step 4:  Pick up a few A-list endorsements from Bjork and Damon Albarn along the way.  Step 5: Travel the world, play all the festivals that matter (Glastonbury, All Tomorrow’s Parties, Sonar, Central Park Summerstage, Eurockéenes de Belfort etc) and belly laugh indecently whilst fingering the greenbacks.  Sounds just too evil to be true, doesn’t it?

When Omar Souleyman is lead into a quiet bell tent backstage at the Shambala Festival for our interview, he doesn’t look or act like the Johnny Sauron of Middle Eastern pop.   In fact he’s quite the opposite.  Small, wiry with smooth healthy skin and intelligent eyes hovering behind those iconic aviator shades, his manner is neat, polite and at times almost taciturn, perhaps due to the drag of having to talk through a translator.

At the end of the interview, after a brief absence, Omar bursts back into the tent where his keyboardist Rizan Sa’id and I are stitching together a conversation about home studios out of scraps of broken English and evening-school Arabic, and clambers under the covers of the tent’s blow-up bed, shivering.  The damp chill of a cloudless late summer’s night in Northamptonshire is seeping into his bones.   “Back home we have similar weather,” he tells me earlier.  “But only in winter.  Right now the daytime temperature is 42C.  In three months time it’ll be down to zero.”   Rasha, our translator, comes in with a poo-brown hippy jacket and Omar dons it gratefully over his white jellabiya.  I notice a stove in a corner and suggest that we brew up some tea.  We light both burners and Omar huddles next to me, rubbing his hands over the calor gas flames and blowing into them with satisfaction.  As he settles into his comfort zone, Omar exudes a kind of unfazed toughness, as if he’s huddled round a precious source of warmth in this way a million times before, routinely, without complaint, like a trooper.

“That’s what Omar is; a trooper,” Mark Gergis, the man who brought Omar Souleyman out of Syria and onto the world stage, confirms over the phone a week later.   “People work really really hard where he’s from and they age very quickly.  I’ve seen it first hand.  It’s not an easy life in those villages in the Jazeera.”   The Jazeera, (‘The Island’), is Syria’s very own ‘Midwest’, its farming belt, tucked far away in the far north eastern corner of the country like an ugly but useful tool hidden away in a broom cupboard.  Turkey and Iraq are just over the border.  Damascus, and all its glittering urban sophistication, is a 12-hour bus drive away.  The land is flat, dusty and overexploited.  The Khabour river, which makes it into the Bible as ‘The Habor’ (check 2 Kings 17:6), is drying up.  So are jobs in agriculture.  It used to be the country’s breadbasket.  Now it’s turning into a rural basket case.   It hasn’t rained properly for a decade.   “Next to Tell Amir, the village where I was born, there’s a river,” Omar told me.  “It’s been dry for ten years.  I always used to go there and fish when I was kid, or just sit and pass the day.  It used to be beautiful in the springtime.”

Omar Souleyman’s home territory is as far off the tourist trail as you can possibly imagine.   The only foreigners who go there are either archaeologists who have come to drool over the three thousand year old ‘tells’, or prehistoric man-made mounds that dot this big country, or the odd music producer in search of his grail.   Yes, very odd indeed.   Cue Mark Gergis, a tall dark music fan of Iraqi descent, resident in San Francisco, who has played in countless punk / noise / art / musical theatre combos (Mono Pause, Neung Phak, Lord Chord, Porest) and spent years indulging his wayward passion for hunting down arcane global pop, mostly on cassette, in the public libraries, South East Asian and Middle Eastern emporia of the West Coast and Detroit, where most of his Iraqi family are based.

In 1997 Gergis decided to take his first trip outside of the USA and opted for Syria “because it seemed like the last bastion in the Middle East of the old Arab World.”   There he kept hearing this fast, ferocious and wildly electronic form of ‘dabke’ music blaring from cassette kiosks and taxi stereos.  Dabke is the universal foot stomping, line-dancing, shut-up-and-boogie pop beat of the Middle East, as lowbrow and unpretentious as you can possibly get.  There’s no equivalent to it in England, because it’s a genuinely traditional, yet living and ubiquitous dance form, invented, so they say, centuries ago by villagers who had to pound down earthenware roofs to make them solid and watertight.  If the English hadn’t consigned Morris dancing to the attic of shame and embarrassment, then we might have kept something similar in our culture.   When I voice this conjecture to Omar Souleyman his response is unequivocal; “Well people in your country should dance the traditional music.  Folk music is heritage.  If you loose it, you loose your soul.”

