ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Muslim youth and popular music. Muslim youth in the diaspora not only download and listen to music, but play it. Online one can find many requests from Muslim youth for rulings on whether playing the guitar. Popular music defines not only eras in human history, but taste cultures, and the cultural identities of young people as they grow up in those eras. Young Muslims participate creatively as both listeners and producers. Music cultures are affective, dialogical and transformative. They are also transnational. Muslim heavy metal has an even smaller following in the diaspora, yet it is even more subversive, attracting a high level of moral panic in Islamic communities because of associations with satanism. Muslim popular music as a youth preference is intrinsically a counter-narrative to the radical Islamist meta-narrative of distance, superiority and vengeance because it makes an implicit statement about the way things should be, and could be, in the diaspora.
