Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam
TRUE believers are essential to rock 'n' roll. That's especially true in heavy metal, a sound fueled not just by raw aggression and noise, but by youthful feelings of frustration and rage, railing loudly against rules and authority. The greater the repression, the heavier the metal.
By that measure, any metal to emerge from the most restrictive regimes across the Middle East and North Africa should be the hardest rock of all, feeding off real poverty and oppression largely unknown to American rock fans. It is a landscape of war, dictatorship and uncertain democracy, where songs of horror and intolerance are reality-based, not fantasy. As one metalhead in Morocco told author Mark LeVine, "We play heavy metal because our lives are heavy metal."
LeVine is one of the truest believers of all, a passionate adherent of Afrobeat visionary Fela Kuti's declaration: "Music is the weapon of the future." A professor of Middle Eastern history at UC Irvine and sometime musician, LeVine documents some vibrant, if marginalized, hard rock scenes across the region in "Heavy Metal Islam," and comes away convinced of the "revolutionary potential of a bunch of kids."
In chapters devoted to Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan and Israel and the Palestinian territories, LeVine hears an explosive cry for freedom he argues could have a role in resolving the communication breakdown between ethnic groups, sects, generations and classes. Whether that outsized hope is realistic or misplaced, the music he found during five years of travel represents a stirring alternative voice for Muslim youth.
He describes an environment where rapid globalization has shaken identity and community, places such as Morocco where the rich live more lavishly than ever and young multitudes from slums of Casablanca and elsewhere have few places to turn beside the local mosque. That gap, writes Le- Vine, is the "caldron that produces both Morocco's metalheads and its extremists."
Heavy metal musicians in the Islamic world are not typical careerists but musical revolutionaries putting everything at risk for little payoff beyond dreams of free expression. The price has been high, writes LeVine. Morocco initially repressed the scene, convicting 14 metal fans in 2003 as Satanists recruiting "for an international cult of devil worship." In 1997, more than 100 players and fans were jailed in Egypt, where the grand mufti demanded they repent or be executed. (They were eventually released.) That same year in Iran, homes were raided and metal fans arrested.
