After September 11, a night at the King KingBy Siran Babayan, LA Weekly

This fall, the night before the anniversary of September 11, local Middle Eastern arts organization the Levantine Cultural Center hosted a talk between authors Mark LeVine and Reza Aslan at the King King club in Hollywood. The conversation, however, wasn't a political discourse, and the pictures projected on the wall above the stage weren't images of war. Instead, the audience saw face-painted, punked-out kids and a girl in hijab and an Iron Maiden T-shirt at the 2006 Dubai Desert Rock Festival, illustrating what, according to LeVine and Aslan, is really shaking up in the Arab world: metal.

This year saw the rise of Arab metal madness. Both LeVine's book Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam, and Eddy Moretti and Suroosh Alvi's documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad capture a secret musical culture whose proponents take real-life risks every time they attempt to perform, all for the love of the devil horns (praise Allah). The former is a map across the Middle East's musical underground, the latter, a poignant story of one band's personal journey. If what LeVine said is true that night about having more "uncomfortably in common" with Muslims than we think, and if heavy metal is no longer white-man's trash but belongs to the universe, then Iron Maiden is the world's savior, and the band's mascot, Eddie, is the new peace symbol. 

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