Taqwacore SXSW Showing

For those of you who have not read the Taqwacores by Michael Muhammad Knight, please add it to your Spring reading list. If you are not very familiar with Islam, then start with Blue-Eyed Devil, which is a great personalized and street level view of Muslims in contemporary America. Then you can move on to the Taqwacores. A film has been made about Taqwacore Muslim punk music and individual lifestyles, which I hope to incorporate into teaching over the next year. Below is an article on the film showing in Austin, TX.

A defining moment for punk Islam? | Basim Usmani:

"The Taqwacores is really a film about individualism – but attention is likely to focus on the music and its sexual content. The Taqwacores, a film directed by Eyad Zahra based on the novel of the same name by Michael Muhammad Knight, is playing at the media and music extravaganza South by South West (SXSW) in Austin this March. It's exciting to imagine who will be watching at a festival that features guests such as Spike Lee, Chuck D and Devo.

I had the pleasure of seeing the film at a sold-out screening at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah last month.
Author and screenplay writer Michael Muhammad Knight and I first began communicating in 2005, when he originally reached out to me to play the character of Jehanghir in an adaptation he was scripting with a Brooklyn-based film-maker named Cihan Kaan. Budgeting issues proved fatal for that iteration, and Mike went through a few other directors before I left our fledging Taqwacore scene in America for Lahore.
It's been surreal to come back to the US three years later to a complete film and cast. In an interview, the celebrated director of Night of the Living Dead George Romero mentioned how Hollywood vetoed his first script for Diary of the Dead because it had a non-white lead.

I was reminded of Romero's words when I saw the vibrant, all-minority cast of Eyad's film. In many ways the book The Taqwacores should have been an impossible adaption to produce, with no major white characters, and its heavy ruminations on Islamic theology. In America and the UK, white audiences are not only unresponsive to minority leads, but overexposed to Muslims in particular.

The odds are stacked against the film. Eyad has taken Knight's book and trimmed it into a clearer narrative – one that begins and ends with the main character Yusef, played faithfully by Bobby Naderi. The movie follows Yusef on his safari through punk rock in America, which will likely surprise audiences. Yes, there are Muslims along the way, but the main subject in this film is Yusef's flirtation and growing disillusionment as he tries to navigate through both punk and religion. If there is a message to take from Zahra's film, it is that only you can only take what you can from the world around you. This is played out by each of the characters in their own way: burqa-cloaked Rabyah, reimagined by Naureen DeWulf, crosses out verses from the Qur'an that she finds problematic.

During the question-and-answer session after the screening, an elderly Muslim man asked the cast and crew how an unmarried woman who is obviously pious enough to wear a burqa could perform oral sex on a man. One of the crew members said that women are complicated, and dress is not a determinant in how she acts. The man said: 'Muslim women do not act like this.' There was a tense moment where the crew member responded: 'Are you trying to tell me you know more than I do, a Muslim woman, about myself?'

This movie is likely to be seen as the defining moment for Taqwacore, the way Wild Style was the defining moment for hip-hop. Many think that it was a unique feature of the Taqwacore music scene to have been inspired by a book, but so much English punk owes its own 'ultraviolence' to a fiction as well. Academics will eat up the self-referential elements of the subculture as some evidence of Generation Twitter, or whatever we've been touted as. But this relationship between people is as old as artists of different mediums being inspired by each other. In some ways, hearing my band's music open and close the movie was a testament to my enduring friendship with Knight over the past half a decade.

For other people, I anticipate The Taqwacores will be polarising. Many responded to the Muslim punk angle, which accounts for its uniqueness. But these elements are only a shrink wrap, and Eyad's adaption is not a Muslim-punk film any more than Kubrick's adaption of A Clockwork Orange is a Slavic-punk film. The film is about individualism, and how even the most rigid dogmas are, in effect, ideas we've come up with on our own. For those who are curious, the documentary Taqwacore is also being screened at SXSW.

Basim Usmani"