Heavy metal in the Middle East has always had more listeners than stages. The proof came on 9 March 2007 at the Dubai Country Club, where the fourth Desert Rock festival sold out its first night past fifteen thousand strong in front of one headliner, fans flown in from Saudi Arabia, Oman and as far as Albania to stand beside the UAE's own, in countries that would never book the band themselves. The six-man British band that battered the floodlight rigs over that field with a set built on A Matter of Life and Death, the album it was touring, was Iron Maiden. Nobody there needed the words explained.
That crowd knew the catalogue by heart and had almost nowhere at home to hear it played loud. It is the whole shape of the region in one field.
On the roofs of the old desert cities of Iran and the Gulf stand windcatchers, square towers open on every side, built to seize any wind that crosses the sand, tear it out of the sky with their inner walls and force it down a brick shaft into the cellar, over a pool of standing water, until it rises into the rooms below colder and heavier than it arrived. Heavy metal came into the region like that: blown in from somewhere else, pulled down into private rooms, basements, villas and back bars, and changed on the way down.
Heavy metal in the Middle East plays for export first
The pattern repeats from Istanbul to Tehran. A band forms, records at home, finds that the home market has no shop, no radio and no hall for it, and ships the record to a European label, so that its music reaches Germany years before it reaches the next town. The region has produced its black and death metal bands too, from Melechesh, born in Jerusalem and relocated to the Netherlands, to Nervecell in Dubai and the anonymous Al-Namrood in Saudi Arabia, and those belong to their own silos. The heavy bands took the same road out.
Rehearsed in rented rooms behind shops, recorded on borrowed desks and mixed by email with engineers the players would never meet, a heavy metal record from the region reaches its first buyers as a box of discs in a German warehouse, while the band at home knocks the plaster off its rehearsal room walls for a public that hears it later, on a phone. It is an export business. The home market pays in downloads.
Those scenes sit on a longer map of music grown under pressure, and the chapter that covers it runs from Birmingham to Gaborone. What sets the Middle East apart on that map is the distance between the band and its own street. It is measured in borders.
Istanbul: the reed and the riff
The Istanbul band that Hakan Utangaç and Cenk Ünnü formed on guitar and drums in 1986, with Tarkan Gözübüyük arriving on bass a year later, plays at home under its first name, Pentagram, and sells abroad as Mezarkabul, because an American doom band had taken the name first. It is widely counted the vanguard of Turkish heavy metal. That is the easy part.
A ney, the end-blown flute of Turkish and Persian classical music, is cut from a length of cane, and before it can make a sound the maker drives a red-hot iron rod down the tube and burns out the hard nodes that wall each section off from the next, until the breath can pass from one end to the other through a bore that smells of scorched reed. Anatolia, released in Turkey in 1997, did that to the wall between Anatolian folk and heavy metal. The ney, the bağlama and the darbuka went in beside the guitars. The songs came out in Turkish for the first time.
"For the One Unchanging", from Unspoken four years later, shows where that led: a heavy metal song first, twin guitars at the front, with the region's melodic turns worked into the line rather than hung on top of it. The region's folk metal grew out of that record. The heavy core stayed intact.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, / Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit / Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line.
Omar Khayyám, translated by Edward FitzGerald, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
Cairo and Beirut: the knock at the door
In November 1996 the Egyptian weekly Rose al-Youssef received an anonymous fax describing supposed satanic rituals on the edges of Cairo and Alexandria, and on 9 December it printed a call to action against heavy metal fans. On 22 January 1997 police raided homes in Cairo and arrested young people, some as young as thirteen and many of them regulars at gatherings near the derelict Baron Palace in Heliopolis; the number taken in is given both as 86 and as around a hundred. They were held for up to two weeks and released without convictions.
Egyptian metal went quiet for years afterwards and came back in small rooms. In February 2016 the head of Egypt's Musicians Syndicate ordered two Cairo metal concerts shut down as satanist gatherings. The accusation had not changed in nineteen years.
Lebanon has run the same cycle. Bassem Deaibess, a Beirut singer and guitarist, has said he spent a night in a Beirut cell in 1996 for being a Metallica fan, was released after signing a promise not to worship the devil, and was arrested again in 2007 over a metal-friendly bar he ran; he connects each wave of arrests to a political crisis the authorities wanted off the front pages.
The band he had founded in the summer of 1995, which started on pop and rock, turned to thrash and heavy metal with Levantine folk threaded through the riffs, won the Middle East round of the Wacken Metal Battle in 2015 and took third place in the world final at Wacken Open Air, was Blaakyum, a Beirut band cheered by a German field. "Destined to Rise" carries the stubbornness in its title. The riff does the rest.
What sets the Middle East apart on that map is the distance between the band and its own street.
Tehran records in two versions
In Iran every album and every concert needs a permit from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, known as Ershad, and heavy metal has lived in the gap between what a band can submit and what it wants to play. Bands in Tehran have been known to cut one version for the ministry and another, unedited, for themselves. Concerts have been allowed in short seasons and cancelled in long ones.
The Tehran band that Mahyar Dean formed in 2004, a guitarist who had written books on Death and Testament, was Angband, and when it signed with the German label Pure Steel for Rising from Apadana, released on 29 August 2008, it became the first Iranian heavy metal band on a foreign label. The record took its name from the audience hall of the Achaemenid kings at Persepolis. The riffs took theirs from Europe.
Built on Dean's power metal riffing and on melodies one German review heard drifting toward Matt Barlow-era Iced Earth in the slow passages, the four records Angband put out on Pure Steel between 2008 and 2020 hammered double bass under every verse of songs pressed in Germany for a home audience that had to find them online, Ashkan Yazdani singing. "Forsaken Dreams", off the 2010 record Visions of the Seeker, is the band at full gallop, and the American singer who shared the microphone on IV a decade later was Tim Aymar, of Pharaoh and Control Denied.
The Gulf and the long drive to a show
The Gulf states built the stages and imported the bands. Desert Rock ran in Dubai from 2004 to 2009, and for those years it was the one fixed date in the region's calendar, the field where a Saudi fan could stand beside a Lebanese one under the banners of a British headliner. The Dubai band that played the side stage at the 2009 closer, one local name among the season's imports, was Nervecell. The crowd was the scene.
Israel, where the record shops were never the problem, grew bands of every kind from the middle eighties, with Salem, formed in 1985 and often counted the country's first metal band, heading for the extreme end that the death metal shelf covers, and the Tel Aviv quintet that won the Wacken Metal Battle outright in 2011 was Hammercult, a thrash band with a heavy metal chorus. Across the Mediterranean the Maghreb built its own version of the same stubbornness, and heavy metal in Africa starts from there. The fans in that Dubai field had spent years listening on headphones. They had learned the words anyway.
