“Taqwacore is dead. Long live Taqwacore”

Siddharta Mitter, writing for MTV Iggy, brilliantly assesses the history and future (if any) of Taqwacore, frequently mis-identified as "Muslim Punk." (But -- how would you identify it?)

...whether Taqwacore is dead or has simply mutated, the intersection of Islam, among other brown identities, and music will remain busy and vibrant so long as there are youth around to rebel against the boxes that confine them. 


“No one wants to be pigeonholed,” [Omar] Majeed says. “Taqwacore itself was a reaction against being labeled—as Muslim, brown, too religious, not religious enough. Now people are doing new things with the moniker. That’s happening, and that’s good.”

Al-Thawra's "Wine of Power"--in tribute to wave of Arab revolutions

Free and timely download from the doom-crust punk band Al-Thawra, out of Chicago.

Al-Thawra says on their blog: "In celebration of the wave of revolutions spreading rapidly across the Middle East, we're proud to be giving away our song, "Wine of Power" for free download. We hope that song's lyrics of self-empowerment are something that everyone, everywhere can relate to, and hopefully something that everyone can also take inspiration from. In some ways, its anger and passion are a sign of the times..."

Get it here.

And check out their blog here. Al-Thawra is sometimes linked to the taqwacore scene. I really like their music. They are very fond of kufiyas.

"The Taqwacores" to screen at Sundance! Trailer now available on MTV!

Check out this terrific trailer for "The Taqwacores," courtesy MTV. It will screen soon at the Sundance Film Festival. Five chances to view it between January 24 and January 29. The Kominas will be there.

This makes me even more appreciative of Sundance, which screened Slingshot Hip-Hop, Jackie Salloum's film about Palestinian rap, in 2008.

Will Quentin Tarantino show up for an after-party, as he did for Slingshot?

Big congrats and mabrouk to all concerned, and particularly to Michael Muhammad Knight, the author of the novel The Taqwacores. And many other books, which all readers of this blawg should purchase and read. (Confession: I'm one of the inhabitants of Knight's Blue-Eyed Devil: A Road Odyssey Through Islamic America. It's cool to be part of MMK's vision of Islamic USA.

And of course, there are kufiyas, in the film, and in the trailer. This guy is the "West Coast Punk." From the trailer, it appears that he will be a quite interesting and provocative character in the film.


But the Riot Grrrl and the Queer Punk look promising too, eh?

misc. #2010.z

Hipsters. Orientalism. Qaddafi. Yusuf Islam. Rififi. Taqwacore. The Japanese Red Army. Any interest? Read on...

Random stuff I've been gathering for awhile. I meant to do longer posts on some of this material, but the time has passed for that. Time to get all this off my desktop. Here goes.

1. Bashing the hipsters. According to Ben Sisario, this is the place. Hipster Runoff. Only two kufiya posts, here, and here, that don't really add much to kufiya snarkiness. But if you are in search of snide, irreverent and often witty hipster satire, it's all here.

2. Popular Orientalism. Last February the New York Times published an article, in the Antiques section, about Goldsheider ceramics, very popular among the US middle class. Especially popular were the Art Deco figures of the 20s and 30s, including those featuring "harem dancers." What caught my eye was the photo of a figurine called "Aida," which the online version did not reproduce. Now I've found an image (at left). The one I saw on ebay was selling for $4000. An earlier post on the popularity of harem and belly-dance dress among the US bohemian bourgeoisie is here.

3. Gaza and pop culture. Last January, Yusuf Islam (ex-Cat Stevens) released "The Day the World Gets Round." Proceeds from the sale of the single go to UNRWA and Save the Children, for their work with children in Gaza. It's a cover a George Harrison song, and recorded with bassist Klaus Voorman, who used to play with the Beatles. I'm not a big Islam/Stevens fan, but I like this one.



4. Qaddafi, the Opera. Almost too odd to be true. News from September 2006, but still worth recording. Put on by the English National Opera in London, and called "Gaddafi: A Living Myth," it was ostensibly meant to attract younger audiences. To that end, Asian Dub Foundation was commissioned to dub the score. If we can credit The Guardian, it didn't work too well. I'm a huge fan of Asian Dub Foundation, but I can't figure out why they were involved in this project. But you can watch a clip about it here.

5. Rififi: a footnote. I had heard of this film but never seen it until last night. The name intrigued me, however, because it seemed to be some kind of riff on the Moroccan Rif. Of course this is the film that blacklisted US director Jules Dassin famously shot in Paris, was a huge hit in 1954, and reestablished his reputation (and income).

It is based on a novel by Auguste le Breton called Du Rififi Chez les Hommes, which was given to Dassin to film. He hated the novel but took the job because he needed it. In particular, he hated it because of its racism. The bad guys were all North African, and Dassin said, when interviewed later, "The truth is the book shocked me: it was all about Arab bad behavior, including necrophilia." So Dassin made the bad guys French, and focused the film in particular on the robbery caper.

The title of the film only comes up in the theme song, "Rififi," sung in the cabaret by Viviane (played by Magali Noël), but even then, you can't really make sense of what it means other than that it seems to be gangster argot. (Watch the sequence here.)

