The Subversive Music of Islam and the Middle East

For many in the West, Jihad has simply come to mean Muslim holy war, but then there’s “G-had” as studied by University of Arkansas professor Ted Swedenburg, who is researching Islamic hip hop and Israeli house among other genres. He says the Middle East has been a breeding ground, not for terrorism but experimental music. On his popular blog, readers can catch up with an Israeli transvestite artist who became wildly popular among Egyptian clubbers, a Jewish Moroccan trip-hop artist who sings in Koranic verses, or Muslim punk bands that sport mohawks and produce tracks like “suicide bomb the gap” and “blow shit up.” Swedenburg, aka DJ Teo, plays many of the tunes on a campus radio show he hosts called the “Interzone.” He’s now writing a book on the subject and has discovered that the Interzone phenomenon stretches back a few decades, if not centuries. The New York Review of Ideas recently caught up with Swedenberg to discuss some of his research.

You define Interzone as a kind of music that crosses borders, can you explain that idea?

I’m trying to suggest the Middle East as not being this closed space or alien space but one that is where different trends are pulsating through all the time. I’m the trying to rethink the history of music and culture in the Middle East and emphasize the long tradition of openness as opposed to be cutting off.

Are you critiquing a bias in Western scholarship that says the region as being closed musically?

My target isn’t so much Western scholarship but rather general stereotypes that have become even more rigid of late. One example is Harold Bloom’s introduction to Maria Rosa Menocal’s excellent book about Arab Spain, The Ornament of the World. Bloom praises its accounts of Muslim-Christian-Jewish collaboration, and then says that spirit of multi-culturalism is now dead.

One of the artists you’ve studied is the Israeli transvestite Dana International. She’s a Jew of Yemenite origin who sang in Arabic and became the rage in Egypt but was eventually banned. What was the impact of that?

I think it made visible, for a moment at least, that Egyptians listen to music from Israel produced by people of Middle Eastern background. They have done so and continue to do so, and that’s true in Morocco and a lot of places, so I think it’s just a continuation of Israeli Jewish participation in the cultural life of the Middle East.

You trace this back to several Israeli artists that have sung in Arabic and had hits in the Arab world over recent decades.

In the 1970s Ofrah Hasa (of Yemeni origin) was heard all over Egypt and there was no scandal. There was no scandal with Alabina (of Egyptian origin popular in the 1990s). What’s different with Dana International is that the media was able to throw sexual perversity in. There are a lot of sensationalist media in Egypt. They want to sell papers.

But how are these artists still popular when banned or criticized by the media?

I think people can be skeptical of the media. Plus, a lot of stuff just circulates informally even though it’s banned officially. Enrico Massias (of Algerian Jewish origin) was banned in almost every country in the Arab world. But everybody in the entire Mediterranean knew his songs. People loved the music even though the guy was and is a Zionist and he made a heavily publicized visit to the Wailing Wall right after the June 1967 war. Some people don’t like that, but they like his music.

On the other hand you point out an artist with Jewish roots who considers herself Muslim. Yet by singing Islamic verses she may be accused of blasphemy. Still, you say it could been seen as progressive?

My argument was that she was just bringing Islam and the sounds of Islam into the mainstream pop-cultural arena in the West. Maybe you could use the term progressive to describe making Islam acceptable and situating it as an element inside of Western life, as opposed to something alien and outside. It says Islam is not the worst, the most horrible, most inherently violent religion in the world, but that there is a another point of view.

On the other end of the spectrum, there is Fun-da-mental, a Muslim hip-hop group whose album is titled “The benefits of G-had”. One of their songs describes bomb-making. Was this an incitement to violence?

Fun-da-mental’s angry but not endorsing bomb-making in any way, shape, or form. The song is actually about three kinds of bombs. One is the dirty bombs, someone like the 7/7 subway bombers in Britain; then there is the guy who is selling black market bombs, and then there is the U.S. bomb maker for the Pentagon. So it’s not vindicating bombing, its just saying: “look, why is the guy making this homemade bomb pure evil and why is it okay that we pay taxes so that the Pentagon can make huge bombs that kill all these people.”

