Concerts Caught in Kuwaiti Culture Clash

The Indian rock group Indus Creed began pounding out a beat, and the crowd responded with frenzied dancing never seen before in this conservative Persian Gulf state. Then there was silence.

After only 10 minutes, organizers abruptly announced the show was canceled and told the disappointed fans to leave. The Information Ministry, which lifted a decade-old ban on concerts earlier this year, claimed organizers didn’t have permission.

But the dispute over permits masked the larger conflict between the relatively liberal side of Kuwait, which welcomes such entertainment, and the increasingly influential Muslim fundamentalists, who view such concerts as decadent and non-Islamic.

“There was no vulgarity, it was clean fun,” Farida Dias, a 52-year-old Indian, complained as she left the abbreviated concert June 6.

Not so, Walid al-Tabtabai, a Kuwait University instructor in Sharia, or Islamic law, said in a commentary on public entertainment.

“Isn’t there a wise man in this country who can stop this blind misuse of freedom? Today an army of models, singers and wrestlers, and tomorrow the flood, God forbid,” he wrote.

Kuwait’s government is caught in the middle.

It favors the reintroduction of social freedoms for which Kuwait was noted before the fundamentalists became a strong force in the mid-1980s.

The government tolerates and even promotes local events in a bid to curb the wanderlust of Kuwaitis, who travel abroad frequently and spend vast sums of money in search of diversions not found in the desert nation.

The government even sanctioned a World Wrestling Federation match.

“Our main aim is to limit this frightening money flow out of the country,” said Sheik Saud al-Sabah, the information minister. “We will try to bring back the migrating birds.”

But soon after the concerts resumed, fundamentalist lawmakers introduced a nonbinding resolution urging the government to ban concerts that allow young men and women to mingle in a way “unfamiliar” to Kuwaiti society.

Parliament’s education committee approved the measure, and Nasser Sorkhoh, the head of the committee, expects it to win passage when it goes before the full legislature after the government comments on the proposal.

There is much more openness than in puritanical Saudi Arabia. But the Kuwaiti concerts would not raise eyebrows in nearby Bahrain, which has numerous bars that serve alcohol and allow dancing.

Sheik Saud, the information minister and former ambassador to the United States, said supervised entertainment at home saved Kuwait millions during a nine-day holiday in April. He estimated that only half as many Kuwaitis traveled abroad compared to similar holidays in the past.

“We want parties in the streets, we want carnivals,” said Abdul-Mohsen al-Khaldi, 24, a supporter of the concerts. “I have great hope that things will change.”

Fundamentalists, however, also make their voices heard outside the halls of government.

Kuwaitis wrote letters to newspapers saying they were appalled by scenes of girls kissing singers at one concert. They were similarly upset by the “naked bodies” displayed at the wrestling match.

“Maybe change has to be gradual so as not to aggravate the extremists,” Abdullatif al-Rowdhan, head of Kuwait’s Writers Assn., said after the Indus Creed concert was canceled.