By Rami Abdel Rahman

One snowy winter afternoon in Sweden about two years ago, I hurried into a train station’s coffee shop to get a warm cup of coffee and the latest edition of a globally renowned heavy metal magazine. I flipped quickly through the pages with almost frozen fingers, and to my ultimate surprise, I found a review of Ajdath, a band that an ex-band mate of mine established.

We’ve played together throughout our teenage years in Amman, the capital of Jordan. Today he has a band in Gdansk, Poland, and I am stationed in Stockholm, Sweden. The third band member is in New Jersey, the United States. None of us gave up on music, but we all have day jobs. Our teenage band was called Darkcide, one of the first Jordanian bands to put out an original doom/death metal demo album, recorded in a professional studio.



In 1999, we had just managed to get two tracks out of our hard and heavy compilation released as singles in Malaysia, and then one by one, band members started flying west to achieve professional and musical dreams. No labels in the Middle East would sign us up then, no matter how much we promised to tamper down our music. This was at the turn of the millennium.

By that time, we had succeeded to “headline” two live concerts at home, after getting the necessary police licenses that permits that they’d maintain a close watch on everything being said or done at the venue. It was hard enough to convince any venue to take in a crowd of head-banging social rebels, but a place like the Skating Palace in Amman was known to be losing business, and was revived only by such underground gigs through out the mid 1990s.

Other famous meeting points for metal heads were on a wall just outside a kiosk in Jabal Al Hussain, a traditionally conservative part of Amman. We used to hear about gatherings of metal heads by a record shop in the ultra-conservative Zarqa city. Seldom one dared to show up in a t-shirt with some heavy metal print, but everyone knew what the deal was back then.

The meeting points were famous around 1995-1996, but then the Jordanian security, known globally for being outsourced by western powers to interrogate terrorists later on in the 2000s, took in youngster’s one by one. Everyone who listened to metal knew someone who told horror stories about friends getting beaten up, their hair shaved, their records confiscated, and their families silenced.

Metal music was not sold publicly, but it was always there, under the table in a store nearby in Jabal Al Hussain, or in a fancier shop in Swefieh, the high-end market in Amman. In other cities, they’d most probably travelled to the capital to get their fill of cheap, pirated cassette tapes with weird band names and often graphic artwork (death metal was big at the time).



I was only 14 years old, when I was told stories about Burzum, deemed by my peers as a Norwegian black metal “legend” that wrote and recorded his music in jail, as he was convicted of manslaughter of another black metal pioneer, church burnings and not least, the outburst of the underground, avant-garde scene internationally.

We romanticized every single band, word and tune to pieces for the better or worse, as most teenagers would do. We were rebels, against our own ultra conservative environments and orthodox upbringing infused by narrow minded understandings of Islam and the traditional, patriarchal Arab family “honour” values.

Buying a magazine was not as easy as it was in the beginning of this article, one had to save a week’s allowance to pay some book shop so they’d smuggle in a copy of this or that magazine. Only for a while though, censorship authorities sooner or later banned such magazines by the time Marilyn Manson started showing up on the front pages.

My family was upper-middle class, which meant I could afford a drum set and a rehearsal place in the basement. Many bands had paid me to play in my rehearsal room, and I’d often let them use the room for free, for the adrenalin kicks and to learn something live by watching more experienced drummers. The room was filled with posters, which had to go through my parent’s censoring eyes. Eddy, Iron Maiden’s cartoon icon, was banned and any image of the cartoonish beast was torn to pieces.



In school, I was the only “out-of-the-closet” metal head among 1500 stronghold of students.
In art classes we were allowed to play the music that inspires us the most, and for me, it was Cradle of Filth’s 1994 debut Principle of Evil made Flesh. The only principle I was allowed is the school principle, who directed me to the school psychologist for being too “extreme” — despite having good grades. The psychologist evaluation made more sense, she said I just “thought outside the box” and saw no necessity of contacting my parents, but the principle did anyway.

A few weeks later, the “Christianity Religion” teacher held special lectures to warn that there’s “satanic” influences abound and named a list of “dangerous” bands that I had to check up through my pen pals in Scandinavia and England. We had no internet back then, although we got hold of computer games such as Doom or Quake that featured music by industrial hard core bands such as Nine Inch Nails.

Metal heads accepted things that the society did not accept, mostly in what was perceived as non confirmative western values: sex, alcohol and rock ’n roll. Newspapers would often write about clamp downs on “Satanists” in other nations, such as Egypt, Morocco or Bahrain. We were branded Satanists wherever we “came out,” and that brand involved being accused of committing “adultery” in perverse forms — least to expect from a mind set that keeps sexuality veiled in the shadows. Even the most liberal cafés and outings kicked out anyone who had a slightly “punkish” clothing style.



Writing this article, I had to ring an old fellow to get some ideas. He is now 36, a father of two, and lives the normal middle class Arab father life, no long hair, leather, dreads, gothic pendants or any of that — he keeps the few remnants of his past in a long forgotten box in the basement. This former guitarist, who preferred to stay anonymous, was arrested in the mid 1990s because his band at the time, small as they were, was deemed a threat to common societal values.

Not wanting to go in depth into details, he said that he and his brother, who played bass in their band, had never smoked pot in their lives. One sad afternoon, the police came to raid their bedroom, as they claimed they got a direct complaint that the brothers smoked pot. My respondent said he is absolutely sure that they’d never done so, and that the police brought in pieces of pot and said they found it in their bedroom.

“They took all the records, musical instruments, posters, clothes, and other accessories that had to do anything with rock music – even a peace and love Beatles’ poster – they said these would be used as proof that we belonged to the drugs culture.” He said.

The brothers disappeared for about a month, and never went back to their previous lifestyle again. “We were kept in separate cells, and we’d hear screaming all night long, no one talked to us until I lost count of days, then an interrogator that had no English skills was supposed to look through our belongings.”

“They’d hit me, they told me to pray like a Muslim to prove I was not a Satanist. And they kept me in a cell with the least standards possible. They made sure I’d never hold a guitar again by hitting my fingers.”

That was then.

And then came the internet, and changed our world.

Suddenly we had global access to music, fans, products, ideas, we had a window out, and others had a window in. Bands started promoting themselves internationally, and a cheap garage demo from Jordan would be bought by a rare item collector in France for a good sum of Euros. We downloaded, we connected, and meanwhile the police had other concerns, such as the rise of fanatic Islamism.

A change of regime by 2000, and the beginning of the Global War on Terrorism in 2001, prompted a huge shift in policies governing markets and media. Metal heads finally got their break, ironically enough, due to the outburst of religious fanaticism.



Shortly before I moved to Sweden to do my Master’s degree, a friend of mine arranged for Opeth, a renowned Swedish metal band, to play a concert in Jordan. Tickets were sold across the Middle East, and fans had already started mobilizing when the concert was cancelled one day before the show. Apparently the band decided not to go to untested territory.

However, they did this year. They headlined the Dubai Desert Rock Festival — the first ever metal festival in the Middle East.
Over the past five years, the festival has featured some legendary international heavy metal groups such as Iron Maiden, Korn, Motorhead, as well as a few local ones as support acts. Finally, metal heads in the Middle East gained ground, through blood, sweat and tears, but their battles for freedom from censorship, stereotyping and discrimination is long from over.


Today, Rami Abdel Rahman works as a trilingual multimedia journalist and consultant from his base in Stockholm, Sweden. His clients include the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation (Sveriges Radio), The Local, Ooska News, Reuters TV, The Jordan Times, the Swedish Institute, among others. ramiar.se.