The Birth of Punk

A FILM BY OMAR MAJEED
TAQWACORE: THE BIRTH OF PUNK ISLAM
‘Disaffected young
Muslims in the United States
(inspired) to form real
Muslim punk bands and build
their own subculture.’
– The New York Times
MORE AT TAQWACORE.COM
‘They’re young. They’re punk.
And they’re rocking both
their Muslim and American
worlds with their music,
lyrics and style.’
– CNN
‘Although they are all
children of immigrants from
countries like Pakistan, Iran
and Syria, they came together
in part through the efforts of
an American convert, Mike
Muhammad Knight.’
– Rolling Stone
‘Punk has always been home
to the marginalized and angry
(and) Muslim punk rockers
are fighting a two-sided
establishment: one side West,
the other Middle East.’
– Newsweek
‘Some Muslims are deeming
(The Taqwacores) to be nothing
short of a revelation.’
– The Guardian
‘Their music – sometimes
political, sometimes pop –
speaks of the experience of being Muslim in America with
smatterings of Urdu, Arabic
and Quranic verses.’
– BBC
TAQWA TOUR
COMING SOON TO A CITY NEAR YOU
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TAQWACORE: THE BIRTH OF PUNK ISLAM
SYNOPSIS | Inspired by a novel, rebellious young Muslims heed a loud new call to prayer
“I am an Islamist! I am the antiChrist!” With their tongues firmly
in cheek, Boston’s The Kominas
belt out an anthem for a new generation of young Muslims. And in
this basement of a decrepit Chicago
punkhouse, a mob of like-minded
Islamic misfits sneers along.
It is the summer of 2007. The Pakistani
punkers have arrived at the last stop of
their U.S. tour and are celebrating with
tourmates. There’s Kourosh, an Iranian
kid from San Antonio who calls his band
Vote Hezbollah; Sena, a Pakistani lesbian
from Vancouver who fronts the all-girl Secret Trial Five; Marwan, whose Chicagobased group Al-Thawra pounds heavy
metal beats into Arabic drones. And there,
at the centre of it all, pumping his fists in
the air and shouting Allah hu Akbar, is a
white American convert named Michael
Muhammad Knight.
The Islamic punk music scene would
never have existed if it weren’t for his
2003 novel, The Taqwacores. Melding
the Arabic word for god-consciousness
with the edge of hardcore punk, Michael
imagined a community of Muslim radicals: Mohawked Sufis, riot grrrls in burqas
with band patches, skinhead Shias. These
characters were entirely fictional. But the
movement they inspired is very real.
Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam follows Michael and his real-life kindred spirits on their first U.S. tour, where they incite
a riot of young hijabi girls at the largest
Muslim gathering in North America after
Sena takes the stage. The film then travels
with them to Pakistan, where members of
the first Taqwacore band, The Kominas,
bring punk to the streets of Lahore and Michael begins to reconcile his fundamentalist past with the rebel he has now become.
By stoking the revolution – against traditionalists in their own communities and
against the clichés forced upon them from
the outside – “we’re giving the finger to
both sides,” says one Taqwacore. “Fuck
you and fuck you.” Z
Close-Up: Writer Michael Muhammad Knight
As a 13-year-old surrounded by cornfields in upstate New York, Michael
Muhammad Knight walked the dirt
roads carrying a tape deck blasting
Public Enemy, just like Radio Rahim in
Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.
Soon after discovering Malcolm X,
Knight met his dad, a schizophrenic and
self-described
racial separatist. When Michael told him
he was interested in Islam,
he said: “You
don’t like niggers do you?”
That night, Michael vowed to convert.
At 15, Michael went to Islamabad to
study at Faisal Mosque and nearly left
his studies to become a mujahideen in
Chechnya. His teachers told him he
had a more important role to play: He
should educate Americans about Islam.
So Michael returned to the U.S. In college, he became friends with straight-
edge punks, who like him, were against
drinking, drugs and partying. But Michael couldn’t keep up with Islamic orthodoxy. Feeling like a failed Muslim,
he began imagining a community with
a more punk-rock spirit.
In the winter of 2002, while living
in house in Buffalo, Michael wrote
his seminal novel, The Taqwacores.
