Muslim American Youth: Punk Rock and Identity Formation
by
Louise A. Copp
A THESIS SUBMITTED TO PITZER COLLEGE IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE ANTHROPOLOGY MAJOR
CLAREMONT, CALIFORNIA
APRIL, 2011
© Louise A. Copp, 2011
The undersigned certify that they have read, and recommend for acceptance, a thesis entitled “Muslim American Youth: Punk Rock and Identity Formation” submitted by Lucy Copp in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Spanish Major
______Supervisor (Leda Martins)
______Second Reader (Anthony Shenoda)
______Third Reader (Zayn Kassam)
______Date
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ......
Dedication ......
Introduction ...... 1
Chapter One: Punk Rock as a Social Movement ...... 12
Chapter Two: Taqwacore: Creating a Space for Punk and Islam ...... 36
Chapter Three: Islam in the United States: The Construction of a Muslim Identity ...... 62
Chapter Four: The Music ...... 83
Conclusion ...... 100
Appendix ...... 107
Bibliography ...... 113
Acknowledgements
Thank you, Professor Shenoda for helping me arrive at my thesis idea. Your seminar gave me the time and the space to find the best possible topic.
Thank you, Professor Kassam for being as excited about my topic as I was. I am grateful for your guidance.
Thank you, Professor Martins for encouraging me to write a thesis. I cannot think of a more rewarding academic experience.
Thank you, my best friends who are also, conveniently, my housemates: Sara, Brittany, Erica, Sharon, and Charlotte. I blasted punk rock music in the house and told you I was doing thesis research, but thanks to my obsession with my topic, you all know the lyrics to a number of Punjabi songs.
Dedication
To Iman Moussaoui, Ann Finley, and Ahmed El Ahrach – My best friends and support during my study abroad in Morocco.
Introduction
In the last decade American Muslim youth have begun to express themselves through different creative and artistic mediums. Wajahat Ali, a Muslim American playwright and essayist writes in an article for The Huffington Post, “The watershed victory of President Obama in 2008 ushered in a new generation comprising vibrant, progressive Muslim artists who use their talents to redefine a bold new vision of art. One that reclaims their hijacked heritage, restores dignity to Islam and Muslims, deconstructs stereotypes and uses art as a means to build bridges of understanding.”1 Wajahat Ali gives specific examples of artists who are, as the title of his article mentions, “Redefining
Muslim Art” in a post-9/11 context. In 2002, Preacher Moss, an African American convert to Islam, began to receive substantial attention when he and other Muslim comedians premiered their comedy show Allah Made Me Funny. Around the same time
Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa, motivated by his belief that Muslim children needed their own
Muslim superheroes, created a comic book called THE 99, which has received ample media attention.2 Ms. Zarqa Nawaz, a Muslim British Canadian freelance writer, created a sitcom called “Little Mosque on the Prairie” about the relations between a Muslim family and their non-Muslim neighbors. Towards the end of his article, Wajahat Ali cites one last example of Muslim American artistry by a “Punjabi taqwacore punk band,”
1 Ali, Wajahat. “The Redefining of Muslim Art by the Obama Generation.” The Huffington Post, August 29, 2009. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wajahat-ali/the-redefining-of-muslim_b_271863.html 2 At the Summit for Entrepreneurship in 2010, President Obama acknowledges the work of Dr. Naif. called The Kominas who have opted for a more abrasive and confrontational medium of expression: Punk Rock.
Punk rock, as youth cultural studies have revealed, offers youth a conduit for expressing and mediating ideas of one’s self. In the context of the United States, how are
Muslim American youth using punk rock as a site of negotiation for their Muslim and
American identities? In this thesis I explore this question and I suggest that the medium of punk rock, as used by Muslim American youth, is part of a burgeoning social movement in which young Muslim Americans are creatively expressing a frustration with the stereotypes of Islam in the United States as well as their personal commitments to a religion that seems to be increasingly at odds with their American identity. When one of our identities is made to seem wholly incompatible with one of our other identities, how do we negotiate the two without discarding either? Until we understand these questions in relation to Muslim American youth, we will not be able to fully recognize and appreciate the value of punk rock as an expressive and meaningful craft for a handful of Muslim individuals in the United States.
