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Michael Muhammad Knight (MMK) is in New York, my hometown. He lets me pick a place to meet. I walk right by him, because I do not recognize him. I curse him, thinking that he, a New York newbie, has given me the wrong street corner. After I keep him waiting for 30 minutes (because of my mistake), I offer to buy him a cone from The Big Gay Ice Cream Truck. He pays for his. I am not sure where the cone, or his boot, may end up as we talk.
MMK is considered to be the father of the American Muslim Punk Movement. His originally self-published novel, The Taqwacores, was photocopied and spiral-bound. Sold out of car trunks, given away for free, or bought over the internet (like I did in 2003), it was a sensation at the time. It is a sensation now, but for very different reasons. Soft Skull Press released a perfect-bound edition, with minor changes to the content, and it’s amazing what a difference presentation will make. In addition, they are releasing three more of MMK’s books: the sequel to Taqwacores, Osama Van Halen; his travelogue through Muslim America, Blue-Eyed Devil, as he searches for the true identity of Nation of Islam founder W.D. Fard, and his autobiography, Impossible Man.
It’s easier to understand the unease MMK causes when you consider his work together. The Taqwacores was seen as inflammatory by dominant Muslim-American voices when it emerged, packed as it is with drinking, drug use, sex, and Sunni-Shi’ah friendship. But it undeniably captured a sense of what a post-1965 immigrant Muslim community could look like. All the characters are recognizable. It is as much Islam in America as Malcolm X, as Al-Maghrib, or as Muslims for Progressive Values. I do not want to take anything away from MMK, but he did not create a community, he gave it voice. These people existed before his book, but by writing about them, he put them in the spotlight. People have since coalesced around the core community, so he can clearly be credited with helping to grow it.
What he did create, inadvertently, was a Muslim punk scene—as many thought the bands he wrote about were real. The following passage from Taqwacores, captures this ‘unorthodox’ community perfectly:
I was surrounded by deliberately bad Muslims but they loved Allah with a gonzo kind of passion that escaped sleepy brainless ritualism and the dumb fantasy-camp Islams claiming that our deen [religion] had some inherent moral superiority making the world rightfully ours.
A New American Exotic
The Taqwacore movement is the name of the Muslim punk scene. Taqwa means God-consciousness, while the suffix comes from the hardcore community, a subgenre of punk. Perhaps the most famous of the groups to emerge is the Kominas, who have recently gone on tour and have had several articles written about them. Of course, the best reporting comes from smaller venues, although this LA Times feature does capture one of the more important reasons the Taqwacores is infamous now:
Cavicchi said the constant emphasis on the Muslim-punk angle was unavoidable, especially in the context of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“However, I would hate to see Taqwacore stall in public discourse as a form of exotica,” he wrote. “Their songs are actually quite catchy, with interesting dynamics and a variety of sound textures, all of which are a testament to their musicianship.”
The book now represents a new American exotic, a testament to the wide diversity of religious, immigrant, convert, gendered, racial, etc. experiences of America that are represented. And it deserves to be taken seriously across disciplines. MMK is not only an amateur anthropologist, but a keen observer of character, and a good historian.
Osama Van Halen, a sequel of sorts to the Taqwacores, is far more fragmentary, and less geared towards a continuous narrative. MMK inserts himself, breaking the wall between fiction and reality. As a story, it is not as strong. However, MMK continues to demonstrate a keen eye for the issues of the Muslim-American community. On page 124, he lays out the following conversation:
”You see,” droned the MSA’s Fonz apparent, “it’s haram for a muqallid to do ijtihad, the same way that it’s haram for a mujtahid to do taqleed.” The other kids nodded like zombies. Amazing Ayyub went over to them and just stood there, waiting for someone to acknowledge him. Saliha rolled her eyes at the oversize machine gun resting on his shoulder.
Amazing Ayyub is a carryover character from Taqwacores and is on a mission to kill zombies. When he walks in on this conversation, it is the typical college conversation of students who believe they are discovering truths that have never been known before, and getting it all wrong. The setting is a post-MSA (Muslim Student Association) event, and some boy is apparently trying to show how intellectual he is, using terms like muqallid (one who follows), ijtihad (independent reasoning), mujtahid (one who does independent reasoning), and taqleed (to follow someone else). The flexibility in these terms makes the statement sound like a truism: one who follows does not think; one who thinks does not follow. However, the reality is very different and the passage is in fact a very erudite criticism of superficial understandings of the faith. There is also an undercurrent of Shi’ah-Sunni misunderstandings present in this statement, and throughout much of MMK’s work.
Tags: america, islam, malcolm x, michael muhammad knight, muslim, punk, taqwacore
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