Dassin explained the meaning in a 2000 interview: "The title comes from the North African tribe, the Rifs, who were in constant conflict...So it's all about melees and conflicts and fighting, out of which the novelist Auguste Le Breton made the word 'rififi.'"

There's a history of US citizens being sympathetic to Riffians, going back to Abdelkrim's celebrated revolt against the Spanish colonialists in Morocco (1920-1926). But that's another tale.

6. The Kominas/Taqwacore. Since they toured, they've been getting lots of media attention. The Taqwacore movie (see below) has helped garner media attention too. Here's a nice AP report. My favorite line is this: "Usami said a reporter once questioned him on how he felt about some Muslims being terrorists. He responded by asking her how she, as a white person, felt about the African slave trade."

Here's another from Sapna. "[T]he band is not supportive of 1947, the partition of Pakistan. It is always much more important to be desi than Pakistani, Bengali, Indian. Having a south Asian identity is much more important than being from a region."

The film, Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam, will be screening at this year's Sundance Film Festival! Check out the film website.

Other good reports have been done, I've been trying to keep track, but right now, I can't locate the archive...Later, inshallah.

7. Japanese Red Army & PFLP on film. The invaluable magazine of Middle East art and culture, Bidoun, has partnered with the avante-garde art website Ubuweb to put up some fascinating sound and film documents. I've only just begun to explore.

Check out this one: Sekigun-PFLP: Sekai Senso Sengen (The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War), 1971.

In 1971, Koji Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi, both having ties to the Japanese Red Army, stopped in Palestine on their way home from the Cannes festival. There they caught up with notorious JRA ex-pats Fusako Shigenobu and Mieko Toyama in training camps to create a newsreel-style agit-prop film based off of the "landscape theory" (fûkeiron) that Adachi and Wakamatsu had developed. The theory, most evident at work in A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969), aimed to move the emphasis of film from situations to landscapes as expression of political and economical power relations.

In 1974 Adachi left Japan and committed himself to the Palestinian Revolution and linked up with the Japan Red Army. His activities thereafter were not revealed until he was arrested and imprisoned in 1997 in Lebanon. In 2001 Adachi was extradited to Japan, and after two years of imprisonment, he was released and subsequently published Cinema/Revolution [Eiga/Kakumei], an auto-biographical account of his life.

Yes, really, "newsreel-style agit-prop." Fascinating. (The photo is from the film, of one of the four jets the PFLP hijacked in September 1970.) Of course, if you are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, like I am, the connections that groups like the PFLP made with the Japanese Red Army as well as Germany's Red Army Faction are, to say the least, the source of embarrassment. (I'll have more to say about the RAF in future.)

There is also a short Agnès Varda film here, Plaisir d'amour en Iran, which I hope to look at soon.

And speaking of popular Orientalism--or maybe, rather, avant-garde Orientalism--there are also some Jack Smith films on Ubuweb, including Flaming Creatures, Normal Love and Scotch Tape. Normal Love is quite as amazing as Flaming Creatures, and I hope to have something to say about it in future.

Even more on The Kominas + Pakistani rock

The Kominas

Something happened to The Kominas since we last tuned in. They went on a nation-wide tour (although, for some reason, skipping Arkansas). And they got sorta...famous. Or at least created a lot of media buzz. And not because they were attracting huge audiences. Someone who knows them told me, there were maybe 50-80 people at shows per night. Interesting...not sure how to explain it. Except that the notion of Islam and punk going together continues to be a novel notion.

An article about The Kominas in the Los Angeles Times (August 12) is notable both because it comments on the rather considerable media coverage the band had received by that point, critiques it, and makes a conscious attempt to go beyond previous coverage. The Kominas state that they like getting media attention, but complain (a) that it focuses on the fact that the band is (3/4) Muslim rather than the music itself and (b) that the reports are formulaic. The formula is to note that the band was inspired by the publication of Michael Muhammad Knight's novel The Taqwacores, and then to mentions notable song titles like "Sharia Law in the USA."

At least the article points in the direction of better coverage--but it doesn't really do the job of analyzing lyrics or describing the music. The best it can muster is to quote Daniel Cavicchi, guest curator of the Grammy Museum's "Songs of Conscience" exhibit, which includes a piece of Kominas memorabilia. Says Cavicchi, "I would hate to see Taqwacore stall in public discourse as a form of exotica...Their songs are actually quite catchy, with interesting dynamics and a variety of sound textures, all of which are a testament to their musicianship." True enough.

The next day CNN published its take on The Kominas, by Azadeh Ansari. This piece more or less follows the formula identified in the LA Times report--it starts with the book, refer to song titles, and so on. Ansari does at least offer a bit of sociological analysis to account for the band's significance. He writes, "For [the Kominas], punk music is a way to rebel against their conservative cultural upbringing and the frustrations of growing up a young Muslim in America." And the article includes some observations by UC-Irvine history professor Mark Levine and author of Heavy Metal Islam, who says:

"These punk, metal and rap scenes - so-called extreme music scenes -- are addressing issues that mainstream music doesn't...[Punk] allows them to rebel against society and their own culture at the same time."

