IT IS music to make you close your eyes and dance in your head — an arresting confection of jazzy improvisation, catchy Middle Eastern chords and the beat of the darabuka drum. At the London Interfaith Centre, in Brondesbury, Berakah is well into one of the highlights of its set, Nasruddin’s Dream.
In a world where religion is often seen as the cause of division and conflict, the guitarist and band leader Mohammed Nazam has found his own way to promote interfaith fellowship: through music.
Nazam formed Berakah last year, recruiting members from Muslim, Christian and Jewish backgrounds who share a desire to “create harmony”, not simply by playing together but by blending influences from East and West into a melodic cocktail. Nazam, known to all as Mo, is a versatile musician of more than 20 years’ experience, spanning sessions for the pop stable Stock, Aitken and Waterman to Courtney Pine’s Jazz Warriors.
Born in Pakistan in 1961, Nazam moved to Britain before his first birthday and has lived mostly as a Londoner, apart from a few years in Crawley and then Bolton, where he played soprano cornet in the school brass band. While his Muslim upbringing was not strictly religious, his parents held traditional cultural values — and were none too impressed at his choice of a musical career, he recalls. “They didn’t come over here for me to grow my hair long and wear torn jeans. They wanted me to get a decent education and become a doctor, lawyer or accountant.”
Mainstream organised religion “never quite appealed” to him, but in his late teens he discovered books on Sufism and the esoteric interpretation of Islam, which proved “eye-opening and thought-provoking”.
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“The shadow of religion has always fallen over me one way or another,” he says. “Growing up, I noticed that there were some things that inevitably led to an argument: football, politics, religion. From an early age, I had a lot of questions about religion, not just my own, and I made a point of reading a lot about it — Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Eastern religions, Buddhism.”
Berakah grew out of Nazam’s work for the Prince’s Trust, the charity set up by the Prince of Wales to help disadvantaged young people, where he saw how “music can help to change lives and get to the heart of a person”. Then came 9/11. “But even before that I had sensed the tension between the Muslim populations of the world and, it seemed, everyone else.”
Reflecting on his situation as a Muslim raised in the West, he realised that he was lucky to work in a creative field where the goal was to bring people together, and that led to the idea of “putting together a band where all the musicians come from a single lineage, the Abrahamic faiths”.
He knew the singer Chantelle Duncan, the acoustic bassist Rex Horan and the keyboard player Mark Hinton Stewart through previous musical outings. But it took some time before he could fulfil his wish to recruit the female Jewish violinist Serena Leader, who is classically trained. The violin carries the yearnings of the diaspora experience — think of Chagall’s iconic figure of the fiddler on the roof. The sixth recruit was a percussionist, Abdelkader Saadoun, an exponent of Algerian raï music, who arrived in London in 1988.
“The name of the band was a tough one, I didn’t want anything too twee or hippy-dippy,” Nazam says. “Berakah is found in both Arabic and Hebrew and means roughly the same — grace or blessing.”
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Berakah’s music is not overtly religious but its repertoire includes the soul classic People Get Ready, with its image of “the train to Jordan — no need for a ticket, just thank the Lord” and a setting of Yedid Nefesh, a 16th-century Kabbalistic hymn, which is still sung in Jewish households on the Sabbath.
Nazam’s own compositions, too, draw on his spiritual heritage. Nasruddin’s Dream is inspired, he says, “by the stories of the Mullah Nasruddin, a figure found in Sufi literature. I came across him in the books of Idries Shah, a contemporary Sufi writer [who died in 1996]. The Mullah Nasruddin is an archetype of the wise fool who uses humour and irony to exemplify not only his own shortcomings but those of all of us.”
Another tune, Cydonia — named after a region of Mars where scientists were intrigued by a pyramid-like formation — is intended to “evoke a sense of the desert”, the emblematic place of spiritual search and encounter.
The band recently played in the Middle East Now season at the British Museum and has performed at churches and a Liberal synagogue. Its members are now looking for a suitable Muslim community venue, while entertaining hopes for a tour of northern England next year.
While Berakah is novel, it is not unique — others are tapping into London’s cosmopolitan milieu to build artistic bridges. The group Hafla (meaning a kind of celebration in Arabic) consists of expat Israelis and Arabs as well as local supporters. It focuses, too, on creative collaboration. A concert last year featured an extract of a work by the British composer Orlando Gough, The Shouting Fence, in which an Egyptian and an Israeli opera singer sang to each other in Arabic and Hebrew from The Song of Solomon.
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Jeremy Haneman, a Jewish musician originally from Australia and a Hafla board member, observes: “It seems to me that people are desperate for a way to bring different faiths peacefully and fruitfully together which does not involve political debate or violent demonstration. People are weary of being bombarded by images of destruction. Hafla serves as a reminder of the power of music to transform prejudices and to generate bridges across cultures.”
These ventures may be too few yet to drown out the voices of discord, but they point to an alternative model of coexistence. For Mo Nazam, it is important for Muslims like himself to stand up for “the ideas of freedom and democracy and the right to be ourselves, whether religious or non-religious.
“The Muslim community is very young. We’ve got our challenges assimilating Western traditions into our traditions. It will take a couple of generations but I’m very optimistic that it will happen.”
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www.theberakahproject.org www.halfa.org
Simon Rocker is a journalist with The Jewish Chronicle