Today, Secretary of State John Kerry makes his home just blocks away. In the early 1800s, lawyer Francis Scott Key, author of the poem that would become America’s national anthem, lived less than a kilometer away, near the banks of the Potomac.
But it is one of Dent Place’s earliest residents—a man who bought his house here when it was one of only two homes on the street—who is perhaps the most interesting: Yarrow Mamout, a Muslim African who endured 44 years of slavery in Maryland and Virginia by the Beall family of Maryland before being manumitted in 1796 and buying a house in Georgetown in 1800.
Of the West African Fulani people, Mamout was a devout Muslim who spoke the Fula language and could read and write Arabic and rudimentary English. His actions after securing his freedom are what make him remarkable. He went on not only to buy land in Georgetown, but also to invest in the Columbia Bank there and become a financier for both black and white local merchants.
Mamout was also unusual among his contemporaries—free and enslaved—because his portrait was done in 1819 by famed painter Charles Willson Peale. Peale had painted George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and others made famous on the stage of the American Revolution and the early republic. It is this image, Portrait of Yarrow Mamout, that allows us a glimpse into the man himself.
When Mamout died in 1823, it was Peale who penned his obituary, leaving what remains the most intriguing clue to the man’s past. “He was interred in his garden, the spot where he usually resorted to pray,” Peale wrote.
Fueled by this knowledge, in 2015 the Washington, D.C., archeologist’s office mounted a six-month dig at 3324 Dent Place aimed at finding tangible clues to the life of Yarrow Mamout. The team turned up several thousand items, including two ceramic pipe stems and a few partial bowls, a number of which are now being analyzed to determine if they date to the early 1800s.
With or without artifacts, the legend of Mamout as a fixture of early Georgetown always remained a wispy memory to locals, but the details of his remarkable existence—including the Charles Willson Peale obituary—had largely been forgotten.
“We knew Yarrow’s house was somewhere in this vicinity, but the house that stood most recently on the site was from a much later time, so it was definitely not Yarrow’s,” says Dik Saalfeld whose home is next door to Mamout’s lot and whose property may once have been part of his original holding. “That house fell into serious disrepair until it was crushed by a falling tree in 2013.”
After the ruined house was cleared, new construction might have progressed on the site without a backward glance were it not for James H. Johnston, a lawyer and historical scholar who had become intrigued by an 1822 portrait of Mamout holding a long-stemmed pipe by local artist James Alexander Simpson—later an art professor at Georgetown University—that hangs in the Georgetown Public Library's Peabody Room.
“I was surprised to see a portrait of a poor black man at the Georgetown library,” remembers Johnston. “After all, Georgetown’s whole image is rich and white.”
Johnston went on to spend eight years researching Mamout’s story, resulting in his book From Slave Ship to Harvard: Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family, published in 2012 by Fordham University Press. It follows Mamout’s life and the lives of his descendants—one of whom, Robert Turner Ford, graduated from Harvard University in 1927.
It was Mamout’s leap from an enslaved person to landowner and entrepreneur that most stirred Johnston’s curiosity. Even for white Americans of the laboring class at the time, that level of success was barely attainable. So how did Mamout do it? The main secret to his success seems to have lain in his faith and persistence.
“I think a remarkable part of this story is that he wasn’t freed until he was 60 and immediately has enough money to invest, which he loses. He starts over again and earns another $100 and loses that too—both times because of the actions of the men holding the money for him,” says Johnston.
“He sets out to earn money again, but now he’s learned from his experience. He has enough savvy to know about corporations and puts his money into a bank to keep it safe. He goes on to loan money to white merchants, which would have been risky at the time but by then he understands the system and has the confidence to use it.”
Understanding the system was no small feat—an enslaved person couldn’t come by this knowledge easily. In Mamout’s case, it’s likely that his personal intellect combined with the Qur’anic education he received as a young man in Guinea prepared him a lifetime of learning. In short, he was able to recognize valuable information when he heard it.
Johnston’s detective work also tells us that according to Fulani child-naming traditions, which would have been done with the consultation of an imam, Yarrow was his mother’s fourth child (Yero) and born on a Monday —Mamout, Mamadou and Mohammed being names traditionally chosen for that day. The teenage Mamout, Johnston writes, may have been taken prisoner in a war with a non-Muslim tribe.
Mamout’s literacy in Arabic as well as his native language likely put him in a category above other enslaved people forced into crossing the Atlantic on the Elijah, a ship owned by two colonial Marylanders, according to Johnston. This potentially even afforded him “privileges” like working as a crew member on a voyage lasting up to two months, rather than being constantly shackled in the ship’s putrid, inhumane below-decks area.
