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This updated reissue of Mark LeVine's acclaimed, revolutionary book on sub- and countercultural music in the Middle East brings this groundbreaking portrait of the region's youth cultures to a new generation. Featuring a new preface by the author in conversation with the band The Kominas about the problematic connections between extreme music and Islam. An eighteen-year-old Moroccan who loves Black Sabbath. A twenty-two-year-old rapper from the Gaza Strip. A young Lebanese singer who quotes Bob Marley's "Redemption Song." Heavy metal, punk, hip-hop, and reggae are each the music of protest, and are considered immoral by many in the Muslim world. As the young people and subcultures featured in Mark LeVine's Heavy Metal Islam so presciently predicted, this music turned out to be the soundtrack of countercultures, uprisings, and even revolutions from Morocco to Pakistan. In Heavy Metal Islam, originally published in 2008, Mark LeVine explores the influence of Western music on the Middle East and North Africa through interviews with musicians and fans, introducing us to young people struggling to reconcile their religion with a passion for music and a thirst for change. The result is a revealing tour de force of contemporary cultures across the Muslim majority world through the region's evolving music scenes that only a musician, scholar, and activist with LeVine's unique breadth of experience could narrate. A New York Times Editor's Pick when it was first published, Heavy Metal Islam is a surprising, wildly entertaining foray into a historically authoritarian region where music reveals itself to be a true democratizing force--and a groundbreaking work of scholarship that pioneered new forms of research in the region.

Like great port cities throughout history, Jaffa has always welcomed strangers; enough of them to earn its sobriquet "mother of strangers" (umm al-gharīb). The gateway to Palestine and the Levant since ancient times, Jaffa is not only the site of multiple events of biblical or broader religious significance. With the incorporation of Palestine in the late 18th century into the still developing modern world system, Jaffa became a city of culture and commerce, with winding casbahs and tree-lined boulevards, Turkish baths and Jewish bordellos, sand dunes and orange orchards—lots of them, as we'll see—and some of the most striking architecture, never mind coastline, of the Eastern Mediterranean. North African Jews, Haurani Bedouins, Afghan traders, rabbis from Beirut, troubadours from Jerusalem, divas from Mansoura, and more than a few European Christian and Jewish pilgrims, all made their way to and through Jaffa over the centuries, joining a local population that septupled to over 17,000 during the course of the 19th century. They were joined by tens of thousands of Jews for whom Jaffa was a port of entry to Palestine with the onset of Zionist colonization. Jaffa, in other words, is the perfect locale for a novel, especially when, as with award-winning architect and writer Suad Amiry's first novel, Mother of Strangers, most of it happens to be rooted in truth.

This article argues that Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory represents criminalized state behaviour at the most systematic, intricately planned and executed. Evoking the quantum physics of Israel's matrix of control, the article argues that to understand how it feels to live as a Palestinian today requires the mindset of a particle physicist, not a social scientist. Life in Israel/Palestine involves negotiating a host of forces over which the average Palestinian has as much control as the average electron or proton does over the nuclear and quantum forces determining its path. The power embodied in Israel's matrix of control lies in the state's ability to shift rules, tactics, amplitude and frequency of the forces, strategies and techniques and technologies of occupation. The article argues that the Occupation and the conditions it creates have become normalized, and that maintaining a situation of confusion and ambiguity is key to making the Occupation effectively permanent.

It has become something of a commonplace to argue that music played an important role in the revolutionary upheavals that overthrew the Bin ʿAli regime in Tunisia and forced Husni Mubarak from power in Egypt. This recognition let the larger scholarly community—indeed, the world—in on a secret that a small group of MENA scholars have for decades been trying to share: it's not merely that music is society, as Jonathan Shannon argues in his contribution to this roundtable; it's society in "Real 3D," at once a microcosm, mirror, and prism of "all the social forces and contradictions of culture, politics, and history." As a mirror, music reflects society's contending forces back onto itself. Under the right conditions it also refracts them prismatically, acting as a filter and an amplifier that brings (and sometimes forces) subaltern sentiments into the public consciousness. Music, like other art forms, can help foster and sustain social and political change.

This paper examines the political-economy and cultural dynamics and discourses underlying the emergence of the Palestinian Hamas and the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front. Both movements emerged in the late 1980s as responses to continuing (neo) colonial conditions in their countries. I explore to what extent the various processes commonly referred to as "globalization," both the world-wide economic transformations epitomized by post-fordism on the macro/system level and neo-liberal structural adjustment programs within countries, and—perhaps more important—its cultural dynamics contributed to the rise and power of both movements. I examine the socio-economic situation in Algeria and Palestine-Israel during the 1980s and link it to the politics developments in both countries. Next I review the events behind the founding of both movements and the main components of their ideologies and strategies. Finally I explore their arguments to determine whether the political-economic or cultural pressures unleashed by globalization were the determining factor in their emergence and ideological development. I conclude by comparing the two case studies to determine if there are common threads that can serve as the basis for a region-wide investigation of the role of globalization in the emergence and/or rise to social hegemony of Islamist movements in other MENA countries.