Making Music In The MENA: Mark LeVine's "Heavy Metal Islam"

One of the more fascinating reads in a long while has been Mark LeVine's "Heavy Metal Islam", an interesting survey of the evolving music scene in the MENA. It's a great, illuminating read,, and well crafted: there 's a very deft blend of narrative, feature profiling, and context/analysis that makes it both compelling and informative.

He surveys music scenes in Morocco, Egypt, Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, and Pakistan, meeting and performing with metal and hip-hop musicians who are creating their craft in dire environments. But LeVine is also a professor of Middle Eastern history, holding a doctorate in that field and Islamic studies. That kind of strong intellectual foundation enables him to avoid the easy route of 'jam band travelogue' as he puts the musicians' experiences in a broader context, seeking out and probing various other leaders, media figures, bloggers, activists and speakers to round out the complex dimensions of making music in the MENA.

A companion CD has been planned for release, but the web site has some conflicting info; the home page says it will be out as a 'pre-holiday' release, but info on the site's 'album' page still lists the release with a past due date of September. The embedded promo YouTube video on both pages also doesn't play, saying the video has been set to private. Hope they can get that bug fixed.

If he does a revised edition of the book, I hope he considers a mention or look at the Bangladeshi Islamic music scene, if any; while they don't have to operate under anywhere near the oppressive parameters other artists in the book do (at least to my knowledge), a line or graf about any cutting-edge musical Islamic expression going on there would have been interesting to note in context of the Pakistani section. Also, in view of the general media suppression in other countries that Dayem spoke about in the Berkelely conference covered in the previous post, I'm wondering how musicians are faring in Syria, Tunisia, Iraq, and other MENA locales.

The book is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand the powerful range of thought and expression among youth in Islamic countries. Western traditional media puts its own much milder form of information gatekeeping in place by not giving enough due light to these kinds of alternative voices and struggles throughout the Islamic world.

Two quick related postscripts: 1) A good corollary to LeVine's book -- if you're not familiar with it -- is the documentary DVD Heavy Metal In Baghdad , which follows Iraqi metal band Acrassicauda over several years and across three countries. It's an intense, haunting bit of film-making and well worth a view.

2 ) Huma Yusuf -- whose work documenting Pakistani new media is covered in the previous post -- wrote an eloquent blog post last week entitled
"Beyond The Culture War", about the need for art to "propose counter-narratives to the dominant perspective" (elegantly stated).

In her article she frames the question by noting, in part, the following:

...Many have bemoaned the Taliban’s efforts to purge the Frontier province of music and dancing. Outrage was expressed when the music department at Punjab University was forced to relocate off-campus after receiving threats from an Islamic student organisation. These days, many secular-minded Pakistanis are speaking out against rock and pop acts for failing to criticise the Taliban through their music; their disappointment implies a belief that music effects social change. But this September, a different take on the plight of Pakistani music emerged. Multan’s Bahauddin Zakariya University closed down its music department, blaming a ‘public lack of interest.’ The college’s principal claimed that the number of enrolled students had dropped from 30 to two, making it unfeasible to keep the department going.

Riaz’s pessimism and the varsity example quoted above indicate that the significant disagreement about cultural matters is not only between extremists and moderates. Rather, it is between those who believe that art can play a redeeming role in society, and those who just don’t care. Reframing the culture war this way raises the question of whether there is any meaningful connection between artistic practice and the shape of civil society. ...

She goes on to make the case that there is indeed a necessary and meaningful connection. As Moe Hamzeh of the Lebanese group the Kordz says in LeVine's book, "music can't be lazy" (a motto I've tried to uphold in my own musical work as well).

Politics, New Media And The Muslim Word: Seminar At UC Berkeley

This was a great seminar that I ran into on the web on Islam and new media (and fortuitous, as I renew this blog to include this very area). The seminar was held October 15th at UC Berkeley, and the good folks there have posted the seminar in its entirety on youtube here:




The moderator was Wajahat Ali, associate editor of www.altmuslim.com .

The first speaker was Mohamed Abdel Dayem, Program Coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). He detailed the odds bloggers must face in many MENA countries and the scope, extent and tactics of government suppression on both traditional media and particularly bloggers. A good companion piece to his presentation is his report on CPJ , "Middle East Bloggers: The Street Leads Online."


Next up was Huma Yusuf, features editor for dawn.com, the web site of Pakistan's Engligh language news media group. Yusuf detailed how traditional and new media converged in Nov. 2007 when then-president Pervez Musharraf imposed a state of emergency in Pakistan.

Yusuf provides an in-depth report on MIT's Center For Future Civic Media site , entitled "Old and New Media: Converging During the Pakistan Emergency (March 2007-February 2008)"
. Fantastic work and analysis.