Check the dabke action on You Tube and you’ll see it in all its graceful and gaudy settings.   Young dudes in football shirts, fat middle-aged men in suits and ties, prim traditional dance troupes in the threads of yesteryear, old men and women in jellabiyas and head-dresses, young girls in skin-tight jeans or multi-coloured robes, Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians and Egyptians, all dancing the dabke, in a line, holding hands, laughing, together.   It may be embarrassingly naff to some, but it’s the musical heart and soul of a people, the unselfconscious sap and resin of family and community life.

“I was very familiar with dabke music and I was still learning a lot about it, as well as choubi music which is the equivalent in Iraq,” Gergis recalls.  “But never before had I heard such a sound, that frenetic, that raw, that fast.  It really grabbed me.  And every time I would ask, “who is this?” the same answer would come back; Omar Souleyman.”

Gergis’ discovery wasn’t just a haphazard bolt from the blue.  It was the resolution of a quest.  “For years I’d been searching for rawer and more powerful Arabic music than that in my dad’s record collection.  I went through the whole belly dance thing and then tried to get into rai.  They were promoting rai as being very raw and kind of punk, but although I liked it, it wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for.  But that Jazeera sound was wild.  It just seemed like a punk version of the other dabke that I was hearing.”

Gergis made a second trip to Syria in 2000, with is brother Eric, and this time he left the tourist trail and travelled by bus to Al Hassakeh, one of the main towns in the Jazeera and main home of Omar Souleyman.  “It’s so far, that Damascus considers it almost Iraq.  It’s just another world.  There’s that older village mentality there.  The accent that Omar speaks is very close to the Iraqi accent my family have.    Talking to Omar is sort of like speaking to my Iraqi grandfather.”

Al Hassakeh is a concrete work-a-day town.   Its colour comes from the variety of its inhabitants: Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians, Iraqis, Shias, Sunnis, Christians, Chaldeans, Yazidi, Armenians, Alaouis.  The streets and markets are thronged by old women with facial tattoos, Christian Assyrians wearing ridiculously over-sized crosses round their necks, Arab men in their traditional keffiyas and jellabiyas, women with and without head-scarves and traditional tribal threads of every kind.  The area reminds you of Syria and the Levant’s true mongrel character, a rich and fecund mix that racial and religious pedants and purists of all kinds would dearly love to unravel.

I ask Omar if all these different ethnicities manage to coexist peacefully back home.  “I have all sorts of friends, Christians and Kurds,” he answers.  “My two band members, Rizan and Ali are Kurds.  I am an Arab.  On the last tour we had a poet with us, and he was Christian.”

There has been inter-ethnic conflict in the Jazeera, most notably in March 2004 when a Kurdish ‘intifada’ broke out after a football match in the city of Al-Qamishli.   Apparently the Kurds in the stands were chanting the praises of Talabani, Barzani and George Bush Jr and the Arabs countered with pro-Saddam hollers.  It all became nasty.  Tanks rolled in.   Syrian security forces opened fire on Kurds during the annual celebrations of Nowruz, the Kurdish New Year, in Al Raqqah as recently as this year.

But that’s the big picture.   I have no problem believing that street-level ethnic harmony prevails in and around Al Hassakeh.   Omar himself was born in an Arab family in the Jazeera village of Tell Amir and grew up listening to Iraqi pop from the 1950s onwards, especially the pop dabke and choubi of the 70s and 80s.  A name he cites readily in our interview is that of the singer and rabab (traditional violin) player Saad Harbawi.  A serious motorbike accident in his early teens damaged his eyes, which is why he’s rarely seen without his shades.  In his late teens, Omar became a labourer.   “What kind of labouring?” I asked.   “Anything,” he answered.   Music was just a hobby until the mid 1990s, when Omar was in his late 20s.   His roughneck holler earned him a local reputation as a wedding-performer and he started singing professionally.  His family disapproved but that’s par for the course in the Middle East.

At around this time Souleyman started working with keyboardist Rizan Sa’id and saz player Ali Shaker, both of who still accompany him.  Rizan is a whizz-kid on the Korg and a reputable record producer, credited with inventing the new, edgier, harder form of dabke that emerged from the Jazeera in the mid 1990s.  He has produced hits for dabke and Syrian pop megastars like George Wassouf and Shari Al Fawaz and worked for Syrian TV.   Munching Kettle crisps from a large black bag, Rizan tells me all about his home studio in Al Hassakeh where he produces much of Omar Souleyman’s output, and that of many other local stars whose names he reels off with his quick, intelligent and self-confident manner.   I can’t remember any of them.   On stage, Rizan twiddles knobs, punches programmes, flicks out melodies like a virtuoso.