So far there has been one academic study on Muslim youth’s use of punk rock in the United States written by Sarah Hosman in her 2009 dissertation titled, “Muslim Punk
Rock in the United States: A Social History of The Taqwacores.”3 Additionally, two books, Heavy Metal Islam and Heavy Metal in Baghdad, published in 2008 and 2009 respectively, explore the intersection of Islam and heavy metal in North African and
Middle Eastern countries but not in the United States.45 There is an academic deficit of
3 Hosman, Sarah Siltanen. “Muslim Punk Rock in the United States: A Social History of The Taqwacores.” (M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina, 2009) 4 LeVine, Mark. Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam (New York, NY: Three Rivers Press, 2008), research and analysis on why some Muslim youth have chosen punk rock as a medium of expression and how this medium has offered Muslim youth a platform for identity reformation. This thesis contributes to our understanding of this subject by recognizing the larger artistic social movement in which punk rock is used and by recognizing how the use of punk rock has provided a site of negotiation for Muslim American youth. In doing this, this study creates the potential for readers to view the Muslim Americans presented in this thesis as artists whose creations are direct reflections of the discrimination and misunderstanding surrounding Muslims in the United States that has escalated in the last decade the advent of terrorist acts carried out by Muslims in the
United States and abroad.
Muslim American youth are using punk rock to address stereotypes and personal unease with Islam, however, the use of punk rock by Muslim American youth is not exclusively in response to, or directed towards, Islam. Furthermore the frustration, as exuded in the lyrics and sound of punk rock music, cannot be linked to a common source even though many young American Muslims are dealing with similar social and political issues in the United States. When asked if his band was “progressive” by an online blog,
Basim Usmani replied, “Progressive kind of denotes that we have the power to progress things. I think we’re much better described as angry.”6 What then are some of the sources of frustration for the young Muslim Americans who are using punk rock?
Methodology
5 Capper, Andy and Gabi Sifre. Heavy Metal in Baghdad: The Story of Acrassicauda (New York, NY: Pocket Books, 2009)
6 Sepia Mutiny. “Wild Nights with The Kominas.” October 24, 2008. http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/005438.html My research included looking at the works of Muslim Americans authors who have written about a “Muslim identity” in a western context. Documentary films on punk rock, including the film “Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam,” provided useful visuals for my research of punk rock histories. Three CDs, two from the band mentioned in Wajahat
Ali’s article, The Kominas, and one from Al-Thawra, have been prominent components to my research and are explored in chapter four. I also navigated online blogs that interviewed Muslims from various punk rock bands. These blogs have been useful because many of them provide a full transcript of their interviews unlike many newspaper articles that will provide quotations from Muslim punk rock musicians out of context the original interview. The most helpful online blog for my research is one called Taqwacore
Webzine. This is a blog both created and maintained by Muslim American punk rockers who offer mini bios about their bands and answer questions about their music. These blogs are also useful because the musicians reflect on the representation of their music in the media, which is something they do not do when directly interviewed by a media outlet. Newspaper articles did, however, provide me with a chronological timeline of the punk rock scene and the names of musicians I could contact for ethnographic data.
Throughout my thesis I present my interviews with two prominent musicians in what the media has labeled the “Islamic Punk Rock” scene. Basim Usmani is the lead singer and bassist for The Kominas, a punk rock band from Boston. Imran Malik is the drummer for The Kominas. I was fortunate to be able to meet Basim and Imran in Boston and Los Angeles, respectively, for informal interviews.7 At the start of my research, I began reaching out to a few Muslim Americans in punk rock bands over the online social
7 These interviews were recorded. networking site Facebook hoping to begin some communication however brief or sporadic. While home for a couple days in Rhode Island over winter vacation, I contacted
Basim Usmani knowing that The Kominas was a Boston-based band. He happened to be in town for one more day before heading to Houston, giving me just enough time to take the train to Boston to meet him. Our conversation was monumentally important in helping me shape and direct the focal points of discussion in my thesis. Similarly, I was fortunate to meet Imran Malik in Los Angeles as he was only visiting for a few days. My conversation with Imran allowed me to look for nodes of similarities and differences between two Muslim Americans, both of Pakistani descent, and both members of The
Kominas.
This thesis consists of in-person interviews, analysis of lyrics, and secondary sources including the media, online blogs, and academic material. I have communicated with journalist Wajahat Ali who wrote the article cited on the first page, a member of the punk rock band Al-Thawra, and author Michael Muhammad Knight, who have all responded briefly yet thoughtfully to my email questions. Throughout this process,
Michael Muhammad Knight, a key figure in my thesis whom I introduce in this introduction, has been unavailable for an interview. My attempt for phone or in-person interviews with Muslim Americans in punk rock bands was not futile although ideally I would have had the time and the resources for more interviews. Since I was able to speak with two musicians in person I will explain my approach to these interviews and how I have integrated them into my thesis.
