'Heavy Metal Islam': Muslim youth and a lot of idealism

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Heavy Metal Islam Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam By Mark LeVine 296 pages. Paper, $13.95. Three Rivers Press.
This professor of Middle Eastern history walks into a bar in Fez,Morocco - right from the get-go, Mark LeVine's "Heavy Metal Islam:Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam" is notyour typical dry academic slog.
(Did I mention he's also a longhaired Jewish rock guitarist whosebio lists gigs with Mick Jagger and Dr. John?) So when somebody inthat hotel bar starts talking up the local punk and metal scenes,an incredulous LeVine is hooked. "There are Muslim punks? InMorocco?" Quicker than you can whistle "Rock the Casbah," he's onthe trail of Western-influenced underground music movements thathave blossomed under authoritarian regimes across the Middle Eastand North Africa.
Going to meet the seven-string guitarist Marz of Hate Suffocation,a Cairo band, LeVine confesses, "I still couldn't tell thedifference between death, doom, black, melodic, symphonic,grind-core, hard-core, thrash and half a dozen other styles." (Marzexplains that his group plays a cross between death and blackmetal: "But it's not blackened death metal!") Despite a certainamount of scholarly dogma that goes with the territory - here anycombination of "neo-liberal" and "globalization" is as ominous anepithet as Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" - "Heavy Metal Islam" offersthe hit-and-run (as well as hit-and-miss) pleasures of a livelyroad trip.
Practicing a first-person brand of shuttle diplomacy as he movesbetween countries and cultures, musicians and Islamic activists,LeVine manages to unpack enough cross-cultural incongruities tomount his own mosh pit follow-up to "You Don't Mess With theZohan." An ex-Mossad hairdresser is scarcely more anomalous thandisheveled Moroccan riot grrrls, virtuoso Egyptian metalheads,Lebanese "muhajababes" (young women wearing full head scarves, armyfatigues, tight black T-shirts and Hezbollah wristbands),Tupac-influenced Palestinian M.C.'s, "the Israeli Orientaldeath-doom metal band Orphaned Land" (complete with a devoted Arabfollowing) and rapt Iranian Iron Maiden acolytes. LeVine not onlymeets and eats with Muslim headbangers, he jams with them inapartments, studios and outdoor festivals, taking in the food andthe noise and the people as if it were all a movable metal feast.
Eagerly seizing on the stereotype-busting possibilities of "an18-year-old from Casablanca with spiked hair, or a 20-year-old fromDubai wearing goth makeup," LeVine would like us to see them as thefaces of an emerging Muslim world, potentially a much lessmonochromatic place than the one represented on TV by the usual"Death to America" brigades. "Heavy Metal Islam" turns the notionof irreconcilable differences between Islam and the West on itshead, appealing to the universality of youth culture as "a modelfor communication and cooperation" in the Internet age. LeVinereckons the likes of Metallica and Slayer provide a brute linguafranca that knows no borders, opening up breathing room incloistered societies, gradually undermining rigid belief systems -a benign, bottom-up brand of globalization as opposed to theruthless corporate- or state-sponsored kind.