t hurt because I wasn’t expecting it — a sensation like toilet plungers placed at my ears, toggled furiously. The meat spilled from my kebab, splatting like horror movie gore onto my sneakers. Kids rushed the stage, hands raised, mouths open. Everyone was just as startled as I: No one believed the show would go ahead; no one believed it would last. Noise poured from the stage, only to loop indignantly back into the amps as wails of agonizing feedback. It was if the spirits of pharaohs, buried only a few miles from here in big brick triangles, were protesting this sonic indignity.

I was swept to the front of the crowd, limp remainders of kebab in my hand. Above me, Wasted Land, late of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, threw their heads forward in unison. The screams came from Emad Mujalled’s diaphragm, heaving upward in the clutch of his black T-shirt. Thick rolls of belly fat now had a function — to propel rage from the pit of his gut into the world. His beard dripped spit and sweat.

We came to conquer, he yelled.

The other four members of Wasted Land emitted a low growl and the innocuously named Egypt Music Gates gig was — against every odd imaginable — suddenly underway. And I wondered whether Wasted Land and their ilk — like the ancient Israelites who destroyed the ramparts of Jericho with blasts of their ram’s horns — could bring down the walls that contained them with nothing more than their instruments. Outside, in the sinking light, men in suits stood smoking, watching. It was their job to kill the noise.

he air off the Nile was warm and soft, and the boats — a motley flotilla of fellucas, river ferries, and retrofitted cruise ships — bobbed and blazed with colored lights. This made the sight of seven metal heads lumbering down the boardwalk, laden with the appurtenances of their subculture — long greasy hair, studded work boots, dangling chains, T-shirts depicting death in all its grisly manifestations — seem all the more incongruous. I had doubted their existence at first, but not any longer. They were Saudis, members of the bands Wasted Land and Deathless Anguish, visiting the city for the euphemistically named Egypt Music Gates Fest. This may have explained their presence among all the jeans-and-T-shirt-wearing young men and stroller-pushing families, but didn’t really explain their presence. For that, I had to rely on the voice at the other end of my Nokia.

“I’m running late,” said the man who called himself Karim, voice husky from a decade’s worth of yelling along to Mayhem and Dio. “I’ll be at the Dokki Sheraton in thirty minutes.” I bought a cob of brazier-roasted corn, dodged offers of “special massages” from men with no teeth, and walked along the Tahrir Bridge toward the concrete hunk of the Sheraton Hotel.

Half an hour later, Karim struggled out of a toy-like Fiat cab. Six and a half feet tall, furious blotches of acne on his cheeks, Karim heaved himself forward onto the Cairo street. He stared down at me, his small eyes poking from a donut of pasty flesh, hair buzzed down to the scalp. His black T-shirt was marbled with sweat stains. Egyptian metal heads call themselves Metaliens: I half expected him to demand that I take him to my leader.

Instead he said, “I welcome you. I welcome you to real metal.”

Implicit in this gentle salutation was the fact that metal is far from an anomaly in the Muslim world. There’s the Dubai Desert Rock Festival, headlined in 2008 by Korn and Machine Head. There’s Morocco’s four-day Boulevard des Jeunes Musiciens, featuring Puppetmastaz and Band of Gnawa. There are, on the occasionally active Egypt Metal portal, thousands of kids claiming to be in metal bands. Egypt alone boasts the sonic mayhem of Hate Suffocation, Wyvern, Promised Dawn, Nemesis and Ignoramas among others. I’d seen metal T-shirts in Abu Dhabi, Doha, Dubai, Damascus, Tripoli. Even Pakistan has a brilliant hard rock outfit called Junoon. Despite the genre’s seeming prevalence, Karim was jittery: As the principal organizer of the modest EgyptMusic Gates concert, he was responsible for the presence of those Saudi metal heads along the Nile boardwalk. He was taking an enormous risk, and he knew, more than anyone, what the stakes were. After all, when he was only eleven years old, Karim was charged with the rather serious twin offence of “humiliating religion and Satanism.”

Which means that Karim was arrested and thrown in jail for rocking out.

anuary 22, 1997. Dawn breaks: Imams call the faithful for fajr. This is the cue. Across Heliopolis, Mohandessin, and other middle-class Cairo neighborhoods, men with truncheons, wearing the white uniform of the Egyptian police, gather in the doorways of apartment buildings and homes. Plainclothes Mukhabarat — the fist of the regime — keep watch. As figures walk toward the mosque, these men kick their black boots against the doors of respectable homes.

Boys lie in beds. On their walls hang posters for Megadeth, Metallica, Iron Maiden. Electric guitars stand in cases layered with stickers, alongside portable amps with band names written in whiteout. They wake startled, and listen as their parents rush to the door in alarm. Flashlights blind them. Harsh hands take fistfuls of their hair. And to the soundtrack of their mothers’ wails, they are taken from their homes to nearby jail cells where they are locked up along with men who whisper the words of the Qur’an, promising to rip them limb from limb as soon as God sees fit to turn Egypt into the mother of all battlegrounds.

