What I Am Reading: "The Taqwacores" by Michael Muhammad Knight

This book and its sequel are the final offspring of the “Ong’s Hat” article I read a month or two ago, with their author, Michael Muhammad Knight, quoted therein. His former mentor was involved in the creation of the Ong’s Hat prank, and Knight covers this in one of his books. I followed this trail down the Wikipedia link rabbit hole and found myself interested in Knight’s branding as “the Hunter S. Thompson of Islamic literature.” I’m not much of one for religious texts or memoirs, but I thought that the topic was intriguing enough (and “alternative” enough, let’s be honest) to try his pair of novels.

The Taqwacores is a musing on a fictional (American) Islamic punk rock scene. This scene was created wholesale out of Knight’s imagination, but the idea proved so compelling that an actual scene came about following its publication. I will fully admit that this book is aimed at two audiences, and that I am a part of neither. However, even though I could have used a glossary of Arabic terms, I found it to be a very fun book.

The novel doesn’t have much of a plot, and the main character does not have much of a personality. Instead, he is simply a vessel to receive the theological wisdom and philosophical musings of his friends, mainly the heroic and visionary Jehangir and the burqa-clad feminist Rabeya, who has a lot to say about various misogynist teachings and histories and gives the narrator a burqa to wear, to see what it is like. Another of the leaders of the common house is Umar, a straightedge and very orthodox Muslim. He, like the other characters, is painted by the narrator in very heroic terms; and occasionally the text takes time to bask in their charisma. As the narrator describes the thinking of Jehangir, the most heroic of all:

“…like Saudi, Turkey, Pakistan, and Indonesia, the U.S. would only end up with its own distinct flavor of Islam. But for the time being it was an Islam full of promise and vitality; still young enough to be malleable, still a long ways from growing old and stale and rigid like its cousins. I think the roundabout dream of Jehangir Tabari might have been that American Islam would forever stay that way, freely shapeless like water.”

I was constantly lost in the Islamic references, but I knew enough about punk culture to get by. Knight wasn’t content to simply invent a cadre of “taqwacore” bands travelling from “Khalifornia” to the Buffalo setting, but also went on to invent an entire fictional Islamic counterculture in the United States; including the fictional Buzz Sawyer, Sufi poet and trucker (which the internet tells me was actually the stage name of a wrestler), and Abu Afak, a Muslim pulp novelist from the 1940s who wrote such space operas as Twenty-Four Septendecillion and others with explicitly Islamic themes. I was at least mildly disappointed to learn that these books don’t exist.

I am not qualified to wade into any theological disputes, but I found this book to be very fun, and the author clearly put a lot of his soul and his own ideas into it. Through the narrator, he gives a bit of a thesis statement for the culture that he dreamed into existence:

“Punk rock means deliberately bad music, deliberately bad clothing, deliberately bad language and deliberately bad behavior… loving who you are and somehow forging a shared community with all the other fuck-ups. Taqwacore is the application of this virtue to Islam. 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 had some inherent moral superiority making the world rightfully ours.”

I found it to be a good introduction to Michael Muhammad Knight. I look forward to the next novel, which has more of a focus on riot grrrl Rabeya, and we’ll see after that.