Shyam Bhatia in Cairo
EGYPT’S only two hard rock bands have abandoned rehearsals, hidden their poste rs and locked up their CDs after a police crackdown on heavy-metal fans brande d as Satanists. A satanic fever sweeping the country has prompted some Islamic leaders to warn that “deviants” deserve the death penalty, and Egypt’s opposi
tion newspapers have jumped on the bandwagon.
When the first group of fans was arrested late last month, Al Wafd published a picture of five teenagers waving to their friends. The caption said they were
making satanic gestures to the crowd.
Their weekly pilgrimage to a Cairo cemetery where “worshippers of the devil” a dmit to digging up skulls has created a national scandal. Police say about 300 “devil’s disciples”, aged from 18 to 25, have been arrested and questioned in
the past fortnight.
Hasan, 22, is a student at the American University in Cairo. He admits to lout ish behaviour by some of his friends but insists “they were just having fun. I sn’t that what young people do all over the world?”
The most pernicious foreign influences are seen as heavy-metal groups like Met allica and Megadeth. Police have confiscated scores of their CDs from homes in the upper-class suburbs, and say they will be listening carefully to the lyri
cs.
The arrests, during the holy month of Ramadan, have shocked many senior govern ment officials, famous actors, musicians and leading businessmen who did not r ealise their children had swapped beer and whisky for the blood of cats and pi geons and been tattooed with skulls and other symbols of the occult.
Police say the fans met at least once a month at the Commonwealth cemetery in the wealthy suburb of Heliopolis. Behind the headstones young men and women fr om both Muslim and Christian families would exchange their clothes for black l eather jackets and and T-shirts emblazoned with skulls. Hard rock was played a s the fans dug through graves in search of human bones. In their confessions t o police s ome admit to digging up as many as 15 skulls in one night. They belong to Brit ish and other Allied servicemen who fought Rommel’s troops in the World War II .
“We used to dance to heavy metal,”says 22-year-old Khalid, a student of commer ce and English at Cairo University. “After that we would slaughter a cat or a bird and smear our bodies with the blood. Most of us also got high and each ri tual ended with an orgy.”
His friend Raouf says the rituals included ripping apart the Koran and smashin g a crucifix to demonstrate the group’s abhorrence of conventional religion.
Sociologists have been called in to help understand what went wrong with these children of respectable families. Dr Ahmed Al Magdoub of Cairo University say
s: “The absence of democracy in our country has created an intellectual vacuum that sucks in unacceptable foreign influences.”
The Imam of Al Azhar university, on the other hand, says the real villain in t his national tragedy is Israel. Sheikh Mohammed Syed Tantawi said: “This is pa rt of a Zionist conspiracy, aimed at corrupting our youth.”