I began my interviews by getting to know my interviewees: Where did you grow up? Where did your parents grow up? Do you have siblings? Which high school did you attend? What did you study in school? From here, I asked about the importance of religion in their childhoods. Do you remember what Islam meant to you as a kid? After understanding the undulating presence and influence of Islam throughout the interviewee’s lives, I shifted gears to punk rock music. Do you call your music punk rock? How do you decide what you sing about? Do you consider your music “Islamic”?
What do your parents think of your music? These questions laid a foundation upon which
I could ask questions that elicited less, what I considered to be, well-rehearsed answers.
Do you identify as Muslim because it is an ascribed affiliation or because you believe in the tenets of Islam? What are, if any, the advantages of being Muslim in the United States versus being Muslim in an Islamic country? How did 9/11 change your relationship to
Islam? Were you ever harassed or targeted on the basis of your identity or appearance?
What does punk rock mean to you? Has it provided a space to channel sentiments of frustration, is it an extracurricular hobby, is it both?
These two interviews proved essential for determining the content and structure of my thesis but their words alone do not accurately portray the diversity of the movement in terms of heritage culture, gender, and religious convictions. Marwan Kamel of the band Al-Thawra is of Syrian descent and Arjun Ray, a former member of The Kominas is of Indian descent. Sena Hussain, a Muslim Canadian and lead singer of the all-female punk rock band Secret Trial Five, identifies as a lesbian and Michael Muhammad Knight, author of the book The Taqwacores, converted to Islam as a teenager. These distinctions are important because they are indicative of the identity politics embedded in this specific movement of punk rock in the United States.
Background
My motivation for this thesis topic began with my interest in Islam. The questions
I asked Basim and Imran were almost entirely related to their perception of Islam in the
United States and how they construct their Muslim identities within an American cultural context. The rest of my questions were about the ethos of punk rock in relation to their band. In my post-interview reflections and analysis it became very apparent how influential heritage cultural is in shaping one’s religious identity, especially for those interviewees whose parents are first-generation immigrants to the United States. Basim and Imran are second-generation Pakistani Americans whose parents moved to the
United States in the 1960s when South Asian immigrants with professional skills were given preference in entering the country over other immigrant populations.
South Asian immigrants came to occupy a highly educated, urban middle class niche that gave them a privileged status and the label of ‘model minority,’ predicated on their cultural values of hard work an family unity.8 Where many immigrant populations use boundaries of race or nationality to distinguish themselves from other immigrant groups, South Asians rely on an authentic ethnicity to maintain a cohesive immigrant group. The re-cultivation of this authentic South Asian cultural ethnicity by first- generation immigrants makes it hard for second-generation South Asians to operate outside of what is becoming an overly essentialist and bounded South Asian identity.9
While my personal interests had me focus my research on the intersection between a
Muslim and an American identity in the space of punk rock, it seems that both of these identities are indelibly linked to, in the case of my two interviewees, Desi culture.
8 Gayatri Reddy, “Queer DesiFormations: Marking the Boundaries of Cultural Belonging in America.” Paper presented at Scripps College, March 28, 2011. 9 Ibid. At the start of my research in September of 2011, I had some knowledge about
Islam but I knew little about punk rock. My subsequent education on the history and social theories of punk rock has been a process of selection, inevitably leaving out some social theories or specific branches of punk rock history that could just have easily informed my punk rock education in a different way. Furthermore, this process was to help me make an educated and thoughtful comparison between punk rock movements of the past and the punk rock as used by Muslim American youth in the United States today.
The insights in this thesis illuminate one of the processes that allows us to understand and support the notion that Muslim American youth are using punk rock as a site of identity negotiation. I am not attempting to impose a single model or implying that my process is the best way to understand the use of punk rock by Muslim American youth, but I do believe that my approach is conducive to understanding how a specific and recent strand of punk rock has succeeded in creating a space of identity negotiation for Muslim
Americans.
