The Taqwacores is a novel about a strange community, to put it mildly. To even try and come up with a single word or a sentence that could capture even the gist of the crew of Muslim punk artists is mindwrecking.
The title, “Taqwacores”, combines taqwa, the Arabic word for “piety,” with “hardcore,” used to describe many genres of angry Western music (and also adult movies). So the protagonist Yusuf Ali experiences “taqwacores” as deep Muslim piety mixed with angry hardcore music (played in praise of God), and mixed with a dose of sex (both soft and hardcore). When I say mixed, I mean piety/music/sex often coincide. The story begins when Yusuf, who comes from an average Muslim family of Pakistani origin, lodges in with a group of Muslim youth in Buffalo. There stops mundaneity. Every trace of the average, the regular, the orderly vanishes. There is not a moment Yusuf’s mind is not twisted and bent. What fascinates him the most is perhaps the burqa-wearing feminist guitar player who leads men in prayer and delivers sermons. A lot of stuff for some Muslims to be angry over. But Muhammad Knight, speaking through his characters, arguing back and forth through their own dialogues, seems to suggest, there are many things Muslims should be angry about such as Osama bin Laden and the likes of him, and their picture of Islam that they try to palm off on other people. The punk crew can rage against things such as the treatment of Muslims in the post 9-11 America as well as the moral-police in a Muslim country who let dozens of women burn inside a building because they would not let streetwalkers see women without traditional hejab (head-cover etc).
Muhammad Knight was born an Irish Catholic in upstate New York and converted to Islam as a teenager. He studied at a mosque in Pakistan but became disillusioned with Islam after learning about the sectarian battles after the death of Muhammad. He said he wrote The Taqwacores to mend the rift between his being an observant Muslim and an angry American youth. He found validation in the life of Muhammad, who instructed people to ignore their leaders, destroy their petty deities and follow only God. In the novel, Muhammad Knight often makes references to various Sufi poets who were rebels of their times. One of the characters even claims boldly that the Islamic messenger Muhammad was the hard core punk artist of his time. The small community sing in praise of his anti-establishment actions, his smashing of false idols etc. The book paints the Muslim punk scene with such flavor I am not at all surprised some readers contacted the author and asked where and when were the forthcoming concerts. (Note: Mark Levine wrote a book about the current rock and punk scene in the Middle East, entitled Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam.)
One can say a lot about why and how disturbing and innovative, and yet how old-fashioned the book can appear in its focus on identity crises. One thing that strikes me is the way a community is described. We conceive of community as a gathering of people who have a common ground, a common essence perhaps. Community is often based on myth, be it of religious or secular nature. The motley crew of The Taqwacores indeed have something in common, their love of God. Yet, they are both religious and absolutely against religion. There is nothing they more respect and disrespect as Islam. They absolutely love it, and yet any “ordinary” Muslim would say they disrespect every single aspect of Islam, except perhaps devotion to God himself. To them, to maintain a dose of disrespect to religion is the best way to avoid what Islam is against, the worship of anything but God. They try to demythologize the myth of Islamic community and at the same time uphold it. Their community is not a single thing connected to for instance body, fatherland, nation, leader, language. Any such community, to them, loses the essence of what J-L. Nancy called being-in-common, and the with-together. Even though they believe in God, their “in-common”, their being-in-common does not amount to a substance that absorbs everything. Rather what they share is a strong sense of finitude and a lack of substantial identity, ideal or empirical such. They are inifinitely aware of their finitude, of their lack of infinite identity in the face of the God they worship through they punk rituals (which are not even real rituals because they change from day to day). The interesting thing is that they are not really kids with shattered identities, simply alienated, and all that jazz. They are quite certain in their persuasions and do not hold back in their extreme need to express their positions, spiritual or political. They expose themselves totally, in the true sense of the word: they pose themselves as open to others in the deepest intimacy of their own being. This seems to me what makes their peculiar community, a community that is not society they react against. Community but not society.
Note: The Taqwacores is coming out as a film. Read more at Zabiha News. The picture below taken from this site.
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