The first two minutes and 52 seconds of Dawlat al-Islam Qamat are undeniably beautiful. It is little more than an Arabic chant, sung by a man whose voice is so relaxed you expect him to drift off halfway through. It sounds timeless – as if it has been dug up from the eighth century. The man’s melody has got a gentle swing, something you could easily imagine a jazz drummer playing behind to give it some oomph. Soon he starts layering his voice, so it sounds like a whole choir is trading lines, the song’s impact growing as he does. Musically, it’s better than just about any other religious song you could name.  But just as you are starting to enjoy it – perhaps thinking you might tell your yoga teacher to play it in class – some sound effects drop in. There’s a sword being unsheathed, the stomp-stomp-stomp of soldiers’ feet and some stuttering gunfire. And it is about that point you remember exactly what you are listening to. This is, to give it its English name, My Ummah, Dawn Has Appeared. It is the most popular song in the Islamic State. It is, arguably, the world’s newest national anthem. “The Islamic State has arisen by the blood of the righteous,” it goes. “The Islamic State has arisen by the jihad of the pious.” God Save the Queen it isn’t.  “The Islamic State isn’t going to jump up and down and say, ‘This is our official song,’” says Phillip Smyth, a researcher of Middle Eastern affairs at the University of Maryland and a jihadi music obsessive. “But it’s recognised by the fighters and supporters as kind of their anthem. It just spells out everything they stand for: the Islamic State has arisen, we’ve defeated so many enemies, we’re going to keep on doing so. And it also sounds good. Even for an infidel like me, it has a certain quality. It invigorates certain spirits.”  Behnam Said works for the Hamburg branch of German intelligence, analysing jihadi trends in the country, and is about to complete a PhD about jihadi songs, known as nasheeds. “The first time I heard it, I couldn’t get it out of my head for two weeks,” he says. “It touched me in a different way to other nasheeds. I’d sit on the metro and it’d come into my head.”  The Islamic State’s “high-tech media jihad” – its use of YouTube, Twitter and Instagram to boost support – has received reams of press coverage over the past year. But its use of music seems to have slipped by. That might be because its songs are in Arabic and so harder for non-speakers to take in. It might also be because they all sound similar: a cappella chants sung by men and drenched in echo, all with spoken word intros in which someone says the Arabic word for “Introducing …” like a judge on The X Factor.  But these songs are vital to the organisation. They provide the soundtrack to all the Islamic State’s videos; they are played from cars in towns they control, rather like US gangs use rap songs to demarcate their territory; they are even played on the battlefield. The group also seems to churn them out on an endless array of topics. Earlier this year, it put out an eight-minute nasheed called Al-Maliki, Your End Will Be Tomorrow, directed at the former Iraqi prime minister, which seemed to be little more than an exercise in trolling. More recently, it has been issuing songs about the “life of security and peace” the Islamic State is providing, as if to convince people in the territory it controls it is worth supporting. If you need more evidence of the importance of these songs, some rival jihadi groups have reportedly banned them from areas they control.  Jihadi nasheeds date back to the late 1970s, when Islamic fundamentalists in Egypt and Syria started writing them to inspire their supporters and get out their message. “Nasheeds as a genre of religious songs are old,” Behnam says, “but supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and other groups started making ones that were political and rebellious in the 70s. That was new.” These were circulated on cassette, reaching a wide audience.  Some stringent fundamentalists, mainly Salafists with their literal interpretation of Islam, condemned nasheeds, saying music was unIslamic and a distraction from studying the Qu’ran. But this didn’t stop them. Even a teenage Osama bin Laden founded and sang in a nasheed group in an effort to avoid being seen as “too much of a prig”, according to The Looming Towers, journalist Lawrence Wright’s history of al-Qaida.  Most Islamic scholars now say nasheeds are acceptable, especially during wartime. In fact, the only major disagreement over them seems to be what they should sound like. Most Sunni jihadi groups, including the Islamic State, see instruments as haram (forbidden) and take a bare-bones approach to their composition. Almost all their nasheeds are a cappella, the only accompaniment being an array of sound effects from horses’ hooves (symbolising the Prophet Muhammad’s time in the desert) to bombs.  But Shia groups such as Hezbollah do not care for such self-restraint. Many of their nasheeds are packed with drums, sometimes seeming to place as much importance on rhythm as rap or ragga. Their singers also apparently cannot get through a verse without heavily processing their voices with Auto-Tune, and they’re so packed with young men dancing they seem more boyband than militia. Shia groups also have a seemingly endless supply of nasheeds set to dramatic string arrangements, which could have been plucked straight from some Hollywood thriller.  “These groups will call their songs nasheeds, but sometimes they don’t even fit in with their own ideologies,” says Smyth. “If Ayatollah Khomeini was still around, he’d probably look at some of the techno stuff and go, ‘What the hell is this?’ But the groups are all operating off some kind of religious guideline. They’re getting an ayatollah who’s saying, ‘Yes, this is halal. Go for it.’”  The Islamic State’s songs may be a step back musically from those being produced by Shia jihadis, but the organisation is changing the landscape of nasheeds in other ways. “Most jihadi groups tend to recycle nasheeds that have been around for years, but the Islamic State has its own wing, the Ajnad Media Foundation, that’s dedicated to producing them,” says Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, who has become a controversial figure since being accused of becoming too close to the jihadis he studies. “It’s using them to say it’s new and distinct, as well as to get across its message.”  Behnam agrees, pointing out that the Islamic State’s nasheeds often contain a different message to other groups. “Older nasheeds tend to have been produced by groups that are small, militant and clandestine, and they have a more defensive message – but there were many saying, ‘They can torture us, but we are holding to our beliefs.’ The Islamic State’s nasheeds are not defensive at all. They are about a hope to change the world for ever.”  No one seems to know who exactly is writing the Islamic State’s songs. The consensus appears to be that the words are written by poets, the melodies by musicians, while a separate person sings. “In Iraq, there are lots of different production companies,” Phillip Smyth says, “and the same in other countries. In Lebanon, I once wanted to see how it was done and sat in a room that was in a guy’s mother’s basement. He had a little keyboard, a little recording thing, and he put together this entire song for a Christian militia in a week and a half.”  The influx of westerners into Islamic State ranks – which includes a German former-rapper called Deso Dogg who has tried his hand at nasheeds with appalling results – is unlikely to lead to a demand for more modern songs, says al-Tamimi. “The jihadis with their mindset don’t see their songs as dull. They feel repulsed by the Shia’s willingness to use instrumentation and things like this.”  My Ummah, Dawn has Appeared was released online in December 2013, and its ongoing popularity shows its staying power. If the Islamic State does continue, could it be named an official anthem? One thing seems to stand in the way: anthems are a western concept.
A stark Arabic chant is emerging as the anthem of the Islamic State. And it’s just the tip of a booming industry turning out songs of bloodshed and devotion. Alex Marshall investigates the rise of the jihadi ‘nasheed’