Knight self-published it and gave away
Xeroxed copies at mosques. The book
was later picked up by Alternative Tentacles, the punk label and imprint started
by Jello Biafra.
Michael said he intended the novel to
be his “farewell to Islam.” But when
he heard of real-life Taqwacore bands
like Vote Hezbollah and The Kominas
springing up in the wake of publication,
he felt inspired to return. He toured with
the bands in 2007 in the U.S. and with a
Pakistani band, Noble Drew, in 2008.
Michael’s other books include his
memoir Impossible Man, Blue-Eyed
Devil, The Five Percenters and a sequel
of sorts to The Taqwacores called Osama Van Halen. Z
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TAQWACORE: THE BIRTH OF PUNK ISLAM
THE TAQWACORE PHILOSOPHY
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From Rumi to Omar Khayyam, Islam’s great mystical poets
have had a long tradition of challenging religious orthodoxy
– and they have often suffered for their devotion.
In the late 17th century, a Punjabi Sufi named Bulleh Shah
wrote a scathing rant against the Islamic clerics and the mullahs who had come to dominate his religion:
Yes, Yes, you have read thousands of books
but you have never tried to read your own self
You rush in, into your Mandirs, into your Mosques
but you have never tried to enter your own heart
Centuries later, in the late 1990s, a confused young man
named Michael Muhammad Knight found himself near the
end of the path to Islamic righteousness. He had studied under
fundamentalists in Pakistan and absorbed the conservative
theology coming out of Saudi Arabia, but found he couldn’t
devote fully himself to these rigid ideals. Michael felt that if
he couldn’t live his life within the rules, he must be a heretic.
With great regret, he put
Islam aside.
‘Be Muslim on your own
Back in the United
States, he fell in with the
punk kids at his college.
Their anti-authoritarianism spoke to his struggle to break
free from the structures imposed on his religion.
Soon, the question emerged for Michael: Could a person
take the best parts of Islam and the best parts of punk and
forge a new spiritual path? In a state of newfound devotion,
Michael started writing a novel about characters who embodied these ideals. He called it The Taqwacores. The Arabic
word taqwa means God-consciousness and the phrase core
comes from hardcore punk.
The novel is the ultimate manifesto for misfit Muslims everywhere, and it’s easy to see how its empowering message
has sparked a real-life Taqwacore movement: Be Muslim
on your terms. Tell the
world to eat a dick.
terms’ - Michael Knight
The novel, centred
around a house of Muslim punks, features characters who are complex and
inherently contradictory. They party at night and pray during the day. Playing music, smoking hash and reciting the
Quran. They embody the divine and the human. Saints and
sinners moshing in the same pit.
Echoing the words of Bulleh Shah, the ideals of Taqwacore
are based on the belief that if Islam is supposed to bring you
closer to God, then why not follow your own heart and not
the mortals who claim to have all the answers? Z
Live from Bostonistan, Meet The Kominas
The Kominas is fronted by two Pakistani-Boston natives, Basim Usmani and
Shahjehan Khan. The two met at their
local mosque as teenagers and immediately became fast friends. While at the
University of Massachusetts in Lowell,
they came across Michael Muhammad
Knight’s novel, The Taqwacores. Soon
after devouring it, they decided to form
their own band, The Kominas (which
means ‘the bastards’ in Urdu).
They’ve been written about in Newsweek, The Guardian, CNN, NBC and
Rolling Stone. Their album, Wild Nights
in Guantanamo Bay, made a Boston
Globe critic’s Top 10 list for 2008.
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Basim, who has grew up in the U.S. and
in Pakistan, says he’s always felt like an
outsider. As a teenager, he joined a Goth
band called Malice in Leatherland.
But soon found he wanted to express his
feelings about growing up Muslim. After
forming The Kominas and touring across
the States, he began feeling homesick for
Pakistan. He told Shahjehan of his plan
to bring Taqwacore to the Punjab.
Shahjehan always loved playing guitar. His devout parents and their circle
of conservative Pakistanis often seemed
to conflict with his desires. At 16, he becontinued on next page
TAQWACORE: THE BIRTH OF PUNK ISLAM
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Close-Up:
Filmmaker
Omar Majeed
Omar Majeed has worked as a director, writer and editor in the film and
television industry for the past 10
years. In 2001, he received a Gemini
Award for Best Editing for work he
did on the ground-breaking Citytv
series QueerTelevision, hosted by Irshad Manji.