Levine goes on to say,

"It makes sense why punk has been the music of choice for young, politically active Muslims who are musical...The straight edge movement in punk which was about no drugs, no alcohol, was clean yet very intense and political. It's a way for them to rebel against their families in some extreme ways yet still be ritualistically, 'good Muslims.' "

Accompanying the article is a nice slideshow, featuring photos from Kim Badawi's book, The Taqwacores, plus commentary from Mike Knight and band members, and some music.

But alas, no discussion of the music or the lyrics.

In the interest of at least starting a discussion of The Kominas' lyrics, here's my transcription of the song, "Sharia' Law in the USA." The Kominas have just begun to put out videos of some of their songs, which feature just the lyrics, on Facebook. I don't think you necessarily have to be a FB member to see this, so here's the link.

Sharia Law in the USA

I am an Islamist
I am the Antichrist
Most squares don't make the wanted list
But my my! How I stay in style
Cops chased me out of my mother's womb
My crib was in state pen before age two
The cops had bugged my red toy phone
So I devised a plan for heads to roll...
Sharia law in the -- USA (2x)
Sharia law in the – we've had to pay
...for the white man can take with two free hands
Imagine our debts cut in half
Our wives multiplied by the number four
Why the president's daughters couldn't ask for more
One can lick my Afghan's clit
Wife three's ready to help
As I keep screaming
Penetrate me with a strap on dick
While a brother from New Orleans does you anally

Then there is some sampled commentary from a well-known 50s educational film on what to so in case of an atomic attack. "Duck and cover."

Sharia law in the -- USA (2x)
Sharia law or you'll have to pay

Duck and cover

Roll over Sex Pistols, this supersedes "God Save the Queen." The Sex Pistols were waaaay too timid to broach the subject of anal penetration. As I read the lyrics, they complain about how Muslims are demonized in the USA, and imagine sharia law as a way to take revenge. And in addition, sharia law would be a benefit to (male) Muslims, as they'd get 4 wives. Then I'm somewhat at a loss: the wives would lick each other (?) and then--where does the anal sex come from? I don't know. It's nonetheless very clever, the vocals are well-done, not hoarse screaming in the style of much contemporary punk but much more melodious. Punk more in the content of the lyrics than in the musical form. Some kind of South Asian woodwind and percussion opening the song. Nice.

For a flavor of how the recent Kominas tour went, check out this blog post on the Taqwacore Webzine, from Tanzila Ahmed, who accompanied the band and the rest of the entourage, on tour from LA to Texas. "The first time I had written about the band was over three years ago, and I’d been following the band ever since. It was a blog post where I declared my crush for the boys in The Kominas and how I would fight Ashwairya Rai in a wet sari for them."

Pakistani rock

And then there is Pakistan, ancestral home to 3 of the 4 members of The Kominas--and they've even toured there. Thanks to Shahjehan, I was led to this audio report and this written one, from The Guardian, on Pakistan's lively underground rock scene. One of the bands discussed is Bumbu Sauce, from Islamabad, and their song "Jiggernaut." It's clever and catchy and goofy/serious and you can listen to it, and see the lyrics, here. Alas, I don't get all the references. "Juggernaut" (which I guess jiggernaut is a version of) is derived from the Sanskrit "Jagganatha," one of the names for the god Vishnu. It was incorporated into the English language as a result of a falsehood propagated by (some) British colonialists, who asserted that fanatical Hindus would throw themselves under the wheels of chariots carrying statues of Jagganatha/Vishnu during an annual festival, in order to gain salvation. "Juggernaut" came to mean "unstoppable force" in English--but with a whiff of religious fanaticism. Quite a witty title for a song, then, that deals with the Taliban. Bumbu Sauce is a kind of hot flavoring that goes on packaged noodles. I don't know what the CDA is. Capital Development Authority? Why does the CDA have ninjas? "Why do you act like such a rand?" Again, no idea what "rand" means in Pakistani English. [Update, Nov. 9, 2009: Thanks to an anonymous comment, I now know that "rand" means "whore," in both India and Pakistan.] I do get that the song suggests the possibility that the US struggle with the Taliban in Pakistan might extend to Iran. As The Guardian notes, the song first talks about fighting on the side of the Taliban, and later, fighting against the Taliban.

The report also discusses a song that is rather more earnest and serious in its political critique: "Ready to Die," from the Lahore band, co-Ven. It's here, on youtube, with lyrics for you to read. I can't make out all the bits in Urdu, except for "Iraqi," "Irani," and "Pakistani." The song criticizes the military collaboration between the Pakistani government and the US (i.e., the coalition) and raises the issue of the fact that this military cooperation seems to be having the effect of making the militants multiply. The song could apply equally well to Afghanistan as to Pakistan, and if it weren't for the map of Pakistan on the video, and the fact that The Guardian told you the band was Pakistani, you might think that Afghanistan was in fact the subject.

