The hijab-clad girls started rocking out a little, but by then the organizers had already called the cops.
It was early September and the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America [ISNA] was about to wrap up in Chicago. About 400 young Muslims had gathered at a Hyatt hotel ballroom for open-mike night, hyped as a wholesome alternative to the vice-land that every big American city inevitably becomes once the sun sets.
The first few acts – Koran recitation, stern spoken-word stylings – matched the hype. But around 3 a.m., with fewer than a quarter of the original audience still around, an all-girl Vancouver punk band took to the stage. A 25-year-old singer with short black hair and a voice like a bar fight asked the crowd: “ISNA, are you ready to rock?”
ISNA was not. As the Secret Trial Five tore into what would be their first and only song of the night – a screaming frenzy of a track called Middle Eastern Zombies – people began streaming out the doors. The convention organizers went deer-in-the-headlights.
But then something changed. Those remaining began to take to the spectacle, clapping and swaying with the music. By the time a second band was halfway through its set, young women were giddily chanting along with the chorus: “Stop the … HATE! Stop the … HATE!”
That's about when the cops put an end to one of the strangest cultural mash-ups in North American Muslim history.
This is Taqwacore: a furious meld of punk and piety that first stamped its foot on the continent that September night in Chicago. For those who weren't there, a Canadian filmmaker caught the whole Chicago spectacle on tape.
The name comes from the words Taqwa – loosely translated from Arabic, it means God-fearing. The genre is only now gaining recognition, thanks to a tour and an upcoming Canadian documentary expected to be released in late 2008.
“It's a really hard thing to explain to people,” says Michael Muhammad Knight, the American Muslim convert and author who invented the genre. “I don't think Western media as a whole is ready for a complicated Muslim voice – they divide the world into good Muslims and bad Muslims.
“But these kids are pissed off about everything.”
When Knight talks about his life leading up to the creation of Taqwacore, he says this: “I grew up in upstate New York. I was raised by my mom. My dad was a white supremacist, a diagnosed schizophrenic poet-slash-racist. I met him for the first time when I was 15.” He talks as though he's reading a shopping list, as though none of this is unusual.
Taqwacore originated in Knight's head. In 2002, about a decade after he discovered Islam through rap lyrics and Malcolm X biographies, the 25-year-old became disillusioned with dogma. He tried going to college but soon dropped out.
“I was coming to class wearing this Khomeini-sized black turban,” he says. “Kids who were sitting behind me had to move; they couldn't see.”
Working as a night-shift janitor and feeling his time with Islam might be coming to an end, Knight began writing a novel about a Muslim culture he wished existed. The result was The Taqwacores, a fictitious account of Muslim punks in Buffalo. The prose swerves from mildly offensive to Danish-cartoon-offensive and beyond.
At first, before a punk rock record label published it, the novel existed only in late-night Kinko's photocopies. Then one day, Knight got a phone call from a 15-year-old San Antonio kid named Kourosh who wanted to meet these Taqwacores.
“He thought it was all real,” Knight says. “I told him there weren't any Taqwacores. He said, ‘but I'm Taqwacore.'”
