Mark LeVine, a musicologist at the University of California, has written a book called Heavy Metal Islam, which marks the proliferation of head-bangers throughout the Middle East. Most are young, digitally adept (they get their music from the Internet because it's usually haram in their countries), and happy to channel the frustration of living in a closed society through Metallica and Ozzy Osbourne, or rather their own domestic versions of them. Iran's O-Hum uses Western guitar riffs alongside Persian melodies and the poetry of the 14th-century Sufi poet Hafez. In Lebanon The Kordz have more or less provided the soundtrack for the Cedar Revolution. Reza Aslan at Slate reviews LeVine's book, but both writers make a major prescriptive blunder in stating what they'd like to see happen as a political consequence of Mideast metal:

The animosity between the Islamists and the metal heads is partly a result of a generational divide and partly a matter of their differing political and cultural agendas. (The metal heads are hardly interested in building an Islamic state.) But the truth is that these two dissident groups who seem to occupy opposite ends of the political spectrum have more in common than one would think: Both have similar aspirations to build a freer, more democratic society, and both have had their political views shaped by the same sense of despair and lack of opportunity that exists throughout the region.

Let's not even call quixotic the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood will start underwriting some Levantine Ozzfest. Aslan is an apologist for his faith, but is he really serious in thinking that its most radical exponents are stumping for a "freer, more democratic society"? (His allusions to Iran are pointless to his thesis because the Islamists are of course the ones already in power.) The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend, and there is no reason to think that once Hezbollah controls Lebanon, even if through fair and open elections, it will become "big tent" enough to encompass a movement that sees piety as just another bankrupt form of authority. Aslan cites Tom Stoppard's Rock n' Roll as evidence that intellectuals and music fans can come together and start a revolution. I'd pay real money to know if he thought Hassan Nasrallah was the moral or intellectual equivalent of Vaclav Havel. But it's worth pointing out that Charter 77, the Czech document that really inaugurated the Velvet Revolution, began when the psychedelic band the Plastic People of the Universe, their Warholian manager Ivan Jirous, and scores of fans were tossed in jail. At first, the intellectuals — those who Stoppard's character Jan derides as "tossers," the "official opposition" — couldn't understand what the regime wanted with a bunch of hippies and burn-outs, why it saw them as the gravest threat to the totalitarian order. Then it occurred: If these kids didn't care enough to even cut their hair, how was it possible to get them to collude in any part of the Big Lie? They'd never mouth the cant phrases or enact the empty pantomimes of "socialism," much less believe in it as actually existing or otherwise. The music rebels didn't want to change their society; they wanted to exist entirely apart from it. But there was nothing really stopping the intellectuals from linking up with them. (Havel anatomized all this brilliantly in his essay "The Power of the Powerless.") So it raises an analogous question: If Middle Eastern governments start locking up heavy metal bands and their legions of followers, will the Islamists speak out on their behalf? And if they do, how sincere will their activism seem when it's all the blasphemers and unveiled women in lipstick and ripped jeans who are the ones being rounded up? [Slate]