You find the hall’s exterior bathed in generator-driven light. The interior is dim but for the concert footage projected on a screen and reflected back upon the white plastic chair-mounted eyeballs fixed before it.

Salloum’s first feature-length film, “Slingshot” chronicles the rise of the Palestinian hip-hop scene - starting in ‘48 Palestine (sometimes called “Israel“) and the other occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

Salloum’s central protagonists are DAM - who had a region-wide hit with their tune “Mean Irhabi” (”Who’s a Terrorist”) - especially the group’s Tamer Nafar, from Al-Lid near Tel Aviv. Other profiled artists include the Gaza Strip’s PR (Palestinian Rapperz), West Bank girl-MC duo Arapeyat (aka Safa and Nahwa), Abeer Zinati (”the first lady of Palestinian R&B,” and Mahmoud Shalabi, veteran of the Palestinian hip-hop group MWR.

Considerable buzz accrued to “Slingshot” since early 2008, when the Sundance film festival nominated it for its grand jury prize.

The Palestinian-American multi-media artist screened her film in Bedawi and Shatilla camps as well as Bourj al-Barajneh. This tour came just after a series of screenings around Palestine, and Salloum was still radiating a high from the experience.

“Until we screened in Palestine, it didn’t feel like we were finished yet,” she said. “Over 4000 people came out to Nablus to see the show. I couldn’t get the Gaza rappers out for the screening and I couldn’t get into Gaza myself … The shows in Ramallah and Jenin were awesome.”

“Slingshot” took some time to ferment and, like so many independent films, it has an eccentric production history.

“By chance,” she says, “I was in Gaza [in 2003] for the first hip-hop show there ever … We just decided to make a movie.

“I didn’t know anything about filmmaking and there were lots of production problems … I didn’t even bother reading the manual before I picked up the camera. We were working on graphics and the sound right up to Sundance.

“I have a great support group,” she continues, “but basically I paid for the film on my credit cards.” Though she’s long since maxed-out her cards, Salloum is less interested in discussing her spectacular indebtedness than the artists at the center of the work.

“The project was a huge collaboration,” she smiles, “even in the production. I left cameras with DAM and Abeer and PR. I wanted the film to speak with their voices as much as possible.

“They did start getting impatient after a couple of years. It was hard to convince them that taking a bit of extra time would make it that much better.

“But they were very loyal to me. Plenty of other filmmakers approached them in those years, but they told them, ‘No. Jackie will make the first movie.’ They even turned down Al-Jazeera. That’s a big sacrifice.”

Western audiences will be interested in the film’s portrayal of how Palestinian rappers have found echoes of their own lives in some American hip-hop, but the form occupies an ambivalent space in occupied Palestine.

“DAM began as an Israeli act,” Salloum says, and they appeared on Israeli TV. The most popular [Jewish] Israeli rapper is an ultra right-wing Zionist. [Israeli filmmaker Anat Halachmi made a 2003 film] about him and [DAM's front man] Tamer, called “Channels of Rage.”

“What really changed DAM’s music was the second Intifada. That’s when they released ‘Meen Irhabi.’ The Intifada made the Zionist rapper worse. He sings ‘Death to Arabs.’ You never hear Palestinian rappers singing ‘Death to Jews.’

“I have so much respect for their integrity. Coca Cola is a big player in Israel and they approached DAM about doing an ad for them. They offered them a lot of money but the guys told them no. You hear about that and you realize these guys really have principals, even though they’re broke.

“The hip-hop is different in different parts of Palestine. In Gaza, it’s harder to have shows because it’s more religious, even though all the rappers believe in god. Yet it took off there more than anywhere else.”

Salloum blinks in recollection. “You ask someone ‘Do you like hip-hop?’ and they’ll say ‘What’s hip-hop?’ If you say ‘Meen Irhabi,’ they’ll say ‘Oh I love “Meen Irhabi!”‘”

“Slingshot Hip Hop” marked Salloum’s second appearance at Sundance. Her first experience with America’s most-loved independent film festival came in 2005, when her nine-minute short “Planet of the Arabs” caught the festival’s attention.

“Reel Bad Arabs,” Jack Shaheen’s 2001 study of Hollywood’s cliched representations of Arabs and Muslims, inspired the short, which draws upon clips from some of the movies Shaheen discusses. A bravura work of editing, “Planet” emulates the cutting and splicing techniques used to produce feature film trailers to make a work that’s funny (if you know this stuff already) and thought-provoking (if you don’t).

“Editing,” Salloum recalls, “taking images and placing them next to each other and setting them to music, that all comes pretty naturally to me. When I heard Sundance wanted to screen it and I had no idea what it meant.”

Salloum’s filmmaking insouciance may stem from her coming to film from multimedia art. She graduated with a masters degree in fine arts from New York University in 2003.

Her work occupies the interstices between pop culture and political activism and she’s proven adept in a number of media - politically inflected collages, gumball machines and flashcards as well as video.

“People have told me that ‘Slingshot’ is the first ‘Palestine film’ they’ve seen that doesn’t make them depressed,” she says. “… That’s why pop culture works so well.

“When I first started, … I didn’t want to start with the Middle East because it was too close to me. My first collages worked with Latin American pop art themes. Some people hated it. ‘Art’s not supposed to be didactic,’” she rolls her eyes. “‘We’re all on the left here, so you’re just preaching to the choir.’”