(Robert Mackey commented on The Guardian's report on the New York Times blog, and decided, for some reason, to focus almost exclusively on the fact that both bands sing in an American accent. He does give us one bit of useful information: the Urdu chorus to "Ready to Die" translates as follows: “The game of chess begins/ And one by one/ Iraqis and Iranians/ Saudis and Afghans/ and Pakistanis.” But why, when the US is involved in such a dangerous game in Pakistan and Afghanistan, you would want to focus on the US accent issue is just beyond me.)

More in the pop vein, stylistically, but much more explicitly political and radical, is the group Laal ("red"). I learned about them, somewhat amazingly, from a report on NPR's Morning Edition. Remarkable because Laal's two leaders are militants in Pakistan's Communist Workers and Peasants party. The guitarist, Taimur Rahman, is getting a PhD at SOAS in London, while the lead singer, Shahram Azhar, is doing his PhD at Oxford. They did music as a hobby, while working on their degrees and participating in Pakistani expat protests against Musharraf. They happened to meet a Pakistani film director, Taimur Khan, who heard them play their song "Main Nay Kaha (”I said”)" at a party. The song is based on a poem by well-known leftist Urdu poet Habib Jalib, and it attacks authoritarianism and political divisiveness. Khan convinced the band to do a video, which he shot in London. The video was a sensation on youtube, and got picked up by the Urdu cable channel Geo TV, and so it was seen, and became popular, in Pakistan. Soon the band was in Karachi, recording their first album.

According to an informative article by James Crabtree in Prospect magazine that focuses on Geo TV, "Main Nay Kaha" quickly became the theme song for the lawyers' movement protests of March and April 2009, that resulted in the reinstatement of Chief Justice Chaudhary. According to Shomial Ahmad's Morning Edition report, the big Laal song of the lawyer's movement was "Umeed-E-Sehr" ("hope of a new dawn"), the title track of Laal's album. Check out the video (with English subtitles) of "Umeed-E-Sehr," whose lyrics are by renowned leftist Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, here. I particularly like this song, "Main Nay Kaha (Musheer)," with lyrics, again, from Habib Jalib.



I find it quite exciting that the poetry of a previous generation of revered Urdu leftist poets, which had rather gone out of fashion, is being revived by Laal. (Their music, of course, is great too.) Check out more Laal videos here. The band's official website is here. Go there for more info and to listen to clips from all the songs on their album.

And finally here's an oldie, a clip from the golden days of Urdu cinema in Pakistan. From the 1966 film Armaan, the song is called "Ko Ko Karina" (sung by Ahmed Rushdi). The song's name refers, of course, to Coca Cola. The clip features a huge plastic Coke bottle on the bar, and waiters dance around with coke on their serving trays. This delightful song is an example of the "indigenization" of "Western" rock--it deploys rock elements, especially the electric guitar riffs, but is not straight "rock" in the ways that Bumbu Sauce or co-Ven are. This sort of incorporation of Western genres of course is very familiar from the more famous Bollywood tradition.



Iftikhar Dadi, in a forthcoming article on Urdu cinema, argues that Coke is fetishized by the elite in this clip, as signs of Western modernity. Nabeel Zuberi commented (when I posted Dadi's remarks on Facebook), that "The way the coke bottles are glued to that tray and the waiter's comic gait/dance are surely 'extracting the urine'/taking the piss. At the very least, it's postcolonial mimicry, if not outright camp." I'm inclined toward the mimicry/camp interpretation. (And hopefully Nabeel won't mind me quoting him!)

This "Socio-political History of Modern Pop Music in Pakistan" calls "Ko Ko Korina" "the first ever modern Pakistani pop song." I have no idea whether that is true, but please read this history--an outline, really--more background on Pakistani pop and rock.

The Kominas: National Tour (+kufiya bonus)

Taqwacore icons The Kominas are going on national tour! Go see them: all reports of live sightings are very positive. This is the latest, updated poster, fresh off the (virtual) press.

This is the first iteration of The Kominas tour poster. Which do you prefer? (Forgetting the fact that the second is the 'correct' version. Whichever you choose, you must admit that The Kominas really have the image thing going on.

And the kufiya thing going on. (This photo is from their Facebook page.)


Other Kominas and taqwacore-related items that I've come across of late (mostly, in fact, courtesy of The Kominas).

##A video of highlights of the 2007 Taqwatour, with The Kominas, Al-Thawra, Omar Waqar, Vote Hizballah, and The Secret Trial Five.

@@A report from The Guardian on a new book (The Taqwacores: Muslim Punk in the USA) featuring photographer Kim Badawi's images of Islamic punk bands, from 2005-07.

%% The Kominas have recorded a new track, "Blackout Beach," which was featured in a new play, "Water Board: A Play About Torture," which is being performed today at the YMCA Theater, Cambridge, MA. (Please read about it--I can hardly stomach it myself.) You can hear the song on The Kominas myspace page--or if you're a "fan," on Facebook.

^^A long trailer for the film, Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam.

&& Watch The Kominas practice. With trumpet. They keep putting out these clips, so stay tuned.