Side note: Her blog at MIT's Center For Future Civic Media begins to cite her coverage on what was known as the "second long march" in March of this year, as a similar confluence occurred again in response to President Asif Zardari's activities. That blog teased to her additional coverage on dawn.com but that particular dawn.com page turns up an error message. However, you can see blog coverage on the march by other Dawn correspondents and bloggers if you pull the March 2009 archives on their blog page. Not sure if Yusuf's own coverage got pulled or whether she was unable to cover it logistically.


Muhamad Ali, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California-Riverside, spoke next, discussing contemporary Islam in Indonesia. He posited that new media was being used by various Islamic groups in the region to strengthen their individual identity rather than as a means to help develop bridge-building or consensus.

Haroon Moghul is the Director of Public Relations for the Islamic Center of New York University, and is pursuing a Ph.D. in Middle East Studies at Columbia University. He also maintains a great blog at avari.

Moghul discussed how the reciprocity and exchange possible in new media is changing the structure of Islamic traditional schools of thought, citing among other examples the popularity of podcasts from the Islamic Center Of New York. He gave examples of how the podcasts had created requests for direct counseling from as far away as India and requests for transcripts from as far away as Iran (I suggested to him on his blog that the Center look into some text recognition software such as Dragon's Naturally Speaking.

He touched on how the reach of such exchanges could help the sustainability of marginalized Islamic communities, but warned of a potential downside, where such access could "potentially create an escape valve where you dont have to negotiate with the society around you."

He also referred to Benedict Anderson's work on imagined communities in posing the question, "How will new media change conceptions and fellings of identity among Muslims?" Moghul said one of the mechanisms states use to create a sense of loayalty is through religion, and posited that the ability of states to engender loyalty and strengthen their legitimacy through religion will change as Islamic discourse and the sense of religious belonging can be provided elsewhere through outside new media sources.


The last speaker was Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad, a Malaysian politician actively involved with Parti Keadilan Rakyat, the Malaysian opposition party. He was elected to the legislature in Selangor state in 2008 as a member of the Pakatan Rakyat coalition -- the youngest candidate to contest a seat in those elections. Ahmad spoke about the role of the new media in Malaysian politics and his recent electoral campaign.

Takeaways: It was a very interesting discussion all the way around. Dayem brought details and insight to a situation I was aware of but not familiar with its scope and intricacies; I also appreciated the Malaysian and Indonesian presentations.

Yusuf's presentation was detailed and gripping (and made me wish that I had kept this blog active during that time period). What struck me most was that under those circumstances, traditional media outlets -- also under the fire -- cooperated with and took up, when possible, where bloggers left off if the bloggers were shut down (Dayem also pointed out examples of this kind of cooperation in the MENA). That's very different from the behavior of traditional media outlets in the West, who are still reluctant to partner with what they perceive as the "cult of the amateur."

Moghul's remarks were, for me, some of the most compelling observations. Matching insight, experience, and historical context, he took on the role of futurist standing at the direct nexus of the future of both Islam and new media developments.

Dr. Singh - Obama State Visit Coverage

As I often cover South Asian media in this blog, I thought it would be interesting to sample a range of takes on the event from various media across the globe. i'll try to get to a few blogs that covered the event in alter post, but for now a quick survey of a few MSM spins:

The AP piece brought up some interesting nuances regarding China and greenhouse emissions , but glosses over Pakistan and did not mention the uncompleted work on nuclear agreements.

The Times Of India picks up the Pakistan issue thread in a bit more detail, including this interesting sound bite, something I haven't seen yet in Western coverage of Thursday's event:

Obama also acknowledged implicitly, probably for the first time by Washington, that the United States historically may have erred in its approach towards Pakistan.

"There were probably times when we were just focused on the (Pakistani) military...instead of (engaging its) civil society," he admitted, when asked about the US policy of arming Pakistan that had allowed it to become a heavily armed adversary of India.

TOI also offered a couple of interesting sidebar articles, including Dr. Singh's remarks on Afghanistan to the Center for Foreign Relations in D.C. on Monday (a separate piece also covered his views on China . TOI in fact has a whole special section on the visit.

Pakistan's English media group Dawn News, of course, focuses on the Pakistan angle more in depth.

The TOI article also covers progress on the nuclear agreement, and it's how IBN Live headlined their coverage: "Nuclear deal will go through, Obama assures PM", states the article. It's the focal point of the news coverage in the article (though you have to get through the narrative of the day's ambience beforehand).

On the lighter side, India's Rediff provided a comprehensive guest list 'who's who', an interesting read to get familiar with the top movers and shakers in the India - America sphere.

Most of the other major American MSM coverage (the networks, CNN, WaPo, NYT) focused their coverage more on the pageantry of the event itself rather than any in depth geopolitical analysis. That's not unexpected or gratuitous -- very deep in the American collective psyche, I think, there's still a yearning for occasional ceremony, symbolism, and ritual in the processes of its political leadership -- but it's interesting to see the harder news dimensions covered in greater detail at the outset of the event by non-American media.

