(published in Ablaze Magazine # 15, 2016)
Among the enduring adversaries of Black Metal is Abrahamic monotheism. Compared to the countless anti-Christian lyrics, cover art, and interview statements by Black Metal bands, the artistic engagement with Islam is still in its infancy. However, current developments in Europe also show that Islam will influence the social and cultural life on this continent much more strongly in the future than in recent decades.
How is the local Black Metal scene responding to this new challenge? Are there already (Black) Metal bands in Islamic-dominated societies, and if so, how do they express themselves, and what are their experiences? Does Islam even have a form of Satanism that a Black Metal band could invoke?
In the Beginning Was the Fire
The story of Satan in Christian mythology is well-known: he is the adversary of God, engaged in an eternal struggle for the souls of humanity and dominion over the earth. At the end of days, the Antichrist will even succeed in seizing world power—only to be ultimately defeated by the heavenly hosts led by the Savior and banished to Hell. In Islamic legend, there is a similar figure—the angel Iblis, created from fire. After Allah created the first human, Adam, and commanded his angels to bow before him, Iblis was the only one to refuse the divine order. Iblis said, “Shall I bow to someone You created from clay?” (Surah 17:61) Pride and arrogance led Iblis to rebel, and his followers joined him. Allah responded, “Go forth from here, for you are accursed, and My curse shall rest upon you until the Day of Judgment.” (Surah 38:74) Iblis and his followers, who would later become jinn (supernatural beings created from fire, endowed with reason, and coexisting with humans in the world), were banished from Heaven to Earth. But Iblis requested a reprieve from Allah, which was granted until the Day of Judgment. Until then, he promised Allah, he would “lead humans astray, except for Your chosen servants among them.” (Surah 38:82)
Although the basic tone of the legends of Satan and Iblis is comparable, there is a crucial difference: Satan became the adversary of God, but Iblis remains the executor of Allah’s will. His antagonism is directed at Adam, and he promises Allah to tempt and mislead humans henceforth. For only in this way will it be revealed who the true believers in Islam are. Allah cannot be questioned, opposed, or even overthrown. He is all-powerful. There are no indications in Islamic mythology of the existence of an enemy of God that an Islamic Satanism could invoke. Compared to the rich array of occult, historical, and literary traditions of devil worship in Christianity, which converge into an inexhaustible source of inspiration for every Black Metal band, the question inevitably arises about the meaningfulness of a Black Metal band in an Islamic cultural context. Are there real examples of this, or is one chasing a chimera?
Musicians Under Sharia
As exotic or even alien as the Islamic-influenced cultures of North Africa, the Near, and Middle East may often seem to European observers, Western pop culture, including its subcultures and their music styles, has arrived in the Orient, not least thanks to global digital connectivity. Incidentally, there is no music ban in the Quran; even in strictly religious societies and states like Saudi Arabia, there is fundamentally nothing against the existence of Arab Metal bands.
However, the social stigmatization, up to political persecution, of their musicians will be problematic for such a band, as even the hedonism inherent in a subculture, particularly its sexual permissiveness, meets with widespread rejection in a strictly conservative, religious society. This is not even about religious heresy, which is punishable by death in many Islamic countries, but generally about a deviation from traditional norms, customs, and practices.
Given these circumstances, Metal bands in the Orient can only be perceived publicly where state institutions guarantee at least nominal secularism. Nowadays, with increasing limitations, this is only the case in Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Syria (as far as it is not in rebel hands), and Turkey. The video documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad, which follows the Iraqi band ACRASSICAUDA between 2003 and 2007, vividly illustrates the difficulties a Metal band faces in an Islamic society. ACRASSICAUDA could only be publicly active during the time of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, but in the end, the band members lived as refugees in neighboring Syria.
The astonishment in the Metal scene was all the greater after the publication of an article by American music journalist Kim Kelly in 2012, which reported on the then allegedly 28-year-old musician Anahita, supposedly based in Iraq. She is said to be the singer and bassist of the band SEEDS OF IBLIS, which in turn belongs to the “Arabic Anti-Islamic Legion”: a collective of bands or projects with names like FALSE ALLAH or MOSQUE OF SATAN. With their first single, “Jihad against Islam,” from 2011, SEEDS OF IBLIS made clear statements against the Prophet Muhammad and his followers. The Finnish label Hammer of Hate Records released their second EP, The Black Quran, the following year, and in 2013, their first and so far only full album, Anti Quran Rituals, was released. Lyrically, it once again targeted Islam, its prophet, and sacred sites:
The flames are moving
Between Al-Madina and Mecca
As the hypocrisy is smoking the mosques
my feet are above the ashes
The ashes of Islam
In the interview that Kim Kelly conducted with Anahita, the latter explained that her hatred of Islam stemmed partly from personal reasons—her parents and a brother were allegedly killed by a Muslim suicide bomber—but also from early doubts about the validity of the Quran, which is, after all, the word of God. Anahita also spoke of the constant danger she and her fellow musicians faced in Iraq and that there was still a Metal underground with numerous bands that could only rehearse and record their music under great difficulties.
