an Iron Maiden CD, "Death on the Road", one of the members of the band Acrassicauda, which was featured in the film, said: "This is what life looks like here." Another member explained: "If I didn’t play drums as hard as I can, I would kill somebody."

Until now, it was largely metalheads who faced the most extreme ire of conservatives in the Muslim world. The genre’s reputation for "Satanism" and debauchery have long since made it a lightning rod for attacks by Christian conservatives in the West. In recent decades, it has been attracting similar attention from religious and political leaders in the Muslim world. In the 1990s and early 2000s, "Satanic metal" scares saw scores of metalheads arrested, beaten, prosecuted and threatened with execution by their countries’religious and political establishments.

With their focus on violence, war and corruption, hardcore metal and hip-hop were natural channels for young people in the Arab and Muslim world to express their anger at their countries’ patriarchal, repressive and sclerotic political and social systems. Whether it was Indonesia in 1998, Tehran in 2009, Tunis in 2010 or Cairo a few weeks later, metalheads, rappers and punks anticipated and could be found at the front lines of most of the major political upheavals of the past decade and a half in the Arab and larger Muslim world.

Indeed, the anger, despair and emotion so effectively channelled by these genres of music are the same anger, despair and emotion that drove Mohamed Bouazizi to set himself on fire, and that drove hundreds of