Heavy Metal Islam by Mark LeVine

Author:Mark LeVine
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307449603
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2008-07-07T16:00:00+00:00

Building a Temple of Rock

Moe Hamzeh has always loved two things, rock music and rocks. Before he became a professional musician, he received his BA and then his master’s degree in hydrogeology. As he jokes, “Geology is rocks, I do rock ’n’ roll. So it was a natural move. In fact, Beirut for me was the original ‘school of rock.’ I studied rocks in the morning and played rock ’n’ roll at night.”

Listening to classic heavy metal—Zeppelin, Hendrix, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, and Iron Maiden—was his way of dealing with the strains of the country’s long civil war. “I was always into rock, because it was my only way to forget where I was, with bombs going off all the time. The music was my only companion. I’d put on the headphones and listen to one of the great albums and try to sleep at night while the bombs exploded near my parents’ house,” he continued. “And when I’d wake up the next morning I’d put on Bob Marley in order to give me hope as I started a new day.”

But what about Oum Kalthoum, I wondered, or even the timeless diva Fairuz, acclaimed as the “soul of Lebanon” because of her popularity among Lebanese regardless of creed or communal affiliation? “Honestly,” Moe responded, “far more than Arab music, rock spoke to me because of how it reflected the reality of war. And when The Wall came out 1979, it became a symbol of tearing down the walls that kept us apart, and forced us to live with the worst kind of ‘thought control.’”

Aside from music, what rescued Moe was attending the American University of Beirut (AUB), where he could enroll thanks to a scholarship from Rafiq Hariri, one of thousands the billionaire turned prime minister provided for young Lebanese to attend college. “It might seem ironic, since it was established by American missionaries to reflect Western superiority, but AUB opened me to different perspectives, a crucial experience because we were so closed off from other people outside our immediate community during and right after the war. It also gave me the ability to pursue a dream, music, that my parents thought was irrational. If I had gone to another university, where there wasn’t the sort of interaction with other groups from Lebanese society, not to mention Americans and other foreigners, I would have become a much more narrow-minded person.

“I remember at AUB I had friends from Hezbollah—they would laugh at me as a rocker, but I wasn’t a threat to them, nor they to me. We respected each other, studied, debated, hung out, and challenged each other, even during the war. Our discussions helped us all to learn to say to each other, ‘Respect my space and I’ll respect yours.’ And it is precisely this that is no longer happening in the larger society today, outside of the music scene.”

Indeed, today the trend in education has moved toward sectarian universities that cater primarily to one group or subculture within Lebanon’s communal tapestry.

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