I just got hold of John Lennon's The Lost Home Tapes 1965-1969. It's cool that we can have access to The Kominas home tapes almost instantaneously. Not that The Kominas are The Beatles, but Shahjehan Khan does bear a resemblance to John Lennon.

^^Nice interview with The Kominas. The word means "scum" in Urdu. They explain their humor. And their politics. "Shariah Law in the USA." Taqwa: Terrorists Are Quite Well Adjusted.



Again, be sure to go see The Kominas if they are playing anywhere near you. Hopefully their next tour will swing by NW Ark.

The Kominas, and -- DJ Rekha to play at Wakarusa (Ozark, AR)

Over the past three weekends I've traveled to NYC, DC, and Oslo. And I finished up the paper and exam grading for the semester. Now I'm deep into summer school teaching, which I started the day after I returned from Oslo. I think I'm still recovering from the jet lag. So there hasn't been much energy for blogging...

(photo: Baltimore City Paper)

I just read this quite useful and illuminating post about the, I guess we should say, so-called taqwacore band, The Kominas, on the YellowBuzz blog. Here are some good excerpts:

The song [on the album, Wild Nights in Guantanamo] that brings out the best of the Kominas’ mixed influences, I would say, is “Par Desi.” It begins with a Bhangra-inspired, chromatic surf guitar riff. Basim sings about living in a social limbo between Pakistan and the U.S. “How'd I get here, from a land with long monsoons? / In Lahore it's raining water, in Boston it rains boots.” Following the second chorus is an 8-second analog sample of a live Bhangra percussion recording. This segment features fast striking on dhols, a two-headed drum used in Punjab, a region in the northern part of South Asian subcontinent. The syncopated bass accents in the sample suspend one’s attention on the 4/4 meter in the first part of the song and enables the transition a series of triplets interspersed by noise guitar. The sample, in short, seamlessly bridges the first and second part of the song, each with a disparate rhythmic articulation. I give these guys props for their compositional sophistication...

In the interview, the Kominas criticized how media pigeonholes them. Shahjehan explained, “Taqwacore is no more than just a few kids that talk online every now and then. People think it’s like we all hang out, we all live in a house. It’s not.” Apparently six of the taqwacore-associated bands have disbanded since the 2007 tour. Shahjehan continued, “Another thing that gets lost in the media angle of taqwacore within the book is that there are different people that have different relationships to Islam. Now within this band, there are different people with different relationships to Islam, or none at all.”

Adding to the commentary, Arjun explicated how the press has blown up and distorted the story of the Kominas by presuming their liberal, diversified “Muslim punk” identity as an alternative to Islam as imagined by mainstream media in the U.S. and Europe...

I highly recommend following the Yellowbuzz, the asian-american music blog, btw. (Which links to me, I just discovered. Thanks, comrades.)

More Kominas/Taqwacore/MM Knight miscellanea: To keep up with the happenings of the taqwa, please follow the Taqwacore Webzine, which only recently started up.

And please check out this episode of Playlist, a great series on music from Al Jazeera English, which deals with taqwacore. Check out the whole series, there's much more of interest, including coverage of Palestinian rap.



Meanwhile, and still on the Asian-American music tip, DJ Rekha, the esteemed organizer of Basement Bhangra, a monthly, movable dance event in New York City, going strong since 1997, will be performing at Wakarusa. Started in 2004, this music festival was held in Kansas until this year, when it will convene in Ozark, Arkansas, June 4-7. I'm pretty excited that DJ Rekha will be performing, and I plan to go.

I highly recommend her album, Basement Bhangra. (If you want to buy it, don't get it from iTunes, which only has it available as a continuous mix. Amazon, and maybe other outlets as well, sell it as discrete songs.)

The Kominas in Brooklyn, Last Night (Taqwacore!)

Thanks to Carolina Gonzalez for sending along these photos, shot by Siddhartha Mitter, on Carolina's camera. (Carolina covers music for the New York Daily News.) The Kominas played at Goodbye Blue Monday, and according to Carolina, are as good in concert as they are on record. (I have yet to see The Kominas. I missed the SXSW gig. Apparently I could have just showed up, without the $400+ pass. But I didn't know.)

More hawgblawg Kominas posts here.

This is Shahjehan Khan. Note that he is wearing a sweatshirt with a Nation of Gods and Earths (Five Percenters) emblem. I suspect the influence of Michael Muhammad Knight.

Arjun Ray, Shahjehan Khan, Basim Usmani (l to r)

Arjun Ray, Shahjehan Khan (l to r)

Basim Usmani

misc. #8756

Time to post, at least in shorthand, some of the items that I've been saving up.

1. This just in, from the blog Hipster Runoff: "Are Palestinian Scarves Still Authentically Alt?" This is so hipster that I feel I can't really decode it. I think the blog's answer is, no, it's now "cool" to support Israel. Only blacks are still wearing (faux) kufiyas. Really, after Gaza, it's cool to support Israel?? (Thanks, Laine.)

