Muslim Punks: Coming of Age

The low-budget 'The Taqwacores' uses Muslims who are hard-core punk rockers to present compelling ideas of how modern Muslims worship in the U.S.

Los Angeles Times

They are, to be sure, ideas that go unexplored in the Koran: Is it a sin to slam dance? Can a person wear his hair in a mohawk, smoke weed like Snoop Dogg and still call himself a devout Muslim under the eyes of God? The micro-budgeted feature "The Taqwacores" — which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, opened in New York last week and reaches theaters in Los Angeles on Friday — tackles such issues head-on.

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FOR THE RECORD:
"Taqwacores" review: The Nov. 11 Calendar section review of the film "The Taqwacores" said a character in the film, Yusef, was an Arab American. The character is a Pakistani American. —

An adaptation of Michael Muhammad Knight's self-published 2003 novel and directed by novice filmmaker Eyad Zahra, "The Taqwacores" encapsulates a shotgun marriage of two seemingly incompatible worldviews: "taqwa," an Arabic word that can be defined as "piety" (but also "God fearing"), and the anarcho-rebellion of hard-core punk.

"If you strip down what punk is really all about, it's questioning the standards of the status quo and society and really looking for the ultimate truth," said Zahra, 27. "And that's the same thing that religion does."

The movie follows a nerdy Arab American college student named Yusef (played by Bobby Naderi) who moves into a dilapidated Buffalo, N.Y., apartment populated by an array of broad punk archetypes who also are devout Muslims — "the boys who missed the Islamic center picnic and the girls who date behind their father's backs," as a character named Jehangir (Dominic Rains) puts it. Each of them navigates the middle ground between the mosque and the mosh pit in a different way.

There's a burka-clad Riot Grrrl who scribbles Patti Smith lyrics on her wall and puts forward the notion that a woman doesn't necessarily need to make her face visible to qualify as an outspoken feminist. Another electric guitar-playing skateboarder character tests the limits of his faith by chugging beer and declaring, "I'm not big on the 'Islam is one way' approach."

The Taqwacores generally reject specific tenets of Koranic dogma: that homosexuality is a sin, that masturbation amounts to "self-harm" and that a man is justified in beating his wife to discipline her.