Outline of Chapters
Chapter one begins by examining the history of social movement theory in the, at the time, nascent field of sociology. Drawing upon the social movement theories of the most formative sociologists will help us understand how, when punk rock came to fruition in the 1970s, social movement theories were applied. In the 1980s, “New Social
Movement” theories examined the ways in which social movements, in the context of an increasingly globalized world, were driven by new constructions of identity in terms of race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and religion.10 I then turn to the history of punk rock and give the evidence that lets us understand how certain historical strands of punk rock can be considered social movements within the definitions and characteristics of social movements that I provide. The combined examination of social movement theory and punk rock history is intended to help support my claim that the use of punk rock by
Muslim American youth has become a prominent thread in a social movement in the
United States. To understand how this social fabric is unique to an American context we must look at the social triggers that make certain environments ripe for social movements. How have certain recent events and social conditions in the United States created an atmosphere conducive to a social movement in which punk rock is a primary thread?
Chapter two examines how and why a Muslim American punk rock scene has emerged in the United States. Michael Muhammad Knight, an author whom many news sources have deemed the “godfather of Muslim punk,” wrote a book called The
Taqwacores.11 This book is a fictional story of a college co-op in Buffalo, New York inhabited by young Muslims with a strong affinity for punk rock. Since its release in
2004 the book has received a great deal of attention from the media and from young readers who have reached out to the author expressing their gratitude, and in some cases, relief for a book like The Taqwacores. By the exploring the sentiments that this book elicited for many young Muslim American readers we can better understand how The
10 Johnston, Hank and Shoon Lio. “Introduction: Collective Behaviour and Social Movements in the Postmodern Age: Looking Backward to Look Forward.” Sociological Perspectives Vol. 41 (1998), 461 11 Knight, Michael Muhammad. The Taqwacores (Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press, 2004)
Taqwacores has buttressed the use of punk rock among Muslim American youth and even gave rise to a punk rock subculture called Taqwacore.
Chapter two will also look at events that have unraveled in the United States in the last decade that have devastated relations between Muslim and non-Muslim
Americans, with the attacks of September 11, 2001 being perhaps the most obvious catalyst for these tense relations. In exploring the repercussions of 9/11 we can understand how Muslim American youth are not necessarily responding to the event itself, but to the deeply entrenched currents of Islamophobia in the United States that were further exacerbated in the aftermath of 9/11 and were only perpetuated by the media. I have spoken with Americans who are also practicing or identifying Muslims who, after September 11th, felt that because Islam and America were in sudden conflict, so was their sense of self.
Chapter three will discuss the construction of a Muslim identity in the context of the United States. In order to do this, it is necessary to understand the history of Islam in the United States, which, as we will see in chapter four, is pertinent to many of the lyrics of punk rock bands. I will examine what exactly young Muslim Americans are negotiating with respect to identity and why a negotiation is necessary for some young
Muslims. These questions are challenging to write about having only spoken with a few young Muslim Americans out of millions in the United States. Although many Muslim
American scholars have attempted to define the “Muslim American” identity, I will argue in chapter three that there can be no single definition of the “Muslim identity”, not even in the American context. Towards the end of chapter three we will learn why many young
Muslims are frustrated to the point of producing abrasive sounds and confrontational lyrics under the banner of punk rock. On another note, we should not lose sight of the reality that for many of these musicians, punk rock also functions as a pastime activity that is not always driven by an explicit agenda but is able to exist just as music.
Chapter four presents and examines specific lyrical excerpts from The Kominas and Al-Thawra. When I spoke with Basim in March he was hesitant to fully disclose the entirety of some of the songs meanings as he conceived of them, and when we arrived at other songs he wasn’t fully sure what they meant even though he authored them, but together we sorted through some of his lyrics and he willingly explained some of the stories and references behind them. Marwan Kamel from the Chicago-based band Al-
Thawra sent me the lyrics to the bands entire first album titled, Who Benefits From War?
I haven’t had the opportunity to speak with Marwan about Al-Thawra’s lyrics but I will provide excerpts in chapter four so that we can have a comparison of two bands that call themselves original Taqwacore bands. The stories and references provided by Basim have allowed me to design three key points that chapter four will address. Framed as questions, the three points are the following: How do The Kominas address the negative stereotypes and the recent events concerning Islam in the United States? How have past movements of punk rock and anarchy influenced The Kominas? How have The Kominas incorporated different linguistic, cultural, and stylistic facets in their music that speak to a
Pakistani heritage and an American upbringing? These questions are designed to buttress my claim that Muslim American youth are using punk rock as a site of identity formation.
Chapter One
Punk Rock as a Social Movement
Introduction
In this thesis I present the Muslim American punk rock scene as part of a burgeoning social movement that is being forged by Muslim American youth at large.