2. Three students at Gateway High School in Monroeville, PA (near Pittsburgh), were banned from wearing kufiyas to school on February 17, after 35 Jewish students signed a petition against the scarves. The next day, the ruling was reversed. Read more, from al-Arabiyya, here. (I'm underwhelmed with the quality of al-Arabiyya's journalism, lots of misspellings and goofs.) And a commentary from the Muslim American Society here.

3. This is dated, but for the sake of completeness, for the sake of the archive, I include it. An article from Columbia News Service, April 29, 2008: "Militant fashion? A Palestinian scarf becomes hip-hop chic,"by Lawrence Delevingne. (It quotes me.)

All the kufiya-garbed people who Delevingne interviewed for the story denied there was any political meaning to it. One claimed it had to do with his Muslim identity. And yet, Tracy Thompson owner of the Harlem clothing store, Connection One Fashion, was prompted to start selling kufiyas after several people came into the store asking for “A-rab,” “Taliban” or “Bin Laden” scarves.

Hmmm, low Palestine consciousness levels, eh? Check out the photos that accompany the article, shot by Delevingne. I especially like this one, which shows a display at Connection One Fashion.

4. Mother Jones has a very short piece on taqwacore in the Jan/Feb ish. Why so short?!

5. Please check out the music that Dave Watts (aka WattsRiot aka Impi-D) of Fun'Da'Mental has put up on his Myspace page. I particularly like "The Aziz Visitation Demo." And then there is "Plaything Demo," which Dave posted to commemorate the departure of W from DC.

Here's what Dave posted on Facebook about it--I think it's probably ok with him that I repost. A lost-found track from FDM's All Is War.

Since the frat-boy that is George Dubbya has packed up his shit and is departing from our faces as POTUS, I thought I'd post PLAYTHINGS, over at www.myspace.com/djwattsriot.

It was done three years ago for the FDM album 'All is War'. We were gonna do the album in two parts...but things got a bit outta hand regarding the reaction. So we moved on.Playthings was my hard drive 'til it crashed, taking all my work, thousands of samples to digital heaven or hell!Found a copy though...

Crying and marketing your one fucking hit.
Crying and hollering 'cos of one fucking hit.
We took away your playthings 'cos of too many hits.
Took away your plaything 'cos of too many hits.
Tired of just surviving in this man made shit.
Wise men of old knew of better and more.
Than living of bent knee, nailed to the floor.

Took away your plaything 'cos of too many hits.
Always read the label, still tasted like shit.
Texas crude dude what's a piece that's bigger.
That's my oil under your sand*******

Count them, one, two, three, four, five hundred years of tears.
Morning breaks, hunting calls, mourning cries No surprise.
Atta-boy threw back your bouncing ball.
Patriots to the shopping malls.
Buy a flag, funeral shawl.
Combat soldiers got new toys.
Hand 'em out to the boys.
Night vision, tunnel vision, System failure, animation.
Digitize real lives, skin-slapped high five.
Body parts six feet under'cos of blue-eyed plunder...and so it goes.

Inspiration came from The Bolivarian Experiment, Franz Fanon, the First Nation Movement in North America, EZLN, Black Panther Party for Self-Defence, Malcolm X, Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the countless and nameless Rebels that have fought back tried to turn us onto a new path for human development

Over, but not out.

6. For those who can read French, check out this post by Yves Gonzalez-Quijano, who authors the terrific blog, Culture et politique arabe. You should check it out regularly. He surveys recent uses put to the kufiya in the Arab world, mostly through a careful reading of the Arab mass media. I'm going to have to come back to this one (someone remind me, ok?), but for the moment, just check out this piece of kufiya art by Mona Hatoum, from an exhibit (Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking) at MOMA, February 26-May 22, 2006).

"Keffieh," by Mona Hatoum, (1993-99), human hair on cotton, 1993-1999, collection Peter Norton, Santa Monica

Here's an excerpt from a review of the exhibit:

Mona Hatoum is well known to international art viewers, and a particular favorite of this reviewer for her head-on collisions with conformity - including this re-creation of the traditional headscarf or "Keffieh" worn by Arab men that interweaves strands of women's hair with the Arab symbol of machismo.

"Can you for instance imagine a man wearing it with trailing hair?" asks Hatoum. In an interweaving of two genders in one fabric Hatoum recognized "a kind of quiet protest in the art of embroidery, which like Reichek and Amer she specifically associates with women" writes Feresteh Daftari. "In 'Keffieh' then, she is subtly giving women visibility through both the work's medium and its technique."

Homi Bhabba also gives an interpretation of this enigmatic work:"The macho style is an externalized response to the powers of domination; but it is also a form of domination turned inward, within the community poised against the presence of women, whose voices are either repressed, or sublimated in the cause of struggle. Hatoum's feminized headscarf reveals this disavowal of the place of women and re-inserts their point of view through the embroidered strands of hair that hang loose beyond the boundary, breaking the pictorial grid of the material in the process of redefining the symbolic surface of political struggle."

You can read a shorter English version of Gonzalez-Quijano's kufiya post here. But best to read it in French and, if you've got Arabic skills, check out the articles he links to.

