Sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. The holy trinity of youth culture has been passed from generation to generation, each new era of young people adapting the tradition and finding a new fundamental truth. However, the proverbial flame of rock ‘n’ roll—whether a torched couch, a burnt-offering guitar, or a lit cigarette—has been passed to a most unexpected group, young Muslim-Americans. Through punk music young Muslim-Americans, most first generation, are crafting a new definition of what it means to be a Muslim. However, what is even more surprising is that this revolution was born from a piece of fiction.
The movement began with the rallying cry of, “Muhammad was a punk rocker / He tore everything down / Muhammad was a punk rocker / and he rocked that town [Mecca],” at the beginning of Michael Muhammad Knight’s novel The Taqwacores. The title of the novel comes from the Arabic word “taqwa” meaning consciousness of the divine combined with the suffix “core,” which in Punk describes different types of fringe music. Before the novel, while there was certainly Muslim youth who identified with punk, the Muslim punk rock music scene did not exist in any united or recognizable fashion. A true Taqwacore movement has been born from the novel, with real young people becoming the characters of the book and living out the story.
The Taqwacores is the fictional story of a group of Muslim twenty-somethings who live together in a punk house in Buffalo, New York. The story is told from the perspective of Yusef, a Pakistani engineering student and the least “punk” of his group of friends. However, like his mohawked, tattooed, pot smoking friends, he is trying to figure out who he is as both an American and a Muslim, and whether the two identities can be compatible.
The novel is centered around Umar a tattooed and straightedge conservative, Ayyub a self-indulgent addict, Jehangir the mohawked prophet of the West coast Taqwacore scene and a drunk, Rabeya the burqa wearing radical feminist, Lynn the blond and dreadlocked convert, philosophical and openly gay Muzammil, Fasiq the pothead skater boy, and Fatima the innocent rebel. The story of their lives together is told to a soundtrack of punk music and daily prayer.
Knight’s novel is considered by many in the movement to be sort of manifesto for Taqwacore, more a self-fulfilling prophecy than a work of fiction. However, in order to understand the movement, one must first understand what it means to be punk. To define punk is itself a conundrum; the basis of punk is that it is the opposite of what everything else is, it is just one all encompassing antonym for society. The definition of punk is different for every individual and different in every situation. The originators of the punk movement in the 1970s, such as the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, and The Clash, are now such an accepted part of mainstream music—you can play “Blitzkrieg Bop” on Guitar Hero—that many might no longer consider the patriarchs of punk to actually be punk.
Whether both the movement and Knight’s novel The Taqwacores goes the way of a Sid Vicious bass line in a credit card commercial or remains on the fringe of society, the leather-studded crown of rock’n’roll has been passed to a new generation of Americans. With this crown of youth culture, Knight inherits the roll of Salinger for a new generation, as the voice of a disenfranchised generation, frantic to just live.
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