However, because Anahita and the other musicians of SEEDS OF IBLIS passed off photos clearly attributable to other bands (e.g., the German Black Metal band MORKE) as their own, doubts about her account quickly arose. Of course, it makes sense that strict anonymity for all musicians who rail against Allah and Muhammad in an Islamic country is absolutely necessary for security reasons. But it is precisely this security aspect that casts doubt on the legend of SEEDS OF IBLIS. The recordings of SEEDS OF IBLIS are professionally performed and cleanly produced, and a considerable level of technical skill can be heard in the individual songs. This requires regular band rehearsals and access to a recording studio—precisely what, according to Anahita in the interview with Kim Kelly, Iraqi Metal bands lack. This seems plausible: the more people know about the existence of a blasphemous band, the greater the risk of betrayal to state or religious authorities. Why SEEDS OF IBLIS should succeed in what no other Iraqi Metal band has managed so far, Anahita could not or would not explain. Therefore, there is suspicion that SEEDS OF IBLIS is indeed a band of Iraqis or Arabs, but they live abroad—some even say in the USA—and the legend of musicians in mortal danger is merely a clever marketing ploy. This could also be supported by the fact that the album Anti Quran Rituals was released by a U.S. label. Alternatively, there may be neither Anahita nor the other musicians of SEEDS OF IBLIS, as the band might actually be an anti-Islamic project by musicians who are neither from Iraq nor ever were Muslims.
In contrast, there is no doubt about the real existence of the Lebanese musicians of DAMAAR, and the trajectory of this trio is likely exemplary of the fate of an anti-Islamic Black Metal band in a society dominated by Muslims. Although DAMAAR has existed since 2004, their first and so far only release, Triumph Through Spears of Sacrilege, was not published until 2007 by the renowned Metal label Nuclear War Now! Productions. By this time, the band members were no longer living in Lebanon but had already emigrated to Australia. Nevertheless, songs like “Ode to Blasphemy (Onward to the Gates of Mekka)” provoked such strong reactions that the band felt compelled to issue the following statement: “We never saw ourselves as anti-Islamic Black Metal. We are against the religious establishment in all its forms, and Islam is just one part of it.” Before DAMAAR, two of the musicians played in the classic Heavy Metal band NIGHTCHAINS, which even managed to release an album and perform concerts in their homeland. However, NIGHTCHAINS’ lyrics contain no religious or blasphemous references.
Even AL NAMROOD, a Black Metal band from Wahhabi Saudi Arabia (though the band’s label is based in Canada, leaving the musicians’ whereabouts uncertain), shies away from overly explicit anti-Islamic rhetoric, preferring to draw on mythological and pre-Islamic antiquity of the Arabian Peninsula in their five albums and various other recordings. However, depicting fictional stories from antiquity is unlikely to find favor with devout Muslims. MOGH, whose founder Lord Faustoos originally hails from Iran and now lives in Germany, also deals with pre-Islamic religion. He focuses on Aryan spirituality and religion (Zoroastrianism) as it existed before Islamization in Persia and India and, to a limited extent, still does today. In this sense, MOGH can be most closely compared to European Pagan Metal; both engage with ancient values and religious traditions lost through aggressive Christianization or Islamization. For MOGH, there is also the aspect of personal religious discrimination in their homeland, where Lord Faustoos and his family belonged to a non-Muslim minority, denied not only religious practice but also any sense of tradition. Since living in Germany and performing with MOGH, there have been deliberate desecrations of the Quran on stage. With this, Lord Faustoos aims to demonstrate that Islam must not be tolerated—not even in the form of so-called “moderate Muslims”—because the Quran does not teach or allow peaceful coexistence with non-believers.