Taqwacores at SXSW

This just in: a Taqwacores concert at the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, TX. Friday, March 20, 2009, 9 P.M. at Club 115, 115 S. Jacinto St.

The lineup is:

The Kominas
Al-Thawra
Omar of Diacritical
Vote Hezbollah
Secret Trial Five

Go here for info on the concert and The Kominas from SXSW, and to download The Kominas' "Sharia Law in the USA."

I am very partial to The Kominas and Al-Thawra; have not yet had much time to familiarize myself with the other groups. (Click on the links above to listen and download.)

I think Mark Levine, author of Heavy Metal Islam, will be sitting in with one or more of the bands on guitar. I don't know whether the godfather of taqwacore, Michael Muhammad Knight, will be there. I'm going to try to get down to Austin for this, if I can figure out how to attend the event without buying one of those super expensive SXSW badges.

Misc: Facebook Politics in Egypt; Taqwacores; Art in Palestine; The Nasty: Gaza?

1. Facebook Egypt: The New York Times Sunday Magazine yesterday had a very interesting article about Facebook politics in Egypt, focusing on the April 6 Youth Movement in support of striking Egyptian textile workers. (Among other things, this line from Egypt's beloved Nubian singer, Mohammed Mounir: “I didn’t need to repent; loving Egypt is not a sin.”) And it tells us that the US government is deeply interested:

James Glassman, the outgoing under secretary of state for public diplomacy, told me he followed the group closely. “It’s not easy in Egypt, and in other countries in the Middle East, to form robust civil-society organizations,” he said. “And in a way that’s what these groups are doing, although they’re certainly unconventional.”

Other State Department officials told me they believe that social-networking software like Facebook’s has the potential to become a powerful pro-democracy tool. They pointed to recent developments in Saudi Arabia, where in November a Facebook group helped organize a national hunger strike against the kingdom’s imprisonment of political opponents, and in Colombia, where activists last February used Facebook to organize one of the largest protests ever held in that country, a nationwide series of demonstrations against the FARC insurgency. Not long ago, the State Department created its own group on Facebook called “Alliance of Youth Movements,” a coalition of groups from a dozen countries who use Facebook for political organizing. Last month, they brought an international collection of young online political activists, including one from the April 6 group, as well as Facebook executives and representatives from Google and MTV, to New York for a three-day conference.

2. Taqwacores: A post on this is long overdue. The LA Times on a teenage Muslim punk/taqwacore in Sugarland, Texas. "Muhammad was a punk rocker, he tore everything down. Muhammad was a punk rocker and he rocked that town."

PS: The Kominas, oldschool taqwacores, will be playing at South by Southwest this March. More on this later.

3. Palestine Art: I just learned about this book, Palestine, rien ne nous manque ici (Palestine, We Lack Nothing Here), ed. Adila Laidi-Hanieh. It is described as follows: "Ce livre est le premier à penser une Palestine contemporaine de manière introspective, multidisciplinaire et critique, telle que vécue et perçue par des artistes et intellectuels Palestiniens et non Palestiniens internationalement confirmés et émergents, a travers des textes en majorité inédits - dont trois nouveaux textes de Mahmoud Darwich."

The editor, who has taught at Birzeit University and is now working on a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies at George Mason University, will speak on "The Palestinian Paradox: Post Modern Globalized Cultural Practices under Colonialism," on February 6, at
7:00 PM, at Cabinet Magazine’s Open Event & Exhibition Space, 300 Nevins St, Brooklyn, NY. Sponsored by Arteast.

4. Cincinnati: The Arts section of yesterday's NYT reminds us that Cincinnati was a major, but forgotten player in the development of rock and soul and R&B in the US. And that the scene, developed by King Records beginning in the 1940s, was as cross-racial as that in the much better known hothouse of Memphis. I was cheered to learn that it was Bootsy Collins who has played a major role in preserving, and reviving, the memory of King Records, run by the irrascible genius Syd Nathan. Didn't know that Wynonie Harris' "Bloodshot Eyes" was originally a country song, or that The Stanley Brothers recorded Hank Ballard's "Finger Poppin' Time."

5. Forget Gaza?: Robert Fisk reminds us why we had a right to expect Obama to talk about Gaza, Israel and Palestine at his inauguration address:

Did Obama's young speech-writer not realise that talking about black rights – why a black man's father might not have been served in a restaurant 60 years ago – would concentrate Arab minds on the fate of a people who gained the vote only three years ago but were then punished because they voted for the wrong people? It wasn't a question of the elephant in the china shop. It was the sheer amount of corpses heaped up on the floor of the china shop.

"The Taqwacores" -- the movie

Very exciting news: Michael Muhammad Knight's novel, The Taqwacores, is being turned into a movie, with Mike serving as co-producer and co-writer. Read about it here. They are just starting up, so keep going back to read the blog as production proceeds.

Mabrouk, ya Michael!

