TAQWACORE: The Documentary

Michael Muhammad Knight, whose book Blue Eyed Devil was reviewed in Parabola’s “The New World” issue, has been getting a lot of press lately. In addition to his latest works, Impossible Man and Osama Van Halen, Knight has been working with Eye Steel Films on a documentary about the taqwacore movement, which he had a heavy hand in (un)defining.

Knight is most famous for his first book, The Taqwacores, which was a work of fiction chronicling the lives of a handful of Muslim punks living in typical punk squalor. What for Knight might have been an attempt to create a world where he could feel at home being both a punk and a Muslim, quickly revealed an already existing world of real-life punks of Muslim background.

Before the book was officially published Knight had been selling/handing out stapled photocopies of the book in mosque parking lots. The book circulated with a bit of a cult following and soon enough Muslim punk kids were contacting Knight to alert him to their existence. Thus a movement was born (or more appropriately, given a name): “Taqwacore.” “Taqwa” is Arabic roughly translated as God Consciouness. “–core” is what any self-respecting punk places on the end of any and every hybrid manifestation of hardcore music (grindcore, queercore, Krishnacore, et al).

The most recent trailer for the Taqwacore documentary can be found here. Enjoy!

 

FINDING KALI MA

The search for devotees of Kali Ma has begun.

Finding places where people gather to worship the aspect of God of severed heads is not necessarily an easy task. There’s nothing particularly secretive about Kali worship, it just tends to often be the practice of either A. Amma or Bhagavan Das devotees who, while fine enough people, are not necessarily my main focus here, or B. immigrant communities that aren’t necessarily interested in proselytizing and thus do not have fancy websites calling all those outside the diaspora to the faith.

 

THE NEXT BIG THING

The Situationists were a radicalized group of international post-Dada ex-artists and political theorists who in the 1950s and 60s attempted to expose everything from the banality of grid-like city planning to the mediation of reality through images and commerce. One graffitied statement attributed to them reads, “Boredom is counterrevolutionary.” An unabashed declarative such as this has always had a special place in my heart. Yet, lately I have been wondering if an obsession with subverting boredom has led us down a rather boring path itself. Especially when it comes to the commercialization of spirituality, perhaps raising our hands and admitting to an excessive ennui is just what we need to do.

 

JESUS, BUY ME A BANJO

For me the term “Christian Rock” has always been synonymous with “bad music.” It’s happy, it’s slightly arrogant in that “I’ve been saved” kind of way, and more often then not it just seems manufactured (think: N’Sync with the Spirit of Jesus running through their veins). But these days I am finding (though I admit I’m slightly skeptical) that as all good well-read twenty-somethings should do, taking an old approach to living and making it radical again is as American as a log cabin in Brooklyn.