Black Metal Reconquista
“The problem today is simply that anti-Islam is very, very quickly perceived as political… Religion in general rubs me the wrong way, whether it’s Christianity, Islam, or other offshoots of insane fairy tales. Since, according to statistics, we have an estimated ridiculous 5% Muslims in Germany, Christianity will remain my main verbal and musical target. Especially when I see how strong Christianity is in countries like the USA or Poland. Drep de Kristne!” says Adrastos of the West German Black Metal band TOTAL HATE in an interview with Legacy magazine. A statement like this, or something similar, would certainly be made by numerous other Black Metal bands in Germany, Europe, and America to explain why they continue to focus on Christianity as their main adversary while paying no attention to Islam. Yet, with 1.2 billion followers, Islam is the second-largest world religion, and the number of Muslims in Europe is growing rapidly. In Islamic societies, non-believers and dissenters are mercilessly persecuted and threatened with death if they do not convert to Islam. There is no equivalent to this from the evangelical movement in the USA or the Catholic Church in Poland.
A growing number of Black and Death Metal bands in Europe, America, and even Australia have come to the conclusion that verbally or otherwise attacking Christianity has become akin to beating a dead horse. Christians, for example, are persecuted and killed by the “Islamic State” in the Levant, without their fellow believers or church leaders in Europe even wanting to talk about it, let alone call for a new crusade against the descendants of Saladin. Such an impotent religion holds no worldly power, and declaring a “Black Metal war” on it borders on laughable. Even the Norwegian Black Metal activists feared that modern Christianity had nothing in common with the crusaders and grand inquisitors of the Middle Ages. “We burn churches to stoke the anger of Christians,” said Varg Vikernes in a 1993 interview, “so we can perhaps wage war with them.” As we know well 25 years later, this religious war never materialized. And incidents where Christians actually confronted the self-proclaimed Satanists and neo-pagans of the Black Metal scene are so rare that the recent clash between a representative of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Austrian band BELPHEGOR at St. Petersburg airport stirred the global Metal scene for days.
However, there have been early signs of anti-Islamic lyrics in Black Metal. Perhaps the oldest example is the song “Marsch nach Süden” by the German band COVEN OF THE WORM, released in 1992 on their demo Crush the Dogs. It reads:
With lightning and thunder, we descend
Our warriors send burning arrows
Toward the heavens
Our battle songs resound proudly
The army approaches, impossible to defeat
Corpses pave its path to the south
God is dead, Allah lies dying
The northern realm casts the dogs into ruin
A few years later, there was an uproar over the song “Purify Sweden” by the Swedish Black Metal band LORD BELIAL. Their label at the time, No Fashion Records, refused to release the song. Although the lyrics lash out against all foreign religions, which, according to the band, have no place in Sweden, it was likely the mention of Islam that particularly displeased the label:
Purify Sweden!
All fucking mosques must burn
Purify Sweden!
Molest all Islamic believers
Due in no small part to such controversies, anti-Islamic lyrics and statements soon became a hallmark of the emerging NSBM scene in Europe and America. AD HOMINEM from France had Muslims face annihilation on their 2002 debut album:
Allah’s forsaking you
Your ignorance is all that you own now
Do you realize?
You’ll never soil my land again
I killed you with my own hands
The band has since distanced itself from NSBM, but it has retained its anti-Islamic stance, as evidenced by their recent album Antitheist from last year:
Death to the prophet
Death to his mongrel sons
Impaled Muhammad
Impaled Muhammad
From Canada comes the Death/Black Metal band SVOLDER, whose debut album Desecration of the Five Holy Pillars was released last year, among others, by Iron Bonehead Productions.
Torched is the black cube, once again
Destroyed by the infidel,
Worthless mass is crushed to pieces
Stone the Imam for his blasphemy
Befoul the Islamic property
Bring to ruins the primitive philosophy
However, the band is not only concerned with fantasies of destruction regarding Islam, as have been commonplace in Black Metal in the form of anti-Christian declarations of war for 25 years, but on their self-titled EP from 2012, they also accuse the “Western man” of not doing enough to counter the advancing Islamization of his homeland:
“There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger”
Who utters this incessant blasphemy?
Culpable for the Islamic Spectacle
Shameful cowardice permits our infection
Precarious robed men distribute propaganda
Armed gangsters on the street
Their Islamic stench stings the nostrils of the Westerner
Precarious robed men distribute propaganda
Veiled gangsters on the street
Their Islamic lies boil the blood of the Westerner
The strong reactions that criticism and hostility toward Islam provoke, not only in (Black) Metal but also in Western mainstream society, can probably be easily explained: while there is a growing number of native converts to Islam, the majority of Muslims in Europe and America are immigrants and their descendants. Thus, the rejection of Islam goes hand in hand with the rejection of mass immigration. It’s not just that Islam supposedly doesn’t belong to Europe, America, and Australia—i.e., the West: the Muslims already present, often living in parallel societies, are also expected to disappear. This connection is openly addressed, for example, by the Silesian Black Metal veterans DARK FURY on their latest album. The band aims to highlight “how, on the one hand, Islam has repeatedly reached into Europe and even established itself here for centuries, and how, on the other hand, a people and its culture inevitably disappear when the ethnic majority in a country shifts.”
