THE Algerian singer-songwriter Rachid Taha, 46, likes to tell the story about the night he met the Clash. In 1981, when he was the leader of Carte de Séjour ("Residence Permit"), a pioneering band from Lyon, France, that combined Algerian rai with funk and punk rock, the Clash played a concert at the Théâtre Mogador in Paris. Mr. Taha, a huge fan, bumped into the band on the street outside the theater and handed them a copy of his group's demo. He never heard back, but a year later the Clash released "Rock the Casbah," a raucous sendup of Middle Eastern politics with a suspiciously Carte de Séjour-like sound: slashing electric guitar, a dance beat and a lead vocal by Joe Strummer filled with undulating Orientalisms. To this day, Mr. Taha says he believes that his recordings inspired the song. "How else could they have come up with it?" he asks with a grin.

On "Tékitoi," his sixth solo album, he reclaims the song. As a tribute to Mr. Strummer, who died in 2002, Mr. Taha recorded "Rock El Casbah," an Arabic-language version that tricks out the song's familiar melody with swooping, Egyptian-style strings, Moroccan flute, qanun and other traditional instruments. The result - "Rock the Casbah" sung as though inside the Casbah - deepens the song's ambiguities. Is "Rock El Casbah," with its images of sheiks gusting through the desert in Cadillacs and cracking down on "degenerate" disco dancers, an indictment of the oil-choked, religiously fanatical Arab world, or a wry comment on the West's cartoonish vision of the region? No listener to the recording can doubt that it is both, or that in Mr. Taha, a rumpled North African with a buzz saw voice, the Clash has an unlikely heir.

"Rock El Casbah" is just the latest stunt in a career that has been devoted to provocation and musical cross-pollination. Mr. Taha, who has lived in Paris for two decades, is a leader of the current generation of rai musicians, but he is more politically confrontational and sonically adventurous than suave international stars like Khaled and Cheb Mami. To even label Mr. Taha a rai singer is a bit misleading; his fierce blend of rai, arena rock, electronica and agitprop is a genre unto itself - a kind of postmodern North African dance-punk - and his new album is his most ambitious: a suite of songs about the chaos that has enveloped the world since Sept. 11, 2001. "Tékitoi" is among the most eloquent musical responses to that day and its aftermath, certainly the most explicit to emerge from the Arab world. Asked to explain the album's genesis, he said, "I dreamed of singing my nightmares."

Understatement is not one of Mr. Taha's specialties. There may never have been a lyricist quite so enamored of the imperative form; the songs on "Tékitoi" - "Lli Fat Mat!" ("What Is Past Is Dead and Gone!"), "H'asbu-Hum!" ("Ask Them for an Explanation!"), "Safi!" ("Pure!") - are packed thick with exhortations and aphorisms, which Mr. Taha delivers in a lusty growl. The arrangements are no less bombastic, mixing traditional North African rhythms and string orchestra flourishes with pummeling big-beat techno, distorted electric guitars, snatches of Bo Diddley, Led Zeppelin and other macho sounds. "Meftuh'!" ("Open!") is typical: a churning midtempo song that finds Mr. Taha bellowing curt commands over power chords, a rattling beat, Arab-flavored lines picked out on mandolute, and surf-rock riffs by the British guitarist Steve Hillage, Mr. Taha's longtime producer and collaborator. He sings: "Drop the worries in a net! Some will fall out, some will remain!/Don't rejoice for that which has come! Don't regret that which is past!"

Mr. Taha has always been prone to harangues, but "Tékitoi" is even more blunt than past albums like "Made in Medina" (2000). He strove, he said, to strip all artifice out of his lyrics and speak directly to "the man on the street"; his model was "Plastic Ono Band," John Lennon's famously unvarnished 1970 "primal scream therapy" record. But Mr. Taha's songs also look back farther, to rai's early 20th-century roots in Oran, the polyglot Algerian port city where he lived before emigrating to France with his family at 10. Rai (which means "opinion" in Arabic) began in Oran as bawdy, catchy wedding music, but quickly became an outlet for youthful discontent and protest against French colonial occupation. You can hear echoes of that rebel tradition in songs like "H'asbu-Hum!," which lashes out at a truly epic list of bêtes noires: "Liars, thieves, humiliators, killers, oppressors, traitors, the envious, the rotters, the diggers, propagandists, destroyers, humiliators, slavers, the lazy/Get rid of them! Ask them for an explanation!"