So what is meant by “The benefits of G-had”?

Well, the lead singer of the group, Aki Nawaz, was born in Pakistan but raised in England. He’s using that term jihad in a provocative way. His roots are in punk so he’s trying to think about “what is jihad?” The way I would understand the benefits of jihad from the group’s perspective is that its anti-colonial struggle or anti-imperialist struggle, which is not the way its been configured in Western discourse since 9/11.

Has 9/11 had a big impact on Islamic artists?

Definitely. I think anyone who is Muslim in the West will be influenced by 9/11. At first people had to duck for cover, but pretty quickly there was a discourse of self-defense. Fun-da-mental responded with punk provocation, you know, “screw you—you guys are the greater terrorists” and why is there all this emphasis on Westerners being victimized because of three major terrorist attacks when Muslims are getting killed all over the place, in Bosnia, Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan and nobody’s talking about that? So they are responding with militancy and anger. But it’s not only 9/11, it’s Iraq and what continues to go on in Palestine. So it’s self-defense by offense.

Then you have another response, such as the French Muslim rapper Medine who released an album called Jihad. He’s critical of the French government’s treatment of Muslim immigrants and his response is that Islam is about peace and about being a good person. It’s more religious and contemplative and self reflective as opposed to Fun-da-mental, which is “in your face, screw you guys, type of thing.”

Has there been a backlash within Muslim community?

For Orthodox Muslims, of course, you are not supposed to be singing Allah Wa Akbar to a dub beat. I’m on the “Muslims in Hip-Hop” listserv; people who are orthodox say it should only be percussion, and women should not perform in public, and then there are Muslims who participate in the listserv and are doing well in the music scene. I think there is an ongoing debate on those issues. Its not surprising that people in the community try to enforce morality.

Are there some parallels here to gangster rap in the United States?

Some of the hip-hop artists in Palestine that I’ve spoken to just love Tupac and its kind of the militancy of Tupac that they relate to, though not the gang-banging type of stuff. They can relate to Tupac talking about the ghetto, his more politicized stuff. They also don’t like the cursing. One group I spoke to was pretty explicit, “We love hip hop and listen to it–we just don’t think about using foul language.”

What is the importance of studying the Interzone?

The rise of certain forms of fundamentalist nationalism, particularly in the West today, with prevalent notions of Arabs as a terrorists and fanatics and Islam as being somehow closed or blinded—I think its important to stress that there is another tendency that is maybe more authentic to what the civilization and culture has been like for hundreds of years. That is tolerance and openness and willing to borrow and exchange.

The story of Dana International, for example, is surprising in a sense, but on the other hand, there were so many Jews participating in modern Arab culture before 1948 and after 1948 that there’s continuity there. It’s only because of political changes that have taken place that it now seems surprising that an Israeli Jew who is of Yemeni origin is singing in Arabic. There are so many Jews in Israel who are of Middle Eastern background that are doing recordings like Dana and have been forever. So like part of it is there is this history of cultural sharing and this goes back even to Moorish Spain and the influence of the Lute on the guitar.

It was also really interesting to find out how much there was of that from the very beginning, even in early Arab music after the rise of Islam. In 800 AD, Persian music was the hot thing in Mecca and Medina.

You’ve also offered a critique as to how Middle East youth are being portrayed by major pundits in the West. You’ve taken aim at Thomas Friedman’s writing in particular in contrasting Israeli youth as dreaming of becoming capitalist innovators while Arab youth dream of martyrdom.

Some pundits in the U.S., like Friedman and other strategic thinkers, are thinking about Middle Eastern youth as this potential danger–that there are so many of them and they’re disaffected and that there’s a kind of stark choice between Jihadism or going with Western-dominated globalization and freedom and all those kinds things we need to offer them. That’s a false problematic binary. It’s very possible for Middle Eastern youth to like Metallica and to also support Hamas—not from a religious point of view, but from a nationalistic or political point of view. ♦