ROCK AGAINST RELIGION

"In a region controlled by senile dictatorships and fundamentalist faith, the unemployed young – who make up 65 per cent of the population – have very few windows through which to yell their rage. Metal gives it to them. Reda Zine, one of the founders of the Moroccan heavy metal scene, explains: "We play heavy metal because our lives are heavy metal." The point of the music is, he says, to rage against "the vampires of intolerance and superstition". The guitarist of Iran's hottest young metal band, Tarantist, agrees: "Metal is in our blood. It's not entertainment, it's our pain, and an antidote to the hypocrisy of religion that is injected into all of us from the moment we're born." The police states are responding by beating heavy-metal fans with heavy metal bars. In Egypt, the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak – funded by the US and EU – has ordered mass arrests of metalheads for "undermining the faith of Muslims", and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is following close behind. But still millions of young Muslims and atheists defiantly sing along with Metallica: "No need to hear things that they say/Life is for my own to live my own way." (Independent, 8 September) RD