Satanism, West and East

Dangerous Minds has recently been reporting on US hysteria over Satanism (I guess it's a Halloween season theme)? One of them is on a 1970 film, in the pseudo-documentary/ethnographic Mondo Cane vein, called Witchcraft '70. The other is about an evangelical preacher, Dr. Jerry Johnston, and a video he is in that dates from the late 1980s.

In both cases it is all moral panic: Satanism and animal sacrifice, human sacrifice, ritualistic sex, drug use and abuse, desecration of Christian symbols, and so on. In Witchcraft '70, it's hippies who are the focus, and we see nude hippy Satanists doing hallucinogenic drugs and a ritual that involves the violation of nubile young women. In the Johnston vid it is heavy metal music that is associated with the evils of Satanism. In both instances, Satanism is presented as a danger that threatens young people, and urges more sober adults to be on the look-out for the warning signs.

I presented a paper at the American Anthropological Association meetings in 2000 on the 1997 crackdown on Satanic heavy-metal fans in Egypt. I've never published the paper, but you can read an account of it here.

Below is a photo of one of several popular exposés of Satanism that I found in Cairo in summer 2000. This one is entitled: Satan Worship: Rituals of Sex and Blood.

As I am considering reworking the paper for eventual publication, I find it interesting to what degree the 1997 panic over heavy metal Satanism in Egypt (and another, much less hysterical one in 2012), Morocco in 2003, Lebanon in 1996-98 and 2002, and 2012, among others, have their ideological origins in the various panics over Satanism (probably dating from the late sixties) in the US. The discourse, East and West, is remarkably similar, as are the themes and motifs.

The big difference, of course, is that in the case of the US, the danger is internal, whereas in the Arab World, the danger is presented as external: Satanism is an alien, Western, sometimes Zionist, threat.

(Some of these issues are also discussed, of course, in Mark Levine's Heavy Metal Islam.)

More, inshallah, later.

P.S. added 11/11/13: I just came across this source on Egypt's heavy metal, which I've not yet read (but I just ordered the book on Interlibrary Loan): Benjamin J. Harbert, "Noise and its Formless Shadows: Egypt's Extreme Metal as Avant-Garde Nafas Dawsha," in Thomas Burkhalter et al, eds.,  The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, Modernity, Wesleyan University Press. (The book comes out this Wednesday!)