The Freemuse Conference on Freedom of Expression in Music in Beirut, 6–8 October 2005 was the first regional forum of its kind in the Middle East and North Africa, producing some fascinating revelations about man’s love and fear of the art of music. Trevor Mostyn reports on the Freemuse conference. (30-NOV-05)
The Taliban invoked the following Hadith to justify the banning of all musical instruments in Afghanistan: ‘Those who listen to music and songs in this world will on the Day of Judgement have molten lead poured into their ears.’ When the Algerian GIA kidnapped the Berber singer Lounes Matoub in Kabylia — they eventually killed him — they told him, ‘You are the enemy of God. Because of you and your songs, Kabylia is wallowing in darkness.’
Even in Lebanon, an extremely liberal country by most standards, the musician Marcel Khalife was accused in 1999 of blasphemy for singing a song ‘Oh my father. I am Yusuf’, based on a poem by Mahmoud Darwish. The story of the biblical Yusuf and his brothers, from an aya in the Quran, drew hostile attention from Dar al-Fatwa, Lebanon’s highest Sunni religious authority.
Nevertheless, as an Iranian speaker noted at the conference, in 1987 in Qom Ayatollah Khomeini published a fatwa allowing the sale of musical instruments. This move angered the major grand ayatollahs and the fatwa has been regularly challenged since his death.
Varieties of censorship
The conference, Freedom of Expression in Music, was organised in Beirut’s Gefinor Rotana Hotel by Freemuse, the world forum on music and censorship founded in 1999 by an idealistic Scandinavian couple, Marie Korpe and Ole Reitov. The conference included musicians from Lebanon, the US, Iran, Palestine, Syria and Morocco. Much of the focus was on modern youth music such as rap and the fusion of these styles with Arabic, Kurdish and Berber music. Many of those who attended the conference spent a late night out at a concert given at Beirut’s Nova Club by a speaker, the rapper Clotaire K.
Although the conference was addressed by Egypt’s former chief censor, the issues were by no means restricted to state control. In fact, it was widely agreed that the most pernicious form of censorship is corporate censorship — the exclusion of artists by production companies — not least in the US, and that some of the best music has flourished under state censorship.
Censorship from Islamic sources is also a major factor. Famous Iranian singers are unwilling to perform in Iran where women are forbidden to sing solo.
Islam & music
One speaker, a young Iranian woman journalist, fell foul of the regime after she reviewed a book which claimed that the Prophet Muhammad allowed women to give concerts. The article led to demonstrations in Qom against her as well as the writer. All books were gathered up and destroyed. She was arrested and toughly interrogated but was eventually released. She spoke to the conference under a pseudonym.
The Pakistani modern musician Salman Ahmed showed a film in which he tried to persuade traditional clerics in a Pakistani madrassa that his music was not sinful. He even sang verses of the Quran to them, accompanied by his guitar. ‘I researched with scholars’, he said, ‘and discovered that no verse in the Quran prohibits music. [The clerics] invoke a Hadith which only allows the duff (drum) to be played.
‘I argued that Islam is a religion of reason and knowledge and that we must free ourselves from ritual. So I was curiously touched when the talib suddenly said to me, ‘Salman, I don’t want you to be angry with me’. And then, once the mike was off, he sang verses from the Quran, beautifully. I said ‘Why the change? You are singing, but for two hours you condemned singing’. He smiled at me’.
Silence is death
Algeria has seen some of the worst acts of terror censorship. The Algerian writer Tahar Djaout explained the Catch-22 situation in which Algerians found themselves, ‘Silence is death and yet if you speak you die. If you keep quiet you die.’ Before he was slaughtered by the GIA the popular Kabyle singer Matoub Lunes had responded: ‘I want to speak and I don’t want to die.’
In extreme contrast, in neighbouring Morocco rock and rap are popular and the Moroccan singer Reda Zine showed the conference an extraordinary film of a band of girl singers interfacing with an audience of cat-calling youth on a strobelit dance-hall.
The Bahraini singer Khaled ash-Shaikh has had many of his songs banned in Bahrain but told the conference, ‘When Sheikh Hamad met King Hussein, the latter noted that I was well-known in Jordan. ‘Yes’, replied the Bahraini ruler, ‘He sings nice songs which criticise the government. Do you want to hear them?’
Ali Abou Shadi, who combined his role of Egyptian censor until 1996 with running excellent film festivals in Ismailiya, argued that with a ‘good censor’ deals can be struck. He had spent years fighting to defend the rights of songwriters and singers. Shadi believes that if amendments to the law go through in Egypt, all but eliminating censorship, far fiercer controls will replace the censor under pressure from increasingly militant Islamists. Some speakers were worried that a weak
censor would overdo the censorship in order to protect his job but Shadi believed that self-censorship is more likely to lead to unnecessary caution.
Although Western manipulation of Islamic societies since 9/11 is creating a reaction of intolerance, most speakers did not feel that this is where the long-term trouble lies. Most speakers believed that the dangers for modern musicians lie in the artist’s inability to challenge the power and the wealth of the big corporations and that here the world music industry may now be facing the most insidious period of all.
Trevor Mostyn is a leading expert on censorship in the Arab world. The Freemuse
Conference on Freedom of Expression in Music in Beirut, 6–8 October 2005 was the first
regional forum of its kind in the Middle East and North Africa.