“He was only sixteen and looked younger,” writes Johnston. “He may have worked topside. Records of his life later in Georgetown show that he knew his way around a ship and water. His owner at the time rented him out to work on the oceangoing sailing ship the Maryland while it was in port. The Maryland’s owner said Mamout was the best swimmer ever seen on the Potomac River.”
When the Elijah arrived in America in June 1752, the prosperous Maryland tobacco farmer Samuel Beall bought Mamout directly from where the ship moored just off Annapolis.
Since Beall’s main business was tobacco farming, Mamout would have been quickly put to work in some aspect of that enterprise. Soon, however, he was promoted to the position of Beall’s “body servant,” not only tending his daily needs but accompanying him on all his business journeys near and far. This would have placed Mamout in the indirect company of the most prosperous merchants, planters, lawyers and politicians of the day.
It is also possible that Mamout’s status as a Muslim—a member of an Abrahamic faith—led the Christian whites who enslaved him, and those who interacted with him at large, to extend him somewhat greater opportunities than they did to other enslaved people.
Among those opportunities would have been the chance to earn his own money. At the time it was common practice for slaves to be “lent out” to work. Most of their earnings went to the slave owner, but they kept a small portion for themselves. Mamout often performed such work, using a variety of skills—brickmaking among them—to earn the money that later enabled him to acquire the lot in Dent Place with a small frame house.
When Mamout bought his property in 1800, Georgetown had already made a name for itself as a key port on the Potomac River. Land developers built new streets and infrastructure around the time it was incorporated as a town in the 1780s. In 1791, when the new national capital was created, Georgetown was included. Indeed, the men who made the major property deals for the District of Columbia met in the Suter Tavern, only blocks from where Mamout’s house would stand, and included George Washington, fellow Revolutionary War General Uriah Forest and Maryland statesman Benjamin Stoddert. All were major slaveholders of the era.
On the outskirts of town, where Dent Place lay, the land would have been cheap enough for Mamout to afford. And with only one other neighbor on the street, there were few to object to living near a former slave.
Nearly everything we know about Mamout’s life in Georgetown is thanks to Charles Willson Peale who was in Washington in 1819 to paint President James Monroe. Peale had heard of the elderly Mamout, whom local lore wrongly touted as more than a hundred years old, and sought him out to learn the secret of his longevity. He recorded their meetings in his diary with entries like this:
Yarrow owns a house and lotts and is known by most of the Inhabitants of Georgetown and particularly by the Boys who are often teasing him which he takes in good humor. It appears to me that the good temper of the man has contributed considerably to longevity. Yarrow has been noted for sobriety and a chearfull conduct, he professes to be a mahometan, and is often seen and heard in the Streets singing Praises to God—and conversing with him he said man is no good unless his religion comes from the heart.
By 1800 Mamout’s Georgetown hosted a small but thriving free African American community that remained until the 1950s. He would have likely also enjoyed the company of fellow Muslims who resided in the Rock Creek area, near where the National Zoo now sits, about a one and a half kilometers away. Often, they were considered trustworthy by contemporaries because of their faith and specifically its proscription against alcohol.
“My theory is that these men and women would have been the best of the best,” says Muhammad Fraser Rahim, who worked on the dig at Mamout’s house and is a Ph.D. candidate at Howard University specializing in the histories of enslaved African Muslims.
“Arabic would have been their third or fourth language. Then they would have learned English. Their devotion and training would have equipped them to deal with the hardships of life as an enslaved person here,” says Rahim, who is an officer for Africa programs at the us Institute for Peace and a former National Counterterrorism Center expert in the capital.
For Rahim, Yarrow and the small African Muslim communities of early America are part of the American immigrant narrative. They present an opportunity for Muslim Americans at large to feel a greater connection to the earliest days of American history.
“There is a deep connection between Islam and America that most miss, and Yarrow is an embodiment of that,” says Rahim. “Thomas Jefferson owned Muslim slaves and studied Arabic at the College of William and Mary. Along with France, the Muslim nation of Morocco was the first to recognize American independence. I think the current interest in Yarrow speaks to the fact that we, as Americans, are realizing we’ve been getting it all wrong.”
For Dent Place resident Kelley Phillips, one ideal way to “get things right” would be to make Mamout’s former property a park or memorial garden.
“Turning the property into a place of peace and remembrance would be a lovely tribute to Yarrow,” she says. But since the land is privately owned, that is a lovely but unlikely dream.
Even though a new luxury home is soon likely to take up the spot where Yarrow Mamout lived and died, he and other enslaved Muslim Africans won’t soon be forgotten again. This fall the Smithsonian Institution will be borrowing the Simpson portrait of Mamout for three years to include in the American Origins galleries, where it will be used to explore the question of what it meant to be an American in the earliest days of the republic. Curators are planning educational programs revolving around the portrait that will explore the stories of Muslim Americans since that time.
