Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam

Thursday 13.1.2011. While The Kominas try to start a punk scene in Lahore, the white-convert writer Michael Muhammad Knight discusses his imagination of a punk-inspired radical Islam. Watch this great documentary film at the 2. Norient Musikfilm Festival (12-15.1.2011) in Bern, Switzerland.

My story with taqwacore began when I met The Kominas in Boston in May 2009. Inside a greasy diner next to the South Street Station, over a few beers and cheese fries, we chatted about the media co-optation of bands, images, and music associated with taqwacore.

Over-emphasizing the band members as “Muslim”, the press has overlooked the non-Islamic sides of the band’s music, image, and membership. Liberal media has portrayed the band as a good “American Muslim” alternative to those bomb-clad “Terrorists.” Other media outlets simply took The Kominas’ lyrics out of the context of their intended satirical effects, reading them at face value and linking the band’s witty anti-status-quo provocations with the public’s fear for the racialized, foreign “enemy of the state.” Masters of punk satire, members of The Kominas continue to challenge the establishment, tackling issues either concerning their own experiences of living in the post-9/11 United States, or related to older civilizational or Orientalist discourse that ideologically partitions the world into “Muslim” and “western” halves. As a musical group, The Kominas goes on with its inventive aesthetic experimentations mixing early British punk sounds with 1970s Bollywood classics and Punjabi pop tunes.

The Kominas is known for its iconic role within the grassroots music culture self-labeled as “taqwacore.” The prefix “taqwa” is a Qur’anic Arabic term that translates as “piety” and denotes fear and love for the divine. The suffix “core” refers to the punk roots highlighting the do-it-yourself ideology central in hardcore music scenes. Michael Muhammad Knight, a white-convert, coined the term “taqwacore” in his novel about a group of college-aged individuals who live in a house together in Buffalo, New York. Using social media and email, Knight reached out to various punk rockers of Muslim heritage living in North America, forming a network of friends, artists, bloggers, filmmakers, and other enthusiasts around the self-identified label of taqwacore.

Omar Majeed’s documentary film Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam picks up from the moment Knight joined together with five U.S. and Canada-based bands including The Kominas and toured North America, in the summer of 2007. This film follows Knight’s initial fictional imagination of a punk-inspired radical Islam and begins to track the real-life stories of several members of the nascent taqwacore scene. Unlike most narratives of localized music scene, Majeed’s film captures the transnational extensions of the taqwacore story by following Shahjehan Khan and Basim Usmani of The Kominas on their quest to start a punk scene in Lahore, Pakistan. Majeed’s film centers more on an intellectual questioning that leads to the rupture of punk and Islam, than on the musical innovations, inter-ethnic dynamics, or media exploitations among and around the taqwacore associates.

What goes on under the Taqwacore banner is an interpretation of Islam and the humanities surrounding it. It is also an interpretation of life in the era bombarded by intensive global exchanges of media, music, ideologies, images, subcultures, and spiritualities. The life of taqwacore resists discursive simplifications and flattening. What I know is: Taqwacore is a not a religion. It is not even an alternative to “Islam,” as portrayed by mainstream U.S. media. Taqwacore is a cultural space for alternative understanding, practices, identities, and relationships to and around Islam. And the journey to understand it only begins, and should not end, with Majeed’s film.