The raids become known as the Satanic Panic. Egyptian police swept through the lairs of young Metaliens, amassing contraband ranging from Black Sabbath to Beethoven’s 5th (the cops no doubt knowing the combination had influenced heavy metal guitarist/Zionist provocateur Yngwie Malmsteen). They ripped posters from walls, destroyed instruments, and even made off with a black Bugs Bunny T-shirt — the tchotchkes of middle-class youth the world over.

Almost 100 young suspects — between the ages of Karim’s eleven and twenty-five — were interrogated about their extracurricular pursuits. Questions ranged from the theological (“Do you participate in pagan rituals?”) to the morbid (“Do you spit on graves?”) to the veterinary (“Do you skin cats?”). It was two weeks before the public prosecutor, citing lack of evidence, ordered their release.

Fourteen days in a Cairo jail is a lifetime. (One kid, now an engineer in Alexandria, was held for forty-five days.) The press hysteria accompanying the arrests sent ripples through Egyptian middle-class society, stifling a number of then-burgeoning music scenes and establishing in the popular imagination a link between hard rock and Satanism. The accused were reportedly strip-searched and afforded the same hospitality extended to Egypt’s criminal class; the raid was reminiscent of, and organized in the same manner as, the routine dragnets that rounded up Islamist elements. This is neatly summed up by the (possibly apocryphal) story of a mother of two sons — one a metal head, the other a militant Islamist. When the cops knocked on the door that fateful January morning, the mother did what she could to clear up the misunderstanding: “No, no — Ahmed doesn’t wear a beard and he doesn’t go to the mosque! He has long hair, he wears black T-shirts with monsters on them and plays in a band called Scar Tissue. My God, you have the wrong son!” This is less a story of one family than it is a story of Egypt.

The storm passed, as one poetic reporter put it, “like the coming and going of the khamsim”; the murder of twelve Coptic Christians by Islamic terrorists grabbed the national headlines directly thereafter. Nonetheless, the Satanic Panic was a warning. Only recently have young Egyptians dared to pull on their black T-shirts once again.

The Egyptian arrests were by no means the only such incident in the region. In Morocco, for example, on March 14, 2003, there was another assault on black-clad longhairs. Fourteen young men in the capital of Rabat, all members of the country’s well-established metal scene, were arrested for a range of offences including “possession of objects contrary to good morals.” Again, it was black T-shirts that seemed to cause the most offense. (“Normal people,” pronounced the judge in the case, “go to a concert in a suit and tie.”) The Rabat arrests were met with a storm of protest — hundreds, maybe thousands of supporters rallied outside Rabat’s parliament building for the metal heads’ release. In an appeals trial, eleven of the fourteen were acquitted. Running the math, three Moroccan metal heads were successfully prosecuted for devil worship.

These arrests remind us of an interesting period in rock ‘n’ roll’s inadvertent war against tyranny. In 1968, after the collapse of the Prague Spring, when massive crackdowns and the implementation of the “normalization process” retuned Czechoslovakia to the icy bosom of Communist rule, a band called Plastic People of the Universe emerged from the wreckage. Plastic People claimed that they weren’t political, but they knew that merely by existing — by playing the music inspired by the avant-rock of Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa — they couldn’t avoid the tag. Their very existence was an affront to the powers-that-be. Partly inspired by their arrest in 1976, Vaclav Havel and other Czech intelligentsia issued Charter 77, one of the most heartfelt and articulate pleas for the tenets of basic human rights during the dark years of communism.

There was no Charter 77 after the Satanic Panic. Rather, the scene dissipated, scuttling so far underground that it would take almost a decade to re-emerge. Support from the Egyptian intellectual class was scant. Terrified youth were cowed, sent to live with relatives here, there and everywhere. A small pop-cultural fissure that could have inspired an outcry was quickly plastered over.

The reason for this lies at the heart of why the arrests took place, going as they did beyond a mere distaste for thrash metal or a loathing for the capitalist dogs that play it. Partly, they were meant, as one Egyptian economist put it, “as a sop to keep radical Islamists harmlessly diverted while showing that the regime could be just as tough on more secularist threats.” But perhaps the following offers a more plausible explanation: “Egypt was going through a particularly tough passage in its continuous struggle to come to terms with influences from the West, what the late longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer might call the ‘ordeal of change.’ It’s not really the devil, or even the West with which Egypt is wrestling,” wrote reporter James T. Napoli. “It is wrestling with change.” In this, it is no surprise that the authorities claimed that the Metalien’s Satanist HQ was a newly opened McDonald’s in Cairo’s swanky Heliopolis neighbourhood.