Allah, Amps and Anarchy: On the road with the first-ever Muslim punk-rock tour

    By Evan Serpick In late august, a creaking green school bus with red camels stenciled on its side rolled up to the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo in Ohio. Seventeen exhausted, beer-reeking punks, with mohawks and dyed hair, walked up to the mosque looking for a place to rest. “I was surprised — they totally let us hang out there,” says Kourosh Poursalehi, 19, frontman for San Antonio’s Vote Hezbollah. “They even wanted CDs and stuff.” Vote Hezbollah (the band’s name is intended as a joke) is one of five Muslim punk bands that recently wrapped up a ten-date tour that took them from Boston to Chicago during August and September. The bands, which hail from Chicago, San Antonio, Boston and Washington, D.C., share left-of-center politics and an antipathy toward the president. And all have used punk as a means to express the anger, confusion and pride in being young and Muslim in post-9/11 America.

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