Some things, at first glance, seem to stand in complete opposition to each other like the positive ends of two magnets placed side-by-side, each rejecting the other. ‘Punk Muslims’ fits into that category, yet it’s happening. And the writer responsible for giving a name to it, Michael Muhammad Knight, is about to launch his novel The Taqwacores into the UK.
3:AM: Could you quickly describe The Taqwacores?
MMK: Taqwacore is punk rock by and for Muslims, all kinds of Muslims. Some are hardcore fundamentalists, but you also have drunks playing the adhan on their electric guitars, feminist riot grrls in burqas, gay Muslims and people who don’t know if they’re Muslim at all. So the novel’s about these conflicting taqwacore kids trying to live together as a community.
3:AM: Why did you write The Taqwacores? Are you describing a new strata of Islam or presenting the case for the creation of one?
MMK: My experience with Islam was fairly typical for converts: we tend to come in and just go super intense, pushing really hard to be perfect Muslims in every tiny way, and then we burn out and we’re completely lost. I was building through that while writing The Taqwacores, fantasizing about a new Islamic experience—one in which I could remain confused but still keep a relationship to some kind of Muslim community. I wasn’t really in the religion, nor was I completely out, and I just wanted a safe space where that could be ok.
3:AM: You’ve said in previous interviews that The Taqwacores wasn’t originally intended for a non-Muslim audience. If it had been, would you have written it any differently, and how?
MMK: I get upset when certain non-Muslims enjoy the book for its blasphemous parts. When a right-wing Republican blogger says he likes how one character urinates on the Qur’an, then I wonder if I’ve done a good thing. I meant this book as an argument that takes place within the family. You know how brothers and sisters will fight and say terrible things to each other, but then defend each other against outsiders? That’s how I feel. I’m a Muslim, and I don’t want anyone appropriating these words to benefit an anti-Islamic agenda.
3:AM: The main characters of The Taqwacores aren’t rebelling against US society but rather against the literal following of every aspect of the Quran. If your characters are embracing American values, is The Taqwacores an attempt at a new understanding by mainstream culture of Islam or are you looking for a new evolution of traditional Islam?
MMK: I think that the characters are rebelling against all kinds of things. Rabeya the taqwacore feminist rails against Islamic misogyny, but she doesn’t play into America’s commodification of the female body either. She might hate what the burqa meant in the Taliban’s Afghanistan, but she’s wearing it in America. And Umar the straightedger, he wears tattoos of anti-alcohol verses from the Qur’an to rebel against American beer culture. So there’s a dual critique, taqwacores aim the middle finger in both directions.Islam doesn’t just turn everyone who converts into Arabs. When Islam reaches a new place, there’s an exchange of culture and ideas between the religion and whatever traditions are already there. Islam in South Asia has its own character and remains very different from Islam in the Middle East. You have Turkish Islam, Malaysian Islam, sub-Saharan African Islam, Bosnian Islam…so American Islam is going to be its own thing too. The conservatives say that we just treat Islam as a buffet, taking what we want and discarding what we don’t; but I’m fine with that, because they do the same thing. I don’t know what’s from Allah and what’s the made-up human stuff, so I just try to embrace the best parts and leave the worst parts.
3:AM: The UK version has been censored, and certain passages which were deemed to be offensive have been removed by the British publishers. It seems, from reading the offending passages, that the publishers thought Muslims may be more offended by insulting aspects of their faith rather than showing its practitioners consciously acting against its dictates by having promiscuous sex, drinking and doing drugs. Regardless of how offensive the removed passages could be perceived, do you find it bizarre that the behaviour of Jehangir, Ayyub and the rest of the housemates was deemed not to be controversial yet the removed passages were? Who was it that made those decisions?
MMK: Muslims do all kinds of things and they’re still Muslims, it’s just a matter of being pious or not. I’ve known Muslim kids and real-life taqwacores who drink, smoke, have sex, whatever, but most of them would never make the statements that characters make in this novel. It’s just a different level when you talk about sacred things.
Telegram’s editors loved The Taqwacores, and the excerpt they chose to show in their catalog was one of the passages that would get cut. I think that seeing that passage in the catalog made Andre Gaspard, the publisher, want to read the book for himself. When he did, he said that with the Danish cartoons and such, he couldn’t publish The Taqwacores unless all blaspheming sections were removed. I allowed it only if they would acknowledge every act of censorship within the text. They agreed, so then we had to haggle over which excerpts would be cut. I had a really hard time with it. They not only wanted the outright blasphemies removed, but any passage in which characters questioned the Qur’an or the Prophet, no matter their tone. Even the line in which a character says, “let me puke out every book I’ve consumed” was marked for deletion since that could possibly be seen as referring to the Qur’an. The censorship seemed theatrical in a way, as though they were doing it on purpose to show how insane the cultural climate has become.
I have another novel coming out with Telegram, called Osama Van Halen. It has Rabeya cutting off my head for being a phallocentric Orientalist. I’m pretty sure that I only rip on myself in that book, so it should be fine.
3:AM: Apart from the very good review I’m going to give it, why should people in Europe read The Taqwacores?
MMK: I don’t know what The Taqwacores will say to Muslims or non-Muslims in Europe, but this book has come a long way to get there. I started out printing copies at Kinko’s and giving them away for free from the trunk of my car, and later selling the book through punk record labels. Now it’s been published in the US and UK, an Italian edition is coming out this year, a French edition is on the way, and we’re looking at German, Spanish and the Scandinavian markets. In Pakistan it’s gone back to a DIY bootleg edition that kids pass around. It’s taught in college courses and presented in academic papers; one professor at UNC called it the “Catcher in the Rye for young Muslims,” which might be nonsense. Journalists are calling it the manifesto of a new movement, which isn’t exactly true either. But The Taqwacores is now being treated as something serious, which I wasn’t prepared for, since some of the novel even embarrasses me. All I can really say to plug it is that I portray Muslims as human beings who are as confused and complicated as anyone else, and most people who write about Muslims don’t do that.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEW
Pete Carvill is Senior Editor at 3:AM.
