Books

In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, it was discovered with something of a shock that, as a rule, Americans didn't know much about Arab or Islamic culture. This impression was strengthened when we waged war against Iraq and were hard-pressed to find anyone who knew Shiites from Sunnis, or could translate for the troops.

Not much has changed. In 2007, Pew Research found that nearly 60 percent of Americans know very little or nothing about Islam; what we do know is often informed entirely by reports of anger and violence.

Into this breach leap two new books that shed unexpected light on unvisited corners, ask questions the authors admit they can't answer, and remind readers that the vast majority of Arabs and Muslims do daily battle with the same extremism that terrifies the West.

Mark LeVine's Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam plunges into North Africa and the Middle East through the back doors and side windows opened by loud music and a quest for integrity. He finds a world few Americans would suspect, one that includes Egyptians who willingly risk imprisonment and Israelis who divorce themselves from their nation's myths to speak truth to power, often in the teeth of genuinely deadly struggles.

Performing with and interviewing musicians across five years and 16 countries, Mr. LeVine finds that from Morocco to Iran, Palestine to Pakistan, there exists a "hybrid language" that reflects a cultural heterogeneity, a willingness to drape local traditions in the sound of death-, doom- or symphonic-metal. Thus is created "an alternative system that builds an open and democratic culture from the ground up."

"We play heavy metal," says Moroccan star Reda Zine, "because our lives are heavy metal."

By contrast, Moustafa Bayoumi's How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America has an intimate feel, as the author listens closely to the dreams and realities of seven young Arabs living in post-9/11 America. Ultimately, we learn that this community is as varied as any other: Here's a gung-ho Marine who, after two tours of duty, opposes the Iraq war; a former wild child who plans a stricter upbringing for her own children; a young woman who, unjustly incarcerated with her family after the attacks, is now in college and plans a future in human rights advocacy.

These are, first and foremost, American stories, "absorbing and refracting all the ethnicities and histories surrounding [them]," but suffused with an often silent grief as the protagonists struggle to find themselves and their futures in a country they love but in which they are, too often, forced to pay for crimes in which they were as much victims as anyone else.

When tackling such complex subjects, lapses are inevitable. Both authors make only passing efforts to untangle the confusion between "Islam," the faith of 1.5 billion people only some of whom are Arab, and Arabs, many of whom are not, in fact, Muslim. Neither grapples with issues faced by women who attempt to carve out "alternative systems" in these cultures.

In the end, the sense of hope may be the authors' greatest contribution: Mr. Bayoumi writes that his research left him not gloomy, but optimistic, and Mr. LeVine expressly believes that the metal community has the potential to generate the kind of earth-shattering change so many in the region long for.

Emily L. Hauser is an American-Israeli freelance writer; she has been covering the contemporary Middle East since the early 1990s.

Rock, Resistance and the Struggle

for the Soul of Islam

Mark LeVine

(Crown Books, $13.95)

Being Young and Arab in America

Moustafa Bayoumi

(The Penguin Press, $24.95)

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