“With bold, messages on contemporary religious, social and political issues, young
Muslim-Americans are stepping onto the stage and into the studio.”12Why is it important to understand this strand of punk rock as part of a social movement and if it is part of a social movement, what are the characteristics that tell us so? Answering these questions requires looking at two separate histories: the history of social movement theory, and the social history of punk rock. In addition I will look at the evolution of punk rock in the
United Kingdom and in the United States, as they are the most formative countries in the social history of punk rock.
The histories behind specific strands of punk supports the claim that the punk rock scene created by Muslim American youth is part of a social movement mainly because it creates a space for Muslim American youth to negotiate their identities. The reason I say the use of punk rock by Muslim American youth is part of a social movement is because the musicians I have spoken with do not necessarily consider their production of punk rock to encompass the entire category of this social movement. Basim
Usmani of The Kominas suggests this when he says, “A whole different dialogue is going
12 Shellnutt, Kate. “Young Muslims Use Punk to Loosen Their Religion.” Chicago Sun-Times, September 20, 2007, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2344329/posts. on between the marginalized writers and artists and musicians of Pakistani heritage or a different heritage.”13 I have interpreted his reference to “different heritage” to perhaps indicate the diversity of heritages of Muslim American artists who come from different
Muslim countries. This remark is also important because it is indicative, to an extent, of how Basim situates his craft as part of a whole.
Not every social movement theory is applicable to punk rock just as not all expressions of punk rock can fit into social movement theory. My process begins by situating social movement theory in sociological thought in 19th century Europe and understanding some of the contributing factors in developing this new branch of sociology. The type of social environments that are capable of igniting a social movement are most often going through some degree of significant change. What significant change was occurring in at the time that social movement theory became a new point of discussion and interest amongst sociologists of the time? It is important to understand these theories as they arose in their historical social contexts before discerning their contemporary cultural relevance.
This chapter will transition into a discussion of “new social movement” theory that, while not entirely detached from the original theories of social movements, diverges in ways that are critical to understanding the organization of social movements as they arise in contemporary social contexts. Before looking at punk rock in a contemporary social context, the history of punk rock must be explored. Who were the people gravitating towards punk rock in the 1970s and how did they use the music and the lifestyle? By answering these questions I am preparing the readers to engage in a thought
13 Basim Usmani, in-person interview, Boston, January 11, 2011. process that looks for nodes of similarities and differences between the punk rock participants of previous social movements and the punk rock participants in the United
States today.
Defining Youth
Youth is a reoccurring category and point of discussion throughout this thesis.
While I do not adhere to any singular definition of ‘youth,’ I will provide a foundation of the term to which we can return. Mary Bucholtz, a linguistics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote the following on ‘youth’ in 2002 in the Annual
Review of Anthropology:
Where the study of adolescents generally concentrates on how bodies and minds are shaped for adult futures, the study of youth emphasizes instead the here-and-now of young people’s experience, the social and cultural practices through which they shape their worlds.
Another passage that will help us understand youth identity is the following from
Jonathan Epstein’s book Youth Culture: Identity in a Postmodern World:
Over time, individual interactions will adapt to particular situations in the historical evolution of a culture, and these will, in turn, lead to changes in both the social structure and individual behavior. An individual must, therefore, negotiate between various levels of abstraction at particular historical moments, and merge them into a coherent sense of self. In the process of negotiation, discrepancies or tensions inevitably arise within and between the personal and social dimensions. These types of identity problems occur throughout the life course, but the adolescent/youth stage is one of particular interest because of its unique transitional, or liminal, quality in relation to the other stages in the life course.14
These examples do not suggest that ‘youth’ is confined to a specific age bracket that marks the beginning and ending of the ‘youth’ stage. The punk rock musicians I interviewed for this thesis are in their mid to late twenties but their age alone is not telling
14 Epstein, Jonathon. Youth Culture: Identity in a Postmodern World (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 120-1 of ‘youth.’ What indicated youth was their personal reflections on this transitional stage of their lives in which identity reorganization is a necessity. It is important to keep in mind that reorganizing an identity does not necessarily mean renaming one’s identity. As my ethnographic data will support, many Muslim American youth have felt internally obliged, because of increasing Islamophobia in the United States, to reevaluate their
Muslim identity. At the end of this process of identity reformation, which perhaps never ends for some, my interviewees still identify as Muslim and as American but the identification means something different than before. We will return to the