For this reason, left-leaning individuals often speak of “Islamophobia,” an irrational and compulsive fear of Muslims and Islam, equating it with “xenophobia,” the fear of the foreign. However, it is precisely these left-leaning groups that behave irrationally toward Islam, refusing to acknowledge, in their enthusiasm and applause for increasing immigration from Islamic countries to Europe, that they are also importing a religion with a value system and moral code incompatible with leftist ideals and hostile to any “social progress” that has brought us same-sex marriage here and unisex toilets there.
It is therefore unsurprising that the most outspoken proponents of anti-Islamic sentiment in (Black) Metal are also convinced nationalists. Their antagonism toward Islam is accompanied by a commitment to their own nation and culture, which they seek to protect from foreign influence. With NORDVREDE from Arctic Tromsø (interview in Ablaze #3), there is a powerful Black Metal juggernaut that has set its sights on Islam. Their latest album, Confrontation, invokes the conflict between Occident and Orient, which is inevitable due to historical principles and whose outcome will be either the rebirth of Europe or the Islamization of the West. The same message is proclaimed by TWO RUNES from Finland, whose debut two years ago bore the programmatic title Herää Eurooppa! (Europe, awake!) and whose cover artwork depicts how this awakening is envisioned: a Black Sun stands in the firmament, and beneath it, a mosque with its minaret crumbles to dust. Also from Finland, SIELUNVIHOLLINEN’s briskly played Black Metal is finding increasing resonance among fans. The band doesn’t dwell on religious subtleties but states bluntly what it’s about: “There is a new enemy in our midst, and it doesn’t turn the other cheek when struck. And it must be struck, again and again, until it realizes that Europe will never belong to the Islamic world order.”
However, a not insignificant difference between the nationalist-tinged anti-Islamic sentiment and the anti-Christianity of Black Metal stands out. The latter almost always has a religious character, whether through the glorification of the devil as a serious adversary of God and ruler of this world or through the worship of pre-Christian gods and the associated rediscovery and revival of European paganism. Indeed, thanks to the Enlightenment, one can also draw on numerous philosophers and poets who criticized Christianity and advocated for its abolition. There is no equivalent at the core of anti-Islamic sentiment, nor can there be: the Quran never released Iblis from his dependence on Allah. Iblis may act as a tempter of humans, but not for his own cause: he aims to prepare for the Last Judgment, where the faithful are separated from the sinners and non-believers, for Allah. Iblis is not a figure Black Metal can identify with; he is not one who would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven. Nor can there be a return to pre-Islamic spirituality in European Black Metal, as Islam emerged centuries after Christianity, and where it gained a foothold in Europe, Christianization had long been completed. One may regret or even condemn it, but Christianity has been part of European civilization and culture for roughly two millennia. When a Black Metal band in this part of the world rebels against Christianity, it is also a form of coming to terms with the past: either one was baptized and raised Christian, or one has Christian ancestors. In contrast, Islam typically leaves no trace in one’s personal biography or family history. It is something entirely foreign.
Thus, Black Metal cannot adopt the same historically rooted, biographically charged, and religiously-culturally shaped antagonism toward Islam as it does toward Christianity. Instead, Islam in Black Metal must always be perceived as an external and acute threat; as a conqueror from another world seeking to subjugate us. Indeed, the campaigns of the Islamic Moors and later the Ottomans in Southern Europe and the Balkans left deep marks in the collective psyche of the affected European peoples. The Reconquista of the Spanish kings, the defeat of the Serbs in the Battle of Kosovo, the fall of Constantinople and thus the demise of the Byzantine Empire, the victory of the united armies of Germany and Poland over the Ottomans before Vienna: Islam has always appeared as an aggressor in Europe, and this experience continues to resonate today. Black Metal would not be a Eurocentric music genre if its musicians did not process the conflict-laden relationship between Europe and the Islamic world in a manner similar to other Western artists before them.
In the Crosshairs of Fundamentalists
At the latest, since the bloody and violent reaction of fanatical Muslims to the so-called “Muhammad cartoons” published in European newspapers following the attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, the sensitivity of art critical or hostile to Islam has been evident. Whoever insults the Prophet Muhammad deserves death. An Islamic hit squad stormed the editorial offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015, killing eleven people. Charlie Hebdo had repeatedly published cartoons about Muhammad and Islam.