Omar has made several short films
and documentaries, including Meet
Me and Me, which premiered at the
Images Film Festival in 1999, and
Stare With Your Ears, a documentary on Word Jazz artist Ken Nordine
whose beat-era spoken word pieces
were an influence on artists from Tom
Waits to DJ Food.
DIRECTOR’S
STATEMENT
After moving to Montreal in 2005,
Omar worked with the National Film
Board before landing at EyeSteelFilm. Working on a variety of projects,
both documentary and fiction, he has
now partnered with EyeSteelFilm on
his most ambitious and passionate
project to date, Taqwacore: The Birth
of Punk Islam. Z
Meet The Kominas
continued from previous page
gan drinking and doing drugs at an alarming rate, often falling into bouts of
depression. When Basim invited Shahjehan to help him form a band in Pakistan, it seemed like the change he needed.
The atmosphere they encountered when they arrived in Pakistan, however,
was brewing with danger and disillusionment. And not far below loomed an
underground filled with premium hashish and opium. After their first failed
attempts to find an audience in Pakistan, both Basim and Shahjehan lapsed
into drug-fueled depressions. But when they received a visit from Michael,
they soon found the means to realize their dreams of bringing Taqwacore to
the people of Pakistan with their new band, Noble Drew.
Basim and Shahjehan have recently moved back to the U.S. where they
are touring as The Kominas once more and reaching out to deviant Muslims
everywhere. Z
I can admit it. I’m not a very good Muslim. I
realized this the day I caught myself munching
on a ham sandwich while flipping through The
Satanic Verses.
Growing up in North America and in Pakistan, I felt stifled by the mosque and strived to
define myself as a secular soul. But now, in the
dark ages we refer to as “our post 9/11 world,”
I’ve found it surprisingly easier to define myself as a Muslim. As a Pakistani-Canadian,
I’ve also felt the need to counter the prejudices
inflicted upon my mother country. Pakistan is
more than a haven for Islamic terrorists. Islam
is more than the religion of the Taliban.
It was with these feelings that led me to a
young Muslim writer named Michael Muhammad Knight and his ever-expanding circle of
Taqwacores – ‘Bostonistani’ punkers Basim
Usmani and Shahjehan Khan, Kourosh Poursalehi from San Antonio and the Secret Trial
Five, Pakistani riot girls from Vancouver.
Spending time with these brave new Muslims, who dare the faithful and the non-believers alike with
their provocations, I’ve come
Ever-expanding
to realize it is not circle of Taqwacores
fundamentalism
includes Muslim riot
nor conservatism that is the girls Secret Trial Five
greatest threat to
our world. It is
silence and apathy. It takes courage to speak
out and to engage with your harshest critics.
These Muslim punks talk to everyone – from
Wahhabi hardliners at the mosque to racial profilers enforcing ‘homeland security.’
Taqwacore strikes a chord because it is youthful and unapologetic, yet it remains positive
towards Islam. There is no sense of judgment
or condemnation. There are no absolutes. A
conservative Muslim and an atheist can shake
hands and make jokes about being perceived
as terrorists. It’s all part of the scene.
Before I heard of Taqwacore, I couldn’t imagine a Muslim community that would embrace
someone like me. After experiencing Punk Islam, my relationship between east and west is
deeper, warmer and much more complex. Z
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TAQWACORE: THE BIRTH OF PUNK ISLAM
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SOUNDS OF THE TAQWA TOUR
The Secret Trial Five is fronted by Sena Hussain, a Pakistani Canadian
drag king from Vancouver. Sena, who came out to her Muslim parents in her
early 20s, decided to start the first all-girl Taqwacore band after finding The Kominas’ MySpace page. “I thought, Brown guys playing punk?” she says. “I’ve got to
get in on this.” Sena and her band were invited to tour with The Kominas in 2007.
When they all crashed the Islamic Society of North America’s annual meeting in
Chicago, they caused a riot, with organizers and police on one side and excited
hijabi girls rocking out on the other.