Early promo literature in the west made great play of the fact that Souleyman has released over 500 cassettes in Syria…but this of course is just floating hyperbole.  Eighty percent of those releases are recordings made at weddings and presented to the married couple like a kind of aural photo album of their blissful day.  Copies are copied and recopied and sold at local kiosks.   The turn over is relentless.   Every time Gergis went back to Syria he found that his favourite Souleyman tunes were already dépassé.   “He’s a little surprised that people like his old music,” Gergis tells me.  “But then again, ‘old’ is last year.”

When Gergis finally tracked Omar Souleyman down in 2006 and secured an agreement to release a compilation of his music on the Sublime Frequencies label, Souleyman was already a rising star in the Arab world, thanks to the success of his 2005 hit ‘Khataba’ (‘The Proposal’) and its lusciously sensual video clip on You Tube.  He was being booked for residencies in Damascene nightclubs, and for weddings and parties in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.  Gergis proposed a new adventure in Europe and North America, and Souleyman agreed.  Sublime Frequencies have released three CDs to date (‘Highway to Hassake’ 2006, ‘Dabke 2020’ 2009 and ‘Jazeera Nights’ 2010).  As Souleyman started to bewitch the west, word of his success seeped back to Syria through the digital ether.   The reaction in some quarters was pure horror.

The following comes from a Syrian music promoter and journalist friend of mine:  “I’m a great defender of chaabi or popular music.   However, Omar is a very bad singer.  And it’s a real shame that he got lucky.  This isn’t a social judgment; this is an artistic opinion, especially when Al Jazeera is full of amazing popular singers, like Ibrahim Keivo for example.  In terms of chaabi music (like really taxi music), I am a fan of Wafik Habib from the coast.  And the biggest star of the country is, of course, Ali Al Dik.  Omar’s music is offending to the local musicians especially when it is presented in international festivals as Syrian music.  No one knows him here, apart from maybe some truck drivers from the north.  It is just horrible music, with stupid lyrics.   But I understand that western audiences might find it ‘cool’ because it is kitsch, and because of his funny look.  I don’t think the people of Sublime Frequencies would be interested in these great singers (Ibrahim Keivo and Wafik Habib).  It is more commercial to present a bad and kitsch singer as the Syrian sound!!”

I read this passage to Mark Gergis and he returns fire as follows:  “Well, yeah, once again…confirmed.  The lines between high art and pop culture are drawn pretty deeply in the Arab world.  Omar has become the most successful export in the history of Syrian music, as it’s perceived in the rest of the world.  There’s never been a dabke artist or a Syrian, much less anyone from the Jazeera, that’s ever made it out and toured like this in the west.   People are either very entertained or angry or puzzled by it.  But we’re really happy and of course he’s really happy.”  Gergis goes on to elaborate a theory that Syria, post the death of old man Hafez Al Assad and through the current reign of his son Bashir is going through a kind of perestroika period, an opening up both internally and externally and that consequently the intelligentsia of the country are particularly touchy about Syria’s image abroad and concerned that the right music should be allowed to represent the country on the international stage.  Omar is obviously far from being the cultural ambassador they had in mind.

Omar himself gives the impression of not giving a pair of rodents about the controversies raging around him.  “There are very few people who get away from their heritage with that snobbish attitude,” he says.  “Everyone can have their opinion, but if they think that, they’re wrong.  For example, in our country, the soap operas are very popular and very folky.”  Apparently, a soap called ‘Bab El Hara’ (‘The Neighbourhood Gate’) is the big hit of the moment back home.  It’s set in a bygone time of sure and solid values, when men were men and women were women.  People love it and even ignored a live TV speech by Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah and a kind of political deity in Syria, to watch the soap en masse during a recent Ramadan broadcast.

