28 March - 3 April 2002
Issue No.579
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 28 March - 3 April 2002 Issue No.579 |
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Madad, peace et love
The suspense factor dragged on. But, once there, Nur Elmessiri got into the prelapsarian swing of Mohamed Mounir
20 March, the eve of Spring, the first night of a three-day Reggae Festival in Cairo. Tyro from France, Kaliroots from Canada and Serges Kassy from the Ivory Coast will be performing on the 21st and the 22nd. A francophonic event, but opening night, tonight, will sing in Cairo's mother tongue.
photo: Sherif Sonbol
Allahu ya Allahu, salatu minka yahu, ala'l nabi taghshahu, wa'l sahbu man wallahu. The Mohamed Mounir sound -- Nubian, sweet, peppy, mixing local and reggae, religious invocation and pop, endangered musical species and hegemonic -- is carried by the sound system to what, conceptually, in terms of ground plan, should be (but, in terms of implementation, is not and never was) the main entrance to the Cairo Opera House, the gate facing the lion bridge and, across the River Nile, the heart of Cairo, modern and medieval.
Reggae in an opera house? No, in the grounds of. And actually it's not "The Cairo Opera House," but a centre, as in, you know, London's South Bank or Barbican. When the initial multi-functional conception of this prime public sector cultural space was still fresh in the mind 15 years ago, the people in charge insisted on calling the space by its real name: "The National Cultural Centre."
What's in a name anyway? The night -- like the audience -- is young. And there's still time, even if you are a pedestrian who has been redirected by security, to walk around the fortress walls and enter through the same gate as the motorists, the gate that has, effectively speaking, become the National Cultural Centre's main entrance.
We do, and another set of gates, those leading from car park to Main Hall, are far from triumphal. Mounir has sold out. To get through hold your ticket (LE15) high up above your head. Once through the bottle neck, marmoreal-order-town: grass well kept, wide open shiny spaces and, in spite of the sound system, a self-contented atmosphere of quietness.
Yet another door, as in a 1001 Nights Harun Rashid palace, the last one, a security portal leading through a khayamiya fabric marquee barrier. Panic prevails even after someone announces that more tickets have been issued and are for sale.
Once through the portal and into the concert area, the all-but-closed gates fostering an esprit of pushing and shoving are, in hindsight, more surprising than the availability of more tickets. The space at the foot of the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art, extending nearly all the way to (what should be) the main, front gate is generous, big enough to host even more than the 2500-plus Mounir fans who have shown up.
Members of the audience find their place, close to the stage. Others stroll, chat, greet friends, buy a burger or fizzy pop. The grass is wet, the idea probably being Keep Off. When someone tries to sit on the marble around the fountain, he is told that that kind of thing is not allowed. On the tarmac ground, yes -- and on the steps of the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art; but not on the grass, or around the fountain. An enigmatic, hardly user-friendly logic this.
But everyone is in a good mood, and just everyone, almost everyone is still, at most, in their early 20s: shabab with spunk, Egyptian young men and women, university students in smart- casual gear.
An hour or so off schedule, Mounir is greeted by an affectionate crowd. He is petit, in red trousers and blue shirt, and though he is 22 years older than he was in 1980 when, with Benitwillid (We are Being Born) his star was rising, Mounir's audience is still at that same care-free age as when, back at the end of the 70s and in the early 80s, the generation now in its late 30s to mid-40s (a small, but not insignificant number of whom attended tonight's Mounir) was still discovering the pleasures of independent mobility. Cairo was a less hectic place then, less money, more time, fewer cars -- and the car stereo was an object of desire. Egyptian pop was born at this time. Suddenly, you no longer had, if you were a university student or soon-to-be, schizophrenically to switch from Umm Kulthum to the Bee Gees. You could listen to the Jets, Al- Masryiyyin -- or Mohamed Mounir. Here was your native tongue set to the kind of quick heart-beat of a three-minute song that your non-epic, modern life seemed to be about. Here was Arabic music that you and friends packed in a tiny car borrowed for an hour could drive to. Where to? Nowhere in particular-- apart from the club or a handful of restaurants. Those were the days when "leisure" had not yet become quite reified into commodity or industry, when it was still, more or less, your own state of mind.
"Tomorrow," the opening song goes, "will be more beautiful with us, memories will be more beautiful with us."
Here we are, 22 years later, in Tomorrow-Land, and Mounir wishes us a Happy Reggae Festival. He invokes a musical ancestral spirit, Bob Marley, "allah yerhamu," and, half in jest, half-serious, he asks us to read the Fatiha, to say a prayer for Marley's soul. Thus, Mounir invites comparisons between secular festivals like this one and the local real McCoy, mulids, literally "births," but, practically speaking, festive death anniversaries of holy men and women in countries with a Sufi tradition, till-dawn parties that gather multitudes from across the this-world/other- world divide and at which are sung the songs that have inspired Mounir's new (released the day of the concert) album: Madad, ya Rassul Allah (Give Me Strength, O Messenger of God).
Apart from a couple of songs, tonight's selection is not comprised of greatest hits: the emphasis seems to be on those with a reggae-ish sound. "Songs are still possible; no defeat, no victory; no fear, no dreams kept in the dark": the theme song of Youssef Chahine's film with a "progressive" message, Al- Maseer (Destiny), goes down well. And though Mounir has less of the kind of charisma needed to carry presence-energy across a wide open space than do his musicians, particularly percussionists and trumpet, his fans are focused on his diminutive figure, are happy that he, their friend, is there. Mounir is not at all flashy and, in spite of the coloured lights and atmospheric smoke produced on stage, his fame persona is not that of a star, but of the nice Nubian guy next door, the kind of guy who, as one song goes, knows what it is like to have to shelve a dream.
Dream? What dream? "Peace on earth and joy to all mankind" is invoked in Madad ya Rassul Allah, as "peace et love" would be several times over by Serges Kassy two nights later.
Mounir on Muslim mysticism: "Sufism welcomes reggae;" "Sufism is sukar, sugar." Forget the dark nights of the soul, the impossible discipline of annihilating ego. "The music of Sufism carries a nice message: we Arabs and Muslims are not terrorists." Lest anyone take Mounir's new album, consisting exclusively of Sudanese- and Nubian-inspired pop takes on madih (religious songs praising the Prophet and his descendants), to be a sign of an incipient spiritual crisis and/or life-style transformation, lest they fail to notice the silhouettes of churches alongside mosques on the tape cover or the references in the title track to Jesus and Mary, Mohamed Mounir reassures his audience: ana lissa khunfis, I am still a hippie.
Hats off. It's hard work to still be what you were 22 years ago, to resist the winds of change, to carry on in 2002 as if it were 1980. Sometimes the triumph of innocence against all odds is a nice thing, and Mounir's new album is nice in that prelapsarian sort of way. Sweet the sunny sounds from Sudan, carrying with them, in Salat Allah fi Sirri wa Gahri, a dream of the beloved Prophet; sweet the Good News, in Ibshiru ya Shabab, that the love of Taha can cure broken hearts.
If Mounir's most recent warm pastoral does not tease us out of thought, does not quite make a lunge for the guts, a stab at the heart, it will have at least reintroduced an old word into the vocabulary of Egypt's urban young: madad. A good word that, and -- if what they tell you down in Assiut or Sohag, up in Tanta or Dessouq, across the river at Al-Hussein or Al-Sayyida is anything to go by -- one that travels back and forth between lifetimes, faster than the speed of eternity.
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