Marwan Kamel, 21, a Syrian American from Chicago, isn’t
overtly religious, but he takes pride
in his Arabic culture. He joined The
Kominas and the rest of the Taqwa
Tour at Michael’s request. His band,
Al-Thawra (Arabic for the revolution),
creates metal-core music with strong
Middle Eastern influences. Marwan
released the first-ever Taqwacore
compilation.
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Omar Waqar first discovered his passion for Sufism
and South Asian music
when he visited Pakistan
His first band was a Washington, D.C. punk-influenced
group called Diacritical.
Through his songs, Omar
explored racism, intolerance and Sufi philosophy.
His latest project, Sarmust,
brings together punk, rock,
qawwali and classical Indian
music.
Kourosh Poursalehi was a teenager living in
San Antonio, when he first read Michael Muhammad
Knight’s The Taqwacores. He was so wrapped up in
it, he called Michael and asked if he could meet the
characters in the book. After Michael told him that
it was a work of fiction, Kourosh said, “I’m going to
make it real then.” Under the name Vote Hezbollah,
he soon recorded and released Muhammad Was a
Punk Rocker, based on a poem in Michael’s novel.
His song is considered the first Taqwacore song.
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TAQWACORE: THE BIRTH OF PUNK ISLAM
EYESTEELFILM is a documentary film and interactive
media company dedicated to using cinematic expression as
a catalyst for social and political change. Our mandate is to
develop and create cinema that empowers people who are
ignored by mainstream media.
EyeSteelFilm was founded through making films with the
homeless community. Daniel Cross’s gritty street trilogy
(Danny Boy, 1993; The Street: a film with the homeless,
1996; SPIT: Squeegee Punks in Traffic, 2002) chronicled a
generation lost to social funding cuts, political apathy, alcoholism and drug use.
These films provided a template for using cinéma-vérité,
activism and interactivity for empowerment and change.
With SPIT: Squeegee Punks in Traffic, the camera was given
to a street kid named Roach, who at the time was living on
the streets of Montreal. Over the three years it took to make
the film, the viewer sees Roach transform from drug-addicted
street kid to filmmaker. Roach has now made three documentaries with EyeSteelFilm, including Roachtrip, Punk le Vote!,
and the upcoming Les Tickets.
EyeSteelFilm has branched out to make films on topics such
as coming of age in a modern Inuit village (Inuuvunga: I
am Inuk I am Alive, 2004) and a trilogy of films chronicling
modern life in China (Bone, 2005; Chairman George, 2006;
Up the Yangtze; 2007). Up the Yangtze was an IDFA Joris Ivens competition finalist, in official competition at the
Sundance Film Festival, and winner of the best Canadian
documentary at the Vancouver Film Festival. The film was
launched theatrically across North America in Spring 2008
through EyeSteelFilm and KinoSmith Distribution.
Over the years, EyeSteelFilm has collaborated with a wide
range of partners including: The National Film Board of
Canada, CBC, CTV, BBC Storyville, ZDF ARTE, PBS
P.O.V. and National Geographic International. In 2009, EyeSteelFilm was listed as a Realscreen Global 100 company.
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TAQWACORE: THE BIRTH OF PUNK ISLAM
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TAQWACORE
the birth of punk islam
Written and Directed by
OMAR MAJEED
Cinematography
ZACHARIE FAY
MARK ELLAM
Original Music
OMAR WAQAR
Featuring
MICHAEL MUHAMMAD KNIGHT
BASIM USMANI
SHAHJEHAN KHAN
MARWAN KAMEL
SENA HUSSAIN
OMAR WAQAR
KOUROSH POURSALEHI
Executive Producers
DANIEL CROSS
MILA AUNG-THWIN
Produced by
MILA AUNG-THWIN
Co-Producer
BOB MOORE
Associate Producer
OMAR MAJEED
Production Manager
HALIMA OUARDIRI
AMMAR AZIZ (Pakistan)
Production Co-ordinator
ANUJ KHOSLA
Editing
OMAR MAJEED
MAXIME CHALIFOUX
Online Editor
MICHAEL MK SIU
Sound Supervisor
CORY RIZOS
Still Photography
KIM BADAWI
Sound Editor
KYLE STANFIELD
EYESTEELFILM 4475 Saint-Laurent #202 Montreal, Quebec H2W 1Z8
phone 514-937-4893 fax 514-313-7383
mila@eyesteelfilm.com omar@eyesteelfilm.com
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