Little is known about her origins, including her given name and her year of birth in the early 13th century. The name she was known by, “Shajarat al-Durr” (“Tree of Pearls”), is said to have been inspired by her fondness for the jewel of the sea. Legends say she came from royal Arab stock, but historians agree she was most likely born in present-day Armenia to a family of nomadic Kipchak Turks, known to Western medieval chroniclers as “the blonde ones” and among whom women often held high status. “I have witnessed in this country a remarkable thing, namely the respect in which women are held by them,” recalled 14th-century traveler Ibn Battuta.
Around the time of Shajarat al-Durr’s birth, Mongols were sweeping west across Asia, absorbing some Kipchak tribes and settlements while displacing and dispersing others. Some were taken captive and sold to other peoples—including the ruling Ayyubids of Egypt. Shajarat al-Durr’s first husband, Sultan Al-Malik al-Salih, in fact, was the first to bring large numbers of Kipchaks to Cairo. The men became military servants, known as Mamluks, while Shajarat al-Durr, like other women, entered the harem.
In his history of the Egyptian Mamluk sultanate, Cairo-born Al-Makrisi, a biographer, historian and poet of the 14th and 15th centuries, wrote that the sultan “loved her so desperately that he carried her with him to his wars, and never quitted her.” In 1239, she bore a son, Khalil, and in 1240, Shajarat al-Durr and the sultan were married. This freed the bride of servitude, but their son died in infancy, and she bore none further.
Al-Salih, however, already had a son in southeastern Turkey, the troublesome Turan Shah, a child by his first wife. As a result, al-Salih relied greatly on his wife, whose Kipchak roots aided the Ayyubid sultan in mobilizing Mamluk troops to task—first in maintaining his immediate domain, Egypt, and then in extending dominion into Syria. It was this, “her ability to counsel her husband on matters of the state, including military campaigns,” that has garnered Shajarat al-Durr the most attention from biographers today, says historian Mona Russell of East Carolina University and author of Creating the New Egyptian Woman (2004). Writing not long after Shajarat al-Durr’s own lifetime, one Syrian chronicler called her “the most cunning woman of her age.”
Her acumen became widely apparent in the spring of 1249. Sultan al-Salih, campaigning in Syria, learned that the armies of the Seventh Crusade, led by Louis ix of France, were sailing for Egypt, aiming to land 1,800 ships and 50,000 men in the Nile Delta city of Damietta. Shajarat al-Durr, acting as regent in Cairo, dispatched al-Salih’s top commander, Fakhr al-Din, to Damietta while she led the Mamluks in garrisoning Cairo.
Then came more bad news: The sultan had been wounded in battle. He was on his way back to Egypt by stretcher.
Louis landed at Damietta on June 6, 1249. Overwhelmed, the outnumbered Muslim troops abandoned the city, reported the 13th-century historian Ibn Wasil. They regrouped on the east bank of the Nile, about 100 kilometers northeast of Cairo, at al-Mansoura. There, the ailing al-Salih arrived, and he was joined at his bedside by Shajarat al-Durr. By late August, al-Salih’s health began to deteriorate with each passing day. Ibn Wasil described the situation as “a disaster without precedent … there was great grief and amazement, and despair fell upon the whole of Egypt.”
In November, Sultan Al-Malik al-Salih passed away. Bereaved yet determined to ensure the continuity of her husband’s dynasty and avoid revealing weakness to the Crusaders, Shajarat al-Durr recalled Turan Shah from Turkey and, until his arrival, arranged to conceal the sultan’s death.
She summoned Fakhr al-Din and al-Salih’s head eunuch, Jamal al-Din, who was in charge of the Mamluks, “to inform them of the death of the sultan, and to request their assistance in supporting the weight of government at such a critical period,” wrote Al-Makrisi.
Their deception required an elaborate conspiracy. All orders from the sultan were in fact signed by Jamal al-Din, who forged his master’s signature. (Other sources say Shajarat al-Durr had al-Salih sign batches of blank documents before he died.) A doctor was also let in on the secret, and he was seen visiting the sultan’s chamber daily.
Meals were brought to the door and tasted while singers and musicians performed outside the chambers. Meanwhile, Shajarat al-Durr arranged for a boat, and disguised in black robes, she accompanied her husband's body under cover of night up the Nile to Roda Island south of Cairo, where the Mamluk troops were stationed. There, she hid the corpse and issued orders—also forged—for construction to begin on al-Salih’s mausoleum.
In this way, for nearly three months, Shajarat al-Durr secretly directed the sultanate. Although Fakhr al-Din fell in battle, his forces began to repulse the Crusaders, and Turan Shah arrived in time for the defeat and capture of Louis.