I imagine some of the weekly MSM publications, or perhaps some blogs, will offer more in that realm in days to come. We'll check.

Incidentally, the news station I work for caught a few remarks from our own Gov. Richardson before he left for D.C. to attend the dinner.

Surveying The Ft. Hood Tragedy In The Islamosphere - The Muslim Voice And The Media

(time to dust off the blog, and perhaps extend its scope a little bit).

As both a Muslim and a new media geek, I was interested on a number of levels re the media reaction and response -- both within and and outside the Islamosphere -- to the Ft. Hood shootings.

It's also given me a chance to look at what's happening in the Islamosphere in general, a scene I hadn't surveyed since 2005 in this entry. I'll revisit this topic in a forthcoming post.

but to Ft. Hood:

One of the most diligent and thorough aggregator of responses and counterresponses lies with Sheila Musaji's The American Muslim blog (TAM). A recent discovery for me, she is a tireless defender and chronicler of interfaith issues, and her blog has become in general the first stop I go to to gauge osme of the interfaith dialogue on Ft. Hood.

In one of her first posts on the tragedy, she listed the statements released by most major Muslim organizations, all unequivocally condemning Hasan's actions. This provided a lot of detail and resources for me to explore further.

As I continue to peruse her offerings and links, and as I reflect on the tragedy, two key things have struck me:

1) Is the Muslim response sufficient?

and 2) Are the pressures and circumstances for Muslims in the American military being sufficiently addressed and/or brought to light?

To some extent, the two issues overlap.

While the response from most Muslim organizations was swift and laudable, it hasn't been very *visible*. Apart from CAIR, and a few other 'biggies', not a lot of lasting impact was created that made it into the mainstream of network broadcast news with any degree of lasting retention to the public.

Those of you who read this blog know I stress and study user *behavior* as the critical key to new media developments. As other new media geeks have well pointed out before me, the down side of long-tail distribution of information is the potential of interests microniched to the point of insular self-selection. To some extent, I feel, the Islamosphere runs this very risk of 'talking amongst ourselves'.

For the most part -- though certainly not completely -- interaction on Muslim blogs tend to foster either a good community discussion within the fold (which is very necessary and healthy) or else are targeted by incendiary Islamophobes. Taking an honest dialogue on Muslim issues outside of the Islamosphere and into a more mainstream setting is happening, but it hasn't yet reached a level that acheives a lasting, visible clarity, diversity and accessibility to the American mainstream media.

At a time when Muslims in America are, at best, not fully understood (and at worst feared or hated)-- a stronger, more protracted, ongoing visible set and range of Muslim voices is needed. Reactive press releases, though undoubtedly sincere and certainly necessary, become quickly predictable and short-lived see again Musaji's list of statements. They're not enough.

Part of this may have to do with the reticence among Muslim leaders to develop a lasting relationship with the press.

In a follow-up post on TAM, Sheila Musaji wrote:

In the meantime, I cringe every time someone asks me to explain why Maj. Hasan or any other Muslim criminal has committed some reprehensible act. I don’t know why. ... Actually, I am amazed that intelligent people could possibly believe that it makes sense to ask any random Muslim to explain the actions of any one of the other 1.5 billion Muslims on earth, as if we are connected to each other like the Borg.

Dr. Aref Assaf, president of the American Arab Forum, expressed similar sentiments (among some otherwise excellent points) in his article "Please Do Not Call Me! Being an American Muslim when tragedy strikes": "I'm utterly hurt and profoundly burdened by implications and the frequency of these questions from media outlets whenever some lunatic Muslim decides to commit a random act of violence," he writes.

It's a sentiment I genuinely respect, understand, and often feel as well; but keeping a larger endgame in view of bridge-building to a wider circle could help Muslim voices to push beyond this reaction.

Assaf himself offers a powerful voice towards the end of his post:

Undoubtedly, nothing could ever justify or excuse in any way Hassan's alleged actions. But it ought to broaden the horizon of those in the media who seem infatuated with the need to pin the blame for this perverse tragedy solely on a man's religion and last name, rather than considering the variables of a sad case encompassing some combination of mental state, divided loyalty or conscientious objection.

It is precisely that kind of observation that needed to be brought out more, in a stronger, unified voice throughout the Islamosphere. But Dr. Assaf seems to retreat in frustration. In the next and closing paragraph of his post, Assaf makes another elegant point, but then negates any hope of outreach to get his views disseminated:

We should honestly worry about what makes any citizen hate his country so intensely that he is ready to waste his life to express his anger? Till then, please do not call me. For, like you, I have not the answer.

Interestingly, in another version of his article on NJ voices, the comments seem to bear out what I've been sensing, and I'm encouraged that some non-Muslims are seeking a more accessible Muslim media presence to turn to and are also noticing the lack of it.