TV Soaps, dancing, glamour, good times, solid old-time values, the neighbourhood, truckers, taxi-drivers, human frailty; Welcome to modern Syria, welcome to life the world over.  I find it frustrating that artists like Omar Souleyman generate so much guff in the circles of the learned about ‘the unknowable other’, legitimacy, cultural contextualism, tradition, modernity, misappropriation, this schism, that ism.  The real wonder of someone like Omar Souleyman, and the place he comes from, isn’t how different or ‘other’ it is to world we know, but how bloody similar it is, how universal fundamental human tragedy and human farce really is.  Musicians the world over share a common dream: to play the music they love to as many people as possible as often as possible.  And who cares if their away audiences don’t ‘understand’ them, or speak their language, or are conversant with 3000 years of their history, or haven’t read any ethnomusicological treatises about their traditions and just content themselves with head banging gracelessly to their music with the purest kind of appreciation in their hearts: simple wonder and love.  As if some sorry youth in the barrios of Al Hassakeh needs to know anything at all about the history of Black America, the migration north from the rural south, the Detroit car industry, gospel music, slavery and all that jazz to appreciate ‘Thriller’ by Michael Jackson.  If you decide to delve deeper and explore the contexts of the music you love then good for you, but don’t lambast others for not spending their time in the same way.

I love Omar Souleyman’s music.  Ok, I don’t know what he’s singing about and his lyrical talents might well be a joke for all I know.  The fact that he regularly appears with a chain-smoking poet called Mahmoud Harbi who stands on stage whispering sweet prompts into Omar’s ear, Cyrano de Bergerac style, possibly confirms this doubt.  Suffice to say that the songs apparently stumble through a Technicolor landscape of beautiful wenches, dodgy wedding deals, adultery, love, hate, frustration, sexual or otherwise, and the occasional paean to Assad father and son.   But like Gergis, like Bjork, like Albarn and all those other trance-heads out there, I’m touched by the frenzy, the raw honesty of it all, the lack of polish and restraint, the dazzling lamé virtuosity, the heart-wrenching ‘mawwal’ intros and the pounding dabke fever.  I love the fact that Omar Souleyman isn’t a spruced-up grinning entertainer, like Wafik Habib or Ali Al Dik, notwithstanding their possibly superior vocal skills.  He’s a tough reserved biker boy from a hard place.   Like Gene Vincent, Dee Dee Ramone or Iggy Pop.   And I don’t need to know a single solitary fact about him to appreciate that spirit in him.

And anybody who thinks that Sublime Frequencies are making millions off the back of the people like Omar Souleyman is a fool who doesn’t know the realities of that independent and passionate basement floor of the music industry which the label inhabits.   I’d be surprised if they make enough to run an office, pay a few people a living wage and keep releasing the music they love.   But I believe they’ve understood something fundamental, and it’s all about trust and faith.   The truth is that many western music labels and producers who seek out talent in continents other than their own have lost their faith in the ability of local people to produce music of quality, worth and international potential themselves, in situ.  Apparently, they had that ability some time ago, in the 50s, 60s and 70s when stunning gorgeous music was recorded by local musicians, engineers and producers in local studios in places like The Congo, Algeria, Morocco, Ethiopia, South Africa etc etc.   But that ability was garroted, so the theory goes, by piracy, shrinking production budgets and the Darwinian obliteration of ‘real’ instruments by cheap keyboards and synths.  There’s some truth in that, no doubt, but it ignores the fact that modernity is a creative challenge the world over, and Africans, Arabs, Asians etc must rise to it just as we in the west have had to.  And if part of that necessary reinterpretation of older music requires somebody like Rizan to sit down in their home studio in some forgotten burgh in the outer reaches of an African, Asian or Middle Eastern country and tinkle on a Korg synth and a drum machine until something raw, vital and butt-kicking begins to appear, then producers in the west need to have some kind of faith in that process, or a curiosity at least.  Sublime Frequencies seems to have that faith, and that’s why they deserve respect.

And in any case, one should never dismiss trash, however you define it.  High art needs trash in order to boost its energy levels.  Shakespeare, Dickens, Bartok and Joyce all understood that very well.  Like the guys from Sublime Frequencies, I’m constantly surprised by the energy and quality of invention of the music on cheap and tacky cassettes, with zero production values, which I find in the souks of the world.   We’ve got to trust the people who make that music and trust their way of making it, people like Omar, Rizan and Ali Shaker.  Maybe they need a little more rope, a few hours in better studios and mastering rooms, the use of slightly better gear.   But essentially they’re doing their thing, stumbling forward into a dangerous future, like the rest of us, and we should be listening.   Believe me, the ‘unknowable other’ is.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2010
First published in The Independent – Oct 2010

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