Salloum has an agenda but she isn’t naive - being interested in how her artistic intentions are received, regardless how they’re refracted through the public’s consciousness.

Her gumball machines, for instance, offer art consumers plastic capsules with objects and written profiles inside. In one version, “Each comes with a magnet, sticker, or ring of your favorite revolutionary.” In another, “Each capsule comes with a Palestinian refugee: Collect all 5 million!”

“A woman walked into an exhibition that had one of my gumball machines,” Salloum recalls. “She put in a quarter and one of my rings dropped out. She came back with a roll of quarters and kept feeding them in one after the other.

“I asked her, ‘What are you doing?’ I was a little irritated, I guess, because a lot of time and energy goes into each one of those items. She told me ‘I just liked to collect rings.’

“Hip-hop is like that,” she smiles again.

“I don’t think my work is going to change the world, that people will want to overthrow Israel after seeing my film. But if I’m going to work, it has to be meaningful. With ‘Slingshot,’ I also want to help the artists.

“One of the problems Palestinians face is how they’re represented in the media. That means we have to make different media. Media is our strongest weapon, I think.”

Having spent the better part of five years working on a feature-length documentary, Salloum says she has no plans for her next long film.

Rather, she’s thinking about the possibilities of Arabic-language music videos.

“Right now,” she says, “I don’t want to make anything longer than three minutes.”

Jackie Salloum’s “Slingshot Hip Hop” will next screen in Beirut at one of the city’s October film festivals. For more information see www.jSalloum.org

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This is a point of contention in all dialogue initiatives. Islamic political movements are seen with suspicion because their charts, agendas and political statements reinforce the perception that once they come to power, they will change the system and turn it into an oppressive and authoritarian regime. Do the Islamists provide convincing arguments to the contrary? This is a question they have to answer.

The problem is that many analysts, including the Islamists themselves, miss the fact that Islamic political parties, just like other political movements, will be tested more on grounds of issues and services than on ideology. Yes, identity politics plays a role. A new political imagination is key for social mobilization. Political activism thrives on responsible policies. But none of these by itself is sufficient or has much meaning. When it comes to the ballot box, where the will of the people shows up, it is services, good governance, economy, health, education, infrastructure, development, rule of law and transparency that matter.

The failure of authoritarian Arab regimes, supported by Western powers, is as much a failure of political ideology as it is a failure of good governance and services. Ordinary people are not in the game of world visions, global systems, international orders or power balances. They go by the practical wisdom of life, and much of it is grounded in meeting simple needs in simple ways. In other words, the debate about political Islam cannot just be about what a particular Islamist group says or does concerning grand political and ideological issues.

I witnessed a good example of this at a major social event in London this week. The event, called Islam Expo, was organized by British Muslims in cooperation with a number of other British institutions. While we were discussing the future of political Islam on the sidelines, thousands of Muslims of various ethnic and cultural backgrounds were flocking to the event itself. Of course, they were not coming to listen to what the “experts” had to say about this party or that country or issue. They were coming to treat themselves and their families to all sorts of “worldly” things, including cooking contests, art exhibitions, graffiti lessons, face painting, sports events, concerts, theaters, poetry recitations, bank loans, real estate  presentations and numerous other things.

They were “political” to the extent to which any of these things was political. They were the real events of the day, not the expert talks. This is an example from a European capital. Are things any different in Muslim capitals? How about the countryside? The desert? The high-tech cities of the Gulf?

Political Islam was a reaction to the aggressive expansionism of modernity and the rapid decline of political power in Muslim lands. Its ideological mindset was shaped by a desire to seek and gain political power. Its main target was to take over the state. But the nation-state turned out to be the curse of all political parties in the 20th century. Leftist, nationalist, liberal or Islamist, all political movements had to deal with the problem of the nation-state, what kind of a narrow social imagery it presented and how it attempted to obfuscate and kill the creative energy of the individual and the community in the name of protecting the state. Those who sought to take over the nation-state and sit on it failed miserably in terms of both political vision and good services. The modern nation-state remains the central problem of all political movements and social activism in the Muslim world and elsewhere.

What about Muslim hip hop? Well, in the same venue where real people carried on with their real lives, there was a concert of the famous Muslim hip hop group Outlandish. The concert was attended by several thousand people in the middle of London. All theories of global world order, power struggle, etc., faded into sound bites and lyrics with hundreds of listeners singing and joining the hip hop frenzy.

And I was left wondering who had really captured their imagination.

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On 14 June 2008, a wide coalition of grassroots organizations — including NOLAPS (New Orleans, Louisiana Palestine Solidarity); INCITE Women of Color Against Violence; New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival; and the Third World Coalition of the American Friends Service Committee — held a historic event called “Liberation Hip-Hop,” which commemorated the 60th year of the Nakba, the dispossession of the Palestinian people.

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Islamabad, July1: Much to the chagrin of conservatives who say music is ‘haraam’ (forbidden) in Islam, hip Pakistani youngsters are listening to a new kind of music that spreads the “message of Islam”.

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Palestinian Rap Group DAM Use Hip-Hop to Convey the Frustrations, Hopes of a Dispossessed People

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