Yet as successor to his father, Turan Shah quickly began making missteps.
“He had no confidence but in a certain number of favourites, whom he had brought with him from [Syria],” Al-Makrisi recorded, and this sidelined the Mamluks.
He demanded that Shajarat al-Durr hand over both his father’s treasure and her own jewels and trademark pearls. “The sultana, in alarm, implored the protection of the Mamluks,” reported Al-Makrisi. They were only too glad to come to her aid, considering “the services she had done the state in very difficult times” and the fact that Turan Shah was “a prince universally detested,” and Turan Shah was slain on May 2, 1250.
The Mamluks decided that “the functions of Sultan and ruler [of Egypt] should be assumed by Shajarat al-Durr,” Ibn Wasil recorded, adding that “decrees were to be issued at her command and ... [from] that time she became titular head of the whole state; a royal stamp was issued in her name with the formula ‘mother of Khalil,’ and the khutba [Friday sermon] was pronounced in her name as Sultana of Cairo and all Egypt.”
Although—to recall Ibn Battuta’s observations—the Mamluks were not unaccustomed to female potentates, she was entirely up to the job, “endowed … with great intelligence” and capacity for “the affairs of the kingdom,” noted Khayr al-Din al-Zirikli, a modern biographer and poet from Syria.
One of her first acts as sultana was to conclude a treaty with the Crusaders that returned Damietta and ransomed Louis ix. These terms she negotiated with her French counterpart, Queen Margaret of Provence. Thus the Seventh Crusade ended with the diplomacy of two queens—one Muslim and one Christian.
Not all supported her. The most stinging objection came from Baghdad, where Caliph al-Musta’sim is said to have declared: “We’ve heard that you are governed by a woman now. If you’ve run out of men in Egypt, let us know so we can send you a man to rule over you.” Wary of the far reach of Abbasid influence, the sultana and her council knew they needed to capitulate if they were to ultimately endure.
Today harisa is so woven into the cuisines of North Africa that you might assume it has always been there, but if there has ever been a great reason for immigration, free trade and porous borders, this is it. There would be no harisa if one of the New World’s most famous vegetables hadn’t turned up the heat on virtually all of the Old World’s cuisines.
Before chilies came to the Old World, there were varieties of black pepper, Szechuan pepper, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, mustard and horseradish to warm palates from China to London. Ancient China and the Mideast had salty condiments like soy, which was originally a paste, and the equally salty murri in the Fertile Crescent. Black pepper, though both widespread and prized, was rarely a stand-alone condiment—unlike mustard, which has been on the menu in China for at least 2,500 years and appears in medieval recipes from the Middle East, Africa and Andalusia as well as Europe since Roman times.
Soon after capsaicin-bearing New World peppers landed in North Africa, cooks began using local sweet spices like caraway and coriander to transform dried peppers into early variations of the harisa that now, some six centuries later, is enjoying a new global popularity. Walk through New York’s West Village or a few boulevards in Paris, and you find it spooned over falafels or heating up a tagine. From Spain to San Francisco, it’s even showing up in non-traditional recipes like a grapefruit vinaigrette or a salad with wheatberries, carrots, dates and yogurt. I have been known to add it to mayonnaise to take a chicken sandwich to an unprecedented level; blend it with brown butter on Brussels sprouts; even dot it on pizzas. And why not? Its complex heat seems to bless everything it touches, and yet it is easy enough for anyone to make.
Wright suspects harisa—or at least the idea for it—may have come from the New World with the peppers them-selves. “One could argue that the Peruvian aji panca en pasta is such a precursor,” he says, explaining that, like harisa, it is made with rehydrated chilies. “When you think about the way new food ingredients are sold in a market, one of the first questions any prospective customer will ask is, ‘What do you do with it?’ These dried fruits from a magical New World would be an easier sell if there were techniques, recipes or even a sample,” he adds.
My own favorite recipe (above) remains close to the harisa I fell in love with. Instead of reconstituting the dried chilies, I toast them to concentrate their flavor. Then I pulverize them, together with spices and garlic, and I stir in the oil at the end. It keeps at least a year in the fridge—if you can let it last that long. My very favorite way to have it is slathered with honey on a buttery flatbread such as a crepe-like Moroccan m’semme, sprinkled with black olives and sometimes a bit of goat cheese. This addictive combination of hot, sweet and salty is a popular street food in North Africa—edible evidence of why chilies spread through the world like wildfire with every bite.