The Kominas' "Wild NIghts in Guantanamo Bay"

Very exciting news (Thanks, John!)--the groundbreaking taqwacore ("Islamic punk") band, The Kominas, have finally released their first CD, Wild Nights in Guantanamo Bay. I've not yet heard it (it was only released on March 10), but you can listen to some of the songs that appear on it, like "Suicide Bomb the Gap" and "Sharia Law in the USA," on The Kominas' myspace page. I'm especially partial to the latter. Unfortunately, you can no longer download their material for free. So buy the album here.

More info on The Kominas is available from wikipedia. It states that the group is on "gigging hiatus" because bass player Basim is currently in Pakistan. Don't know whether that is true. I hope not for long.

And don't you just love this cover?

(Earlier Kominas posts here and here.)

Newsweek on Islamic Punk

Glad to see that Islamic punk is getting more coverage and visibility. I've not heard all of the groups discussed here, but highly recommend Kominas (homepage here, myspace page--with mp3s--here). Have only just heard it, but I really like their song, 9000 miles, a ska number with some dhol beats. I read Michael Muhammad Knight's The Taqwacores soon after it came out, loved it, but never imagined (until Mike told me otherwise) that there really was a taqwacore "scene." (Hope I can make it to ISNA for the taqwacores concert!) Check out the Newsweek article itself for more photos and to hear the Kominas' "9000 Miles."

(But never forget the original Muslim punk: Aki Nawaz of Fun'Da'Mental, who started his career as drummer for Southern Death Cult.)

Slam Dancing for Allah
Muslim punk rock—it's not as bizarre as it sounds.
By Matthew Philips
Newsweek, June 11, 2007

It's near midnight in a small Fairfax, Va., bar, and Omar Waqar stands on a makeshift stage, brooding in a black tunic and brown cap. He stops playing his electric guitar long enough to survey the crowd—an odd mix of local punks and collared preps—before screaming into the microphone: "Stop the hate! Stop the hate!" Stopping hate is a fairly easy concept to get behind at a punk-rock show, and the crowd yells and pumps its fists right on cue. But it's safe to say that Waqar and his band, Diacritical, aren't shouting about the same kind of hate as the audience. Waqar wants to stop the kind that made people call him "sand flea" as a kid and throw rocks through the windows of the Islamic bookstore he worked at on 9/11. Waqar, 26, the son of a Pakistani immigrant, is a Muslim—a punk-rock Muslim.

Muslim punk rock certainly sounds like an oxymoron, especially since fundamentalist Muslims condemn all music as haram (forbidden). But Diacritical is one of about a dozen Islamic punk-rock bands throughout the country, bands with names like Vote Hezbollah, the Kominas ("bastards" in Punjabi) and Al-Thawra (Arabic for "the revolution"). The bands vary in sound, polish and success: the Kominas' funk-infused Bollywood songs have been on rotation on the BBC, while sounds of explosions and gunfire punctuate Arabic chanting on the MySpace page of Al-Thawra. But they're alike enough to tour together this summer, ending Labor Day weekend in Chicago at the usually staid Islamic Society of North America's annual conference. Muslim punkers call their brand of music taqwacore—a blend of the Arabic word for piety, taqwa, and "hard-core," the English word for musicians who want to be taken very seriously. "The Prophet Muhammad was all about smashing idols," says Michael Muhammad Knight, a Muslim convert whose 2003 novel "The Taqwacores" is a manifesto for the Muslim punk movement. "And what's more punk rock than that?"

Punk has always been home to the marginalized and angry, led by the Sex Pistols and the Clash in Britain and the Ramones across the pond. But Muslim punk rockers are fighting a two-sided establishment: one side West, the other Middle East. To them, the war on terror is unequivocally a war on Islam, but they're equally infuriated by Islamic fundamentalists and the bloodshed they foment against Westerners as well as other Muslims. "It's not like I'm choosing sides," says Kourosh Poursalehi, 18, who wears a denim vest with a print of Ayatollah Khomeini on the back—for the shock value. "To me they're both wrong. Bush with the war is doing horrible things, but there's not a person in my family who's happy with the Islamic revolution in Iran." These punks are the first generation of American-born Muslims; their parents came to the United States in the 1960s, '70s and '80s. They grew up just like most kids their age—playing videogames and listening to music. But in their midteens and early 20s, they suddenly had to come to terms with their dual identities. "It was 9/11 that first made me conscious of my ethnicity," says Shajahan Khan, 23, the son of Pakistani immigrants who grew up outside Boston. The day after 9/11, a classmate asked him what his people had done. "I was like, 'What people? My people from Cambridge or Boston?'" says Khan, guitarist of the Kominas.

Admittedly, these Muslim punks aren't especially devout, at least in the traditional sense. None goes to Friday prayers regularly, but they all say they're deeply spiritual. To them, Islam begins and ends with one's personal relationship with God. After a recent show at a Manhattan bar, Waqar felt the urge to pray. "I went into the men's room, got down on the nasty floor and started praying," he recalls. Nothing says Muslim punk rock more than searching for Allah on the floor of a nightclub bathroom.

(Photos are of the Kominas, and taken from their official website. Earlier post here. Check out Diacritical's myspace page for the group's reaction to being called Islamic punk--they say, not.)