In European historiography, one must go back a long way to find comparable cases where blasphemy in word and image led to draconian punishments. On the contrary, one can cite numerous examples from antiquity where adherents of different religions and denominations mocked each other without immediately fearing for their lives. Nowadays, however, every publicly expressed criticism of Muhammad and Islam inevitably raises the question of potential consequences; this applies to cartoonists as much as to Black Metal musicians. This experience was already faced by TAAKE when the band was nominated for the Norwegian Spellemann Award four years ago, and Arab media reported that the band had written “xenophobic and anti-Islamic lyrics.” Specifically, it concerned the song “Orkan” on the album Noregs vaapen from 2011. Hoest defended himself by claiming that TAAKE was about religious criticism in general—and that they rejected Christianity and Islam equally.
So far, there are no known threats or attacks by Islamic fundamentalists on Western Black Metal musicians; however, it is reasonable to assume that with the growing number and increasing popularity of anti-Islamic Black Metal bands and the rapid spread of information on the Internet, an Islamist activist will sooner or later take notice of the Black Metal scene and respond to the musicians’ thus-far verbal declarations of war in their own way. Among the recruits of the “Islamic State,” there are numerous young men and women born and raised in the West who are familiar with subcultures and music styles that have hardly spread in the Orient.
A glimpse of the arbitrary brutality with which Islamic terrorists can also target music fans and supporters of a rock band was seen during the attack on the Bataclan venue in Paris on November 13, 2015, during a concert by the American band EAGLES OF DEATH METAL. Three supporters of the “Islamic State,” armed with assault rifles and grenades, carried out a massacre among the concertgoers; 89 people were killed. EAGLES OF DEATH METAL frontman Jesse Hughes commented on the events in a recent interview: “I saw fear spread like a blanket over the entire crowd, and they fell like wheat in the wind—like before an idol. … The next day, Muslims in the stadium booed the minute of silence, and the press barely reported it. I saw Muslims celebrating in the streets during the attack. I saw it with my own eyes.” When asked how it came to the point that Islam, with all its fundamentalist and terrorist facets, became a serious threat to public order and safety in the West, Hughes has an answer ready. He blames the leftist zeitgeist with its doctrine of political correctness for this situation. “They (the Islamists, Ed.) know that out there are large groups of white youths who are stupid and blind. These are the rich white kids who grew up with a leftist curriculum from the time they were in kindergarten, flooded with lofty ideas that are nothing but hot air. You see where that has led them.”
Whether such a devastating attack could also occur at a Black Metal band’s concert can so far only be speculated, but it cannot be categorically ruled out. This is not only clear to musicians who—like TOTAL HATE—prefer to continue targeting Christianity instead of dealing with Islam, but also to fans who “still like to go to concerts without having to watch out for some guy next to me who might blow the ‘infidels’ in the venue into nirvana with him,” as someone put it in the online forum of the German music magazine Deaf Forever. The fear is already present, even before an attack is even hinted at.
This is also why anti-Islamic Black Metal will primarily face resistance from groups that, paradoxically, are not Muslims at all. On one hand, there are the advocates of so-called “multiculturalism,” who, for ideological reasons, support mass immigration from Islamic countries, and on the other hand, there are those naive do-gooders who would rather not see any Muslim offended, lest the “peaceful coexistence” be disturbed and a violent reaction from those affected provoked. Against this backdrop, Black Metal can play to its great strength: from the beginning, deliberate taboo-breaking has been a hallmark of this genre and its scene; it consciously aimed to stage a counterculture in opposition to societal rules and norms, and where Satan worship and death obsession are now met with collective shrugs, slaughtering the sacred cow of the politically correct zeitgeist—and that means Islam—becomes the new imperative in Black Metal.
There is probably not a single anti-Islamic Black Metal band in a country where Islam is the state religion and dominates all public life. When one faces the death penalty for allegedly insulting the Prophet Muhammad, it takes an incredible willingness to sacrifice to still play or even listen to blasphemous Black Metal. Western Black Metal bands and fans still have the freedom to criticize and propagandistically combat Islam. Mass immigration to Europe continues, and with it, Islam will further establish and spread among us. One can either speak out against it or let it happen out of cowardice and opportunism. However, it is high time to decide.
“O you who believe, fight those of the disbelievers who are near you! Let them find harshness in you. And know that Allah is with those who fear Him!” (Surah 9:123)
Sources:
takimag.com/article/surrendering_to_death_gavin_mcinnes/print#axzz48gKLoVO9
de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iblis
metal-archives.com
http://www.legacy.de/newsflash/music-news/item/33475-total-hate
http://www.metal-hammer.de/taake-wegen-anti-islamischer-texte-angegriffen-310438/
Weltenfeind.info 