Soap Kills remains the seminal sound of postwar Beirut, a Beirut just emerging from the devastation and dust of a 15-year-long civil war. Hamdan’s trippy, minimalist beats, samples and orchestration underscore and elevate his counterpart’s misty, sensual vocals, giving them a rubbly landscape from which they rise, unfurling like smoke. The effect is that of an awakening, a sleepy materialization into an entirely new reality, where every link with the past will have to be reimagined and reforged. Melancholic, elegiac, even subdued, it is also a sound of possibility—that in recreating links with the past on one’s own terms, the future, too, might be made on those same terms.
There is no account of the contemporary Beirut alternative music scene that doesn’t begin with Soap Kills, with how it felt to turn on the radio, after years of nothing but news-report jingles, more traditional Arabic tarab music and the beloved and wholesome Lebanese diva Fairuz, and hear something that felt both entirely of now and of us. Though the son of Fairuz, musician and playwright Ziad Rahbani, did much in the 1980s to pave the way, mixing politically conscious lyrics delivered in Lebanese dialect with Oriental jazz orchestrations, Soap Kills was the postwar generation’s answer to what it meant to be at once both homegrown and contemporary, tearing down and stepping past the war-enforced contradiction between those two terms.
“Listening to Soap Kills as a kid changed everything for me,” says Hamed Sinno, lead singer of Mashrou’ Leila, inarguably the Arab world’s biggest pop-rock band right now, having premiered its latest album with a concert in London’s Barbican Theatre last November that was two-way live-streamed to Beirut, so important was it for the band to include Beirut in its debut. “Yasmine’s vocals … I’d never heard Arabic used and sung like that before.”
This, explains Hamdan, was a conscious decision on the part of Soap Kills and the crux of its local appeal. Both Zeid and Yasmine had grown up abroad with parents who had fled the war to Europe. Despite, or perhaps because of, having grown up in a house where his parents never listened to Arabic music, never read Arabic books and rarely even spoke to him in Arabic, Zeid came back to Beirut “fantasizing about being an Arab and making Arabic music.”
But the first songs he wrote, with a band called Lombrix (through which he met Yasmine) dissatisfied him. “It was exotic Arabic music, using the cliché scales,” he says. He began listening to Arabic music in earnest, spurred on by Yasmine, who played him classics by Abdel Halim Hafez, Asmahan and Um Kulthum, and when he sat back down to write, it was with the idea that it had to be something he wanted to listen to. Writing Arabic music, he came to see, was not so much about Arabic scales or quarter tones, but addressing an Arab audience, and so it had to be sung in Arabic.
This was where Soap Kills enacted its musical revolution. Arabic tarab music is all about the singing—and what singing it is: grand, emotive, impassioned and virtuosic, with sustained notes that leave both audience and singer breathless. To hear a woman’s voice singing like Yasmine’s—minimal, restrained, intimate, sometimes almost whispering—signaled a new kind of Arabic music that played with and responded seamlessly to the electronics and samples layered behind the voice. It was not so much fusion music as music arising from immersion in and knowledge of two separate cultures, made by artists who were the hybrid children of a Beirut marked by immigration, separation, disjointedness and loss, but also postwar homecoming and tenuous aspirations for a future that might repair those ruptures.
“In my opinion, Soap Kills were the first,” says Ziad Nawfal, “but they weren’t the only ones.” Nawfal is a walking, talking archive of the Beirut alternative-music scene, having come of age right along with it, documenting it through a radio show he began hosting in the ’90s as a teenager and then later, in 2009, creating a record label, Ruptured, that grew out of the show and bears the same name. In addition to his roles as radio host and label owner, Nawfal is also a dj, record producer and promoter, organizing concerts and performances. More than that, though, he is a huge music buff and a committed supporter of local musicians, showcasing both established talents and young newcomers who approach him with their demos on his radio show.
He cites the noise/punk/experimental rock group Scrambled Eggs and the rap duo Aks’ser (Wrong-way Traffic) as other major players on the emerging scene in the early 2000s. “Before that,” he says, “I played foreign music on the show, and then when these bands came along, I started playing local musicians. When I first started out, I would play one or two local bands during my show. Now, I can compose an entire dj set out of only local musicians.”
The scene grew and thrived as artists played with music and sounds from hard rock to electro to experimental improvisation (a genre that has established such a devoted following, thanks to its yearly festival Irtijal, that it has gone from a single day of performances in 2001 to almost a full week of some 20 concerts by both local veterans and international artists). At the end of 2002, a showcase concert was held at Beirut’s Music Hall, a shiny new venue built on the former no-man’s land that once divided the warring halves of Beirut, and in 2003 a compilation was put out by the alt-music store La CD-thèque, where Nawfal worked at the time. The compilation, Beirut Incognito, was a who’s who of the young Lebanese bands that had started in the late ’90s. It was an acoustic portrait of Beirut at the time: eclectic, all over the place, impossible to define, but above all exuberant, willing to experiment, try anything. “It was magnificent,” says Nawfal. “It blew up all expectations and preconceived ideas. For the first time, we had the feeling that something different was happening, that we were opening up and going places.”
