Sara hardly comes to Israel from France, and Ghidian risks arrest and a huge fine if he accepts the weekly offers he still receives to be sneaked into Palestinian East Jerusalem to play at a wedding or hotel. It forces one to consider heavy metal or hip-hop, or whatever genre of music one is exploring, through the lenses and filters of Islam rather than on its own terms, imposing a religious dimension onto a scene a large share of whose members were not religious or at least not normatively religious or refused to associate the music they loved with the religion in which they were raised, which, although less universally than before, in their minds still saw most nonreligious music, especially extreme rock, as a violation of Muslim morality, if not law. So have the intelligence services, especially during the Syrian era, because metalheads were activists. Not everyone stuck with the scene, though. No sooner had Slacker, Seif, Stigma, and I sat down to talk, however, than I got a phone call from someone named Ibrahim, saying he was on his way to meet me.
nest...