‘Baladi Iran…’ – playing Palestinian music in revolutionary Tehran

“Culture can make us friends and make us enemies… a people without music culture is not a
people.” – George Totari

In February 1980, the Palestinian-Swedish band Kofia were invited to Tehran for a concert
marking one year since the Iranian people had kicked out the Shah dictatorship. Symbolising
the internationalism and anti-imperialist solidarity at the heart of the early revolutionary
process, activists in Iran were keen to make links with others confronting fascism, and
brought political musicians from Palestine and Chile to perform in front of thousands of
Iranians. A fleeting moment in a tumultuous history, there are no known recordings of the
event but, during filming for a new journalistic documentary, Kofia band members
remembered the trip fondly and told of their experience in graphic detail.

In Silvi’s Palestinian restaurant in Gothenburg, Sweden, veteran Palestinian songwriter

George Totari laughs that researchers had thought he had died years ago. Now in his 70s, he
left his native Nazareth in 1967 as Israeli occupiers tightened restrictions on free movement
and waged a war of conquest for the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan
Heights; echoing the 1948 nakba, more than 950,000 would leave in the wake of the naksa
(“the setback”) of 1967. Landing in Gothenburg, Totari found Sweden “more Zionist than the
Israelis themselves”, with politicians cosying up to the Israeli regime and public sentiment
hostile or indifferent to the Palestinian struggle. Nevertheless he found a support base in
radical anti-apartheid and anti-imperialist street movements. Totari founded Kofia with
leftist Swedish musicians in 1972 and built an enthusiastic grassroots following, recording
four albums by 1988.

Among the many involved in leftist politics in the 1970s, Totari had become acquainted with
Iranian activists working to support the movement against the Shah and other international
struggles. The Shah had been granted a royal welcome in Stockholm after the US-sponsored
coup in against the democratically elected Mossadegh government 1953 and Sweden
sponsored building contracts under his regime in the 1960s. In late 1979, the musicians
received phonecalls from their band leader to report that Kofia had been invited to Iran.
“You had to think twice,” remembers flute player Bengt Carlsson, as “things were tense…
there was a revolution going on.” Taking a virtually empty flight through Russia, the few
other passengers included a Chilean group based in Stockholm.

Vocalist Carina Olson reports that their Iranian contacts “saw that the Palestinian and
Chilean people had their own struggle against imperialism and fascism, just like the Iranian
people against the Shah.” During the trip, Iranian revolutionaries expressed their gratitude
for the training and support they had received from Palestinian groups in Lebanon.
Palestinian percussionist Michel Kreitem, whose family were forced from their Jerusalem
homes in 1948, points out that Kofia’s contacts were leftist rather than Khomeinist forces.
Among others, they were invited by a faction of the People's Mojahedin, “at that time a
revolutionary organisation... Kofia´s performance in 1980 in Iran was in support of the
people of Iran against the Shah’s regime.”
A year after the dictator fled to the US, the situation on the ground was still unsettled, with
different political trends still able to wield popular support and organise their own means of
cultural expression. These included the rising power of the Shia ‘ulama, whose religious
leadership was backed by an influential small merchant class and bazaar-owners, but it also
included Marxist and other secular trends based on the working class and student
populations of Tehran and other urban centres. By the last days of the Shah, prominent
organisations including the Mujahideen (which split into Islamist and Marxist factions),
Tudeh and Fedayeen splinter groups all had their own underground publications, weapons
and means of organising. The communists had particularly close links to the Palestinians.

The Kofia concert at the city’s main university campus was totally DIY. A mixed crowd of
over 6,000 people packed into the hall, with many sitting cross-legged on the floor. As the
crowd gathered, “they were chanting their songs from the revolution”, Carlsson recalls. The
show did not quite run smoothly. As Kofia began to play the lights in the venue went out.
Some suspected that the performance had been sabotaged but, on reflection, the university
may have experienced a power cut. As if to emphasise the guerrilla quality of the gig,
somebody wired up a set of car headlights to the doorway and the rest of the Kofia
performance went ahead, lit by this makeshift stage lighting. Outside of the concert setting,
the musicians present, two Palestinians and three Swedes, would jam with their Iranian
friends in celebratory mood, sharing protest songs with the comrades and families of the
Tehran participants. Despite travelling around in the cars of Iranian comrades, Carlsson
recollects being tailed and stopped, and had to open his flute case to prove it was not a
weapon; on another occasion the Swedish musicians were misidentified as US agents.

Kofia had already made links with the Iranian cause. For the group’s second album Earth of
My Homeland, recorded in 1978, Totari had set to music a poem by Iranian guerrilla Ashraf
Deghani, who had herself been imprisoned and tortured by the Shah regime. Her
organisation, the communist People's Fedai Guerrillas, were among “the first organisations
to fight back”, says Carlsson, and was popular among Kofia’s Iranian comrades, who
introduced Totari to Deghani’s writings; her prison memoirs reveal that the, during
interrogations, the Shah’s Savak guards denounced her as an Iranian Leila Khaled. The
album notes pay tribute to Deghani’s writings and urge solidarity with the Iranian people.
Presented with the bilingual Swedish/Arabic title Iran Mitt Land/Baladi Iran (Iran My
Country), Totari and a female chorus sang:

Iran, my land, from the Gulf, streaked with blood

to your tall, proud mountains, rabid dogs rave
Look how the clear water from your depths
is sucked into the sewage that is imperialism
But, Iran, my land, I vow,
I vow to answer,
the silence of your night
With the clamour of bullets;
the darkness of your night…

Though sung in Swedish, Totari’s songwriting style is evident in an arrangement that uses
the maqam kurd Arabic scale, playable on the European instruments that accompany his
oud and Hassan Bakri’s percussion, including flute and Greek bouzouki. Unlike most of
Totari’s other songs though, the text is treated like a short qasida (a through-composed
poem), with no chorus and little in the way of the repetition at the heart of traditional
Palestinian songs. The lyrics to other Kofia songs were written by Totari and it may be that
the group wanted to keep Deghani’s message in tact without any structural changes; other
songs on the album put women centre stage and its cover features a Palestinian mother
baking bread.

Recorded before the victory of the revolution, Totari saw Baladi Iran as part of Kofia’s
contribution to a global movement of revolutionary musicians during this period:

“South Africa, South America… Music is always used in the struggle against
oppression, even here in Europe and Sweden too. Songs are not the main weapon
but they are a very important weapon. For instance, using music, I am able to reach
other people… It is not because our representatives are going to speak, it is because
of our music.”

The Kofia journey to Iran was only one of many stories in a unique band history, which is
itself only one memoir in the multidimensional history of Palestinian music. Kofia’s Tehran
concert gave a snapshot of a country in revolutionary upheaval at a particular moment in
history - many of the political forces involved were later suppressed or fell into obscurity.
Others, like the modern incarnation of the “People’s Mojahedin” (Mojahedin-e Khalq), have
collaborated with arch imperialists like John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani in the big dollar
business of US plans to destroy the Iranian state. “It’s all about profit and international
capital”, Totari says of the confrontations in the Middle East.

Kofia remained active during the 1980s but some musicians dropped out after their fourth
and most recent album Palestine Lives in 1988: “they had to pay the rent”, reflects Totari.
Their leader has retained his energy for songwriting and recently reformed the band for
concerts in solidarity with the Palestinian March of Return. As the winds of interventionism
and war become fiercer, the musical interactions of Kofia point to an alternative legacy of
political and cultural resistance and, ultimately, the power of the masses.

Dr Louis Brehony