Turkish Metal: Contesting Islamic Concepts of Morality “I got no problem with religion or religious people. My problem is they got a problem with me,” my counterpart with the long, blond dyed hair so aptly summed up. With his tattooed arms and the “pilot shades” on his head, he could be easily considered as the Turkish incarnation of American glam rock star Bret Michaels, who had just dropped by to have a couple of beers before hitting on the beautiful young women in the bar where we were doing the interview. In the eyes of the Turkish public, the appearance and behavior of Turkish rockers and metalheads—with their long hair, black clothes, tattoos, earrings and piercings, and their love for Turkish rak? and beer—are still often labeled as deviant and contradictory to prevalent concepts of morality and religion. The paper will look at Turkish heavy metal from a perspective of resistance and power, thereby addressing contemporary discourses on secularism and Islamism in Turkish society. Islamic actors, who, for a long time, have found themselves in a marginalized position resisting the laicist doctrines of the Kemalist state, are blaming Turkish rockers and metalheads for their supposedly loose morals and disrespect to Islamic traditions. Today, however, political Islam no longer represents an oppositional counterpublic, but with the electoral victory of the Muslim conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP), has taken the dominant power position in state and society. Turkish metalheads todaysee themselves in a marginalized position, in which they resist the dominance of Islamic revivalism. The conservative government’s Islamization policies are usually seen as evidence for its intentions to subvert the secularist principles of the Turkish state. Consequently, many Turkish metalheads openly speak of their fears of Turkey “becoming Iran” and losing their individual freedoms to the orthodox interpretations of political Islam. The paper aims to explore how particular cultural practices associated with heavy metal are contesting Islamic concepts of morality in Turkish society. After a briefly introducing the history of Turkish heavy metal and providing an insight into the Islamization policies of the present government, it examines the public discourse on heavy metal, shedding light on the different forms of moral subversiveness ascribed to it by the Turkish media. Finally, it investigates how heavy metal culture is contesting Islamic morality in everyday life. In this respect, the presentation will refer to aspects of gender, religion, and anti-Christian blasphemy in a Muslim context.

Music and Parkour: Contesting Hegemonic Ways of Movement Parkour can be seen as a youth movement in a very literal sense; the meaning of which is that young people are literally moving in the public sphere, contesting hegemonic ways of moving through the city. Social actions and cultural expressions such as parkour in the Arab World, have in the past largely escaped academic attention. Previous research has been mostly focusing on the ruling elites, and the seemingly unchangeable patriarchal structures of Arab societies. During the Arab Spring however, various forms of cultural expressions have become more visible: musicians, street artists, male and female demonstrators – all expressed their voices for change on the street. With this paper I would like to illustrate how parkour, seen as a cultural expression, can grasp social change in all its varieties, shortcomings, and inconsistencies. Beginning in the nineteen eighties and nineties, parkour – known as the art of displacement (l’art du deplacement) – found its way via popular media representations from the suburbs of Paris to the world. The idea behind parkour is to find the most direct path between two points, and to overcome any obstacle within that path using only one’s own physical and mental capacities. Parkour suggests ways in which space is negotiated and appropriated in ways other than those intended by city planners and architects. Besides performances on the street, and the incorporation of parkour philosophy in everyday life, parkour is also performed in video clips which are available on the Internet. In video performances, music plays an especially crucial role. To quote a Moroccan parkour actor: “Music is very important; it must be fast and riotous and has to be emphasizing the dynamics of the movements.” Analyzing music in parkour video clips, offers an insight into different facets of popular culture: fun, resistance, and style. The topic is approached from an anthropological perspective in which the actors themselves are given the most importance. In order to explore the role of music as it relates to parkour, I refer to interviews which I conducted with parkour practitioners. These interviews are embedded in field research: online and in Morocco.

“This Music is Westernized” - Absurd Allegations about Musicians from Beirut RESPONDENT: Mohammad Abdel Wahab is bullshit. I saw him performing live last year, and it was just weak. INTERVIEWER: Mohammad Abdel Wahab died in 1991! RESPONDENT: Never mind, all Lebanese composers of Arabic music are bullshit anyway. INTERVIEWER: But Mohammed Abdel Wahab was an important composer and musician from Egypt! (Interview, 2005) Lebanese indie rockers, free improvisers, rappers, death-metal artists, and electro-acoustic musicians combine styles and sounds from transnational niche music styles with field recordings and media samples from local, regional, and transnational contexts. Their music aims to sound personal, and turns away from the persistent “ethnocentric” focus on what is considered “traditional” in the Arab World, the Middle East, or the Levant. Within their daily work with local and international journalists, curators and funders however, these musicians are often being criticized for being “Westernized.” This ongoing focus on otherness and diversity forces them to constantly prove their cultural identity, and their local embeddedness. The musicians do so with parody, focussing on war, violence, and trash culture. The aim of this paper is not to highlight the successes and failures of their artistic strategies, but to show that this criticism from cultural markets is, at its core, absurd. Discussing key references from “Lebanese music” (1950s), belly dance culture (1960s), psychedelic rock (1970s), and the noises of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) the papers follows a theoretical approach by musicologist Robert Walser (2003), who encourages us to examine each piece of music in time and space. In doing so the research highlights a variety of hidden and open, local and regional, and musical and non-musical spheres of influence in contemporary music. Mapping these links further uncovers fundamental challenges within Lebanon: broken links across generations, and broken transfers of knowledge.

In recent years tendencies of islamisation are to be found in the music of Muslim migrants of the French suburbs (the banlieu). This development can be seen as a reaction towards the majority society who accuses the Muslims of not being willing to integrate into the French society and bases this lack of will on the religion of Islam as non adaptable to a laic system like France. Therefore the terms Arab and Muslim are used interchangeable and the integration issue is more and more based on religious difference instead of ethnicity. This is mirrored in popular music of young French of migrant descent. The themes of the songs of the rebellious young of the eighties, like the group carte de séjour, were racism and citizenship, which coincided with the foundation of the beurs movement and organizations like “sos racisme”, but in the nineties due to the increasingly anti-Islamic and very successful rhetoric of the extreme right wing party of the Front National, political American-style banlieu Hip-Hop merged with Elements of Algerian Raï and incorporated increasingly allusions to Islam in an apologetic or rebellious provocative manner. The present contribution will demonstrate the stages of this development and show how the islamisation of banlieu music has led to the spread of Islamic themes into a variety of different musical genres. They are now to be found in French chanson, political and militant hip hop, but also in Sufi hip hop of an artist like Abd al-Malik or the new songs of the female artist Diam’s whose recent conversion to Islam led to a media outburst. In its final analysis the contribution will then talk about specific codes of this music scene and discuss if it is part of a global popular culture (or subculture) of resistance or a specific French counter culture of young Muslim migrants.