It was the last time all the notables would be able to fit on a single record.
As the scene developed, it broke off into little genre “spheres,” as Nawfal puts it, each with its own small, growing and dedicated legion of fans. The political upheaval of 2005 and 2006 in Lebanon, which saw both the shocking assassination of former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri and a 33-day assault on the country by the Israeli army, also had reverberations in which the music scene, with some bands breaking up as their members left the country to seek more stable lives elsewhere, and different bands coming together around that time with a sense of urgency no doubt informed by the situation.
The alternative-music scene in Beirut is an alchemy of creativity and adversity. It’s not so much because of the fraught state of the region (though that certainly plays a role) but due also to the void of an industry or government-sponsored arts initiatives. While there is a giant regional music industry that supports traditional Arabic pop and tarab acts, it is slickly corporate, incredibly lucrative and tightly controlling, with composers, musicians and videographers associated with particular labels, like Rotana, for example, hired to create and manage a singer’s brand and sound from A to Z. By contrast, the alt scene is entirely diy, with improvised venues, musicians exchanging favors, producers lending out their studios, bands paying out of pocket to print their own records, and friends and supporters offering their networks for distribution. It is much like everything in Beirut: a loose, self-made, often chaotic and collaborative solution to a structural problem.
It is precisely this chaos and collaboration, however, that some cite as the draw to working and creating in Beirut. Raed El-Khazen is a musician and producer who studied at the Berklee College of Music in Boston where he met Jana Saleh, a fellow Lebanese student, who happened to be the daughter of his favorite teacher. The two kept in touch over the years as they both moved to New York and worked in music and production—El-Khazen playing with bands and recording his own music, Saleh working in digital distribution and new project development at VP Records. After she moved back to Beirut in 2008, she gave El-Khazen a call: She had “discovered” a group of young musicians who had a rough but exciting sound and the talent and drive to grow into something really special. Moreover, they had something she hadn’t encountered on the indie scene in Beirut in a long time: They sang in Arabic. Did he want to come to Beirut and work with her on producing them?
This was how the two of them came to set up their own studio, B-root, where they arranged, recorded and produced Mashrou’ Leila’s eponymous debut album.
While El-Khazen initially planned to be back and forth between New York and Beirut, “once I got here, I found I really wanted to just be here. I didn’t want to be in New York anymore. It’s much freer here, easier to be innovative, creative, to cross boundaries. There’s no industry and hence a nonchalance. People are willing to try things because there’s no consequences, no guy who’s going to tell you, ‘You can’t do that because no one will play it on the radio.’”
After finishing the Mashrou’ Leila album, El-Khazen and Saleh went separate ways, drawn to different projects and artists, though they often consult with one another and help each other out. In 2014, El-Khazen met Samer Saem Eldahra, aka Zimo, a young visual artist who’d moved to Beirut from his native Syria to escape the war. Zimo was also creating electronic music under a project entitled Hello Psychaleppo: dark, twitchy, psychedelic concoctions of bass-heavy beats and hallucinatory synths infused with keening Bedouin mawwals and filches of old tarab tracks, what Soundcloud has categorized as “electro-tarab,” a subgenre that Hello Psychaleppo seems to singlehandedly own. Very quickly, he took the underground scene by storm. “I heard this guy’s stuff and I was just blown away,” says El-Khazen. “I knew I wanted to work with him immediately.”
Saleh, meanwhile, who is also a popular dj on the Beirut scene, found her new muse in Aziza, a young Lebanese singer-songwriter who “combines classical Arab tarab rules of composition with pop.” Saleh approached the Aziza project with relish and playfulness, eager to develop a sound, album and persona with a narrative modeled on the classic Lebanese and Egyptian musicals of the ’50s and ’60s. They recorded a studio album followed by a live album.
“The approach to the studio album,” says Saleh, “was how to take the traditional compositions of old Lebanese music and freshen them up, while the live album was how to take that freshening up and to deconstruct it.” The live album, she says, actually achieved something unique thanks to the wave of Syrian musicians who came into the country around that time. “In Lebanon we have a more conceptual approach to things. The Syrian musicians brought strong, academic musical know-how to the scene. They have an education in Arabic music through their conservatory that we don’t even have access to here, and they’re also culturally more in touch with those roots.”
