This chapter focuses on heavy metal music and culture in the Middle East. It provides a summary of previous research on metal in the region and touches upon common clichés of metal as a source of counterculture, revolution and change. It then addresses the complicated relationship between metal studies and Orientalism. It is the author’s contention that research on metal in the Middle East has been directly influenced by Orientalist discourse. The author further argues that the impact of this discourse has led to the politicisation and exoticisation of a particular figure – the ‘Muslim metalhead’. This chapter seeks to contribute to the current discussion on ‘Oriental metal’ as an attempt to exotify the very existence (and art) of metalheads from a region that has been geopolitically framed as the ‘Middle East’.

This chapter examines how a variety of writers have strategically manipulated reductive ‘Orientalist’ strategies of representation across quite different texts and historical moments. It begins with a discussion of the life and works of Sake Dean Mahomed, Travels of Dean Mahomet (1794) and Shampooing or Benefits Resulting (1822), the first Indian to write in English and publish in Britain. It also draws briefly on the letters of Ignatius Sancho to show how both writers similarly exploit and play on the concept of ‘exoticisation’ to create different personas which aid their passage through British culture. The chapter highlights how the seductive trope of the ‘Oriental’ and the ‘exotic’ persisted in the reception of influential twentieth-century Indian poets who were both prominent in British literary culture, Rabindranath Tagore and Sarojini Naidu. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Hanif Kureishi’s much later invention of Karim Amir and his father in The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), Englishmen ‘almost’ (Kureishi), to show how all these writers deliberately straddle multiple positions and use dualities, the ability to look in two directions at once, to their own advantage.