One of those musicians was Tarek Khuluki, the wunderkind electric guitarist with the Syrian-origin rock band Tanjaret Daghet (Pressure Cooker), whose albums El-Khazen has gone on to produce. The rehearsal space used by Tanjaret Daghet—guitarist Khuluki, bassist and keyboardist Khaled Omran and drummer Dani Shukri—happened to be right next door to El-Khazen’s underground Hamra Street studio. He was so impressed with what he heard—literally through the walls—that when they approached him, he immediately agreed to work with them. Their second album, currently in the mixing stage, is a heady mix of hard-edged rock with ferocious guitar solos, raucous drums and vocalizations that veer eclectically between boisterous rock-n-roll and soulful mawwal-type chanting.
While several producers talked about the rich addition Syrian musicians have brought to the Beirut scene with their musicianship and relentless hard work, it would be remiss not to mention the difficulties they must navigate. A large part of their modest earnings must cover the fee for the annual residence permits that allow them to remain in the country, and each person must secure a local sponsor to renew that permit—not to mention that working at all requires additional, hard-to-get papers and permits. Not surprisingly, many found help within the music community, with Lebanese producers often stepping in to sponsor Syrian musicians—all adding yet another layer to what it means to be collaborative in Beirut.
John Nasr is the bassist and beatmaker for the rap/hip hop crew Fareeq el Atrash, which he describes in one breath as “a live hip hop band modeled after the classic funk bands from the ’60s and ’70s with musicians, rappers and a beat boxer taking a somewhat improvisational call-and-response approach.” The band came together around 2006, when Nasr began working with rapper Edd Abbas and then later with whizz beatboxer FZ and the Syrian-Filipino rapper Chyno (who recently released a solo album, Making Music to Feel at Home, garnering international attention and securing a European tour). A third rapper, Qarar, has now joined their lineup. Abbas and Qarar rap in Arabic, each with his distinctive rhythm and style, while Chyno switches between Arabic and English. “Edd was one of the first rappers for me to really crack the code of making Lebanese dialect sound good in rapping,” says Nasr.
The band’s sound and beats are much influenced by Western and African American styles, and they often eschew samples in favor of jazzy, funky, melody-rich layers that create an expansive soundscape against which the rappers throw down their rhymes. Their approach is lively and humorous even when the subject matter is dark, sometimes playfully quoting rap classics with their own signature twist, such as the infamous hook from the 1979 hit “Rapper’s Delight” on their track “Njoom ‘Am Te’rab” (“The Stars Are Getting Closer”).
“We don’t really use Arabic beats in our music,” says the California-born Nasr, explaining that the band members prefer to rely on what they know and, more importantly, understand, in terms of sound. “We never want it to sound like a gimmick. If we were to play with Arabic music or beats, we would have to do it in such a way that it would be as accomplished as the rapping.”
This does not mean that the band, like many others, doesn’t proclaim and wear a staunchly regional, rather than local, identity. Besides the fact that they rap (predominantly) in Arabic, they also collaborate often across regional lines, both as a band and as individual producers and beatmakers with rappers and emcees in Jordan, Palestine, Egypt and Syria.
There are also frequent collaborations between the rap scene and the electronic and indie scenes. Chyno collaborated with a number of musicians on his solo album, including Carl Ferneine from Loopstache, “an electro-indie project, mixing folk, swing, funk with electronic beats.” Jawad Nawfal, brother of Ziad, is an avant-garde electro artist who currently creates under the name Munma but began playing live in the early 2000s with other projects. Munma has released 10 albums, under his own name and with different collaborators, including hip hop artist El Rass, who often raps in fus’ha (classical Arabic), recalling and then breaking the formal conventions of Arabic poetry.
A number of bands echo Hamdan’s assertion that “making Arabic music is primarily about addressing an Arab audience,” dismissing the need to work with traditional Arabic scales and compositional rules in favor of a lyrical approach that voices their ideas and concerns predominantly in Arabic.
“I grew up in a really ‘Western bubble,’” says Hamed Sinno, “attending American schools and an American university.” He describes the shock of the 2006 war and the ways in which doing volunteer relief work at the time really sharpened his gaze, bursting that bubble for good. “So when I started writing music, I knew I would only write in Arabic, even though I could barely manage it when I first started out. I still write mostly in English and then I look for the best translations. I have at least five translation tabs open on my computer at any given time.”
It is no small feat, considering Mashrou’ Leila’s powerful lyrics and the way Greek myths are referenced with the same ease as old Egyptian pop songs (the song “Djin,” off their latest album, Ibn El Leil (Son of the Night), is a case in point). In fact, conscious lyrics are a distinctive characteristic of many bands on the scene. Mashrou’ Leila, Fareeq el Atrash, El Rass, Tanjaret Daghet, the Arabic folk and experimental musician Youmna Saba, Edd Abbas (as a solo act) and Chyno all address the personal and collective challenges of navigating a landscape marked by shift and fracture, highlighting the ways in which the personal is political, but also how, in the Arab world, the political is highly personal, as regional events reverberate through individual lives.
Chyno’s verses, for example, in “Ballad of an Exodus,” a track off of Making Music to Feel at Home, eloquently excavate all these multiple layers, positing “home” as a place where “you get out of your comfort zone.” Written during a stint in Barcelona, questions of homeland, identity, responsibility and one’s place in the world echo off of and inform one another, with exile laid atop exile: “My body on a bench in Barcelona’s Paseo Picasso/Cuz this my Blue Period, my mind travels to Damascus corners/Tagging walls in Bab Tuma, manifesto for a New Syria.” Later in that same verse, the situation in Syria, where Chyno grew up, becomes even more personal as the war and its dangers creep closer while his body remains in Barcelona: “Yeah I got mail last month, inbox filled up with texts/‘The old milkshake store we use to chill with our friends/the one in Shaa’lan just got bombed/inshallah we won’t be next.’”
While there is no “Beirut sound,” per se—at least not yet—according to Nawfal, Saleh and El-Khazen, who all seem to agree that the scene has not quite yet matured enough to yield something that can be wholly called its own, there is a Beirut ethos. Beyond the homegrown “industry” inside which all indie musicians and producers here operate, where people must help one another out by necessity, the idea of cooperation extends beyond the material and into something more abstract and idealistic.
“I need to succeed in such a way where I feel I’ve reached a place where I can benefit somebody else,” says Chyno. He credits Fadi Tabbal, musician and founder of Tunefork Recording Studios, as a major force in helping get his album made, not just for his musical knowhow, but also for his generosity. “He basically gave me the studio for free, handed me the keys and let me go mix there on my own when I needed to. It was above and beyond anything I expected.”
Nawfal is motivated by the same sense of mutual responsibility. “I have a role,” he says in reference to his support of local musicians. “It’s my part, my duty.”
Raed El-Khazen, likewise, expresses a sense of guilt at his recent decision to go back to New York to focus more on creating and performing his own music. Ironically and sadly, he blames the same sense of chaos that initially attracted him so much to the Beirut scene as that which now drives him away from it, emphasizing that the flipside of the disorderliness that can nurture creativity can also be a lack of a sense of discipline that spills over toward nihilism. Still, he’s not done with the city yet. “I’ve given back enough,” he says, and then, pausing for a few beats, adds, grinning: “For now.”
Zeid Hamdan, in addition to his output with his bands The New Government and Zeid and the Wings, has also built a career based on collaborations with other musicians, giving workshops in Congo, Guinea and Algeria on how to produce albums with minimal production equipment and on a shoestring budget, and working with other musicians from the region, such as the Egyptian singers-songwriters Maii Waleed and Maryam Saleh, each of whom he has cut an album with.
“Sure, there are egos and competitiveness and all the usual things you’d find when there are a bunch of artists working in a small scene. Still, I don’t know of anyone who has had to pay another musician to get them to work with them,” says Nasr.
It’s tempting to describe a lot of the music coming out of Beirut as a type of fusion between “Western” and “Arab/Oriental” sounds. But that’s a lazy shortcut more focused on maintaining binaries rather than acknowledging their utter meaninglessness, particularly for a postwar generation hyper-aware of its Arab roots and the Western influences that have long been part of the city’s urban fabric, and more importantly, a generation making conscious choices about how to mix elements from the various cultures it identifies with.
Almost equal to the number of artists making music that plays with and redefines concepts taken from Arab roots, there is also a considerable number who don’t think twice about that approach as they make music you’d be hard-pressed to identify by anything other than its pure musicianship and production value. That, too, indicates a creative freedom unconstrained by expectations of what one “ought to sound like.” Rock acts like Who Killed Bruce Lee and The Wanton Bishops, who recall LCD Soundsystem, Queens of the Stone Age and The Black Keys, or folk acts like Postcards and Charlie Rayne, who have echoes of Belle and Sebastian, Kings of Convenience and Bob Dylan: All write lyrics so competent in imagery and references you’d swear they’d just stepped off the streets of a small North American town.
“If I was forced to describe Beirut,” says Hamed Sinno, “I’d say it’s the experience of being in a place and yearning for it at the same time.”
That’s a fitting characterization of a city marked today not so much by the destruction wrought by war but the rampant reconstruction that swallows up the past as wholesale as any bomb. Still, whatever corporate razing there has been, attempting to numb the soul of the perturbed city, these are musicians determined to never let Beirut forget where it came from and where its place is in the now and future worlds. Beirut, port city, always a mix of everything, stubbornly and proudly undefined and indefinable, also has its private yearning, for a sound, for an identity, for a persona it can call its own, even if that persona is just the ability to perfectly mimic something else, without a trace of “foreignness.” That interplay, ongoing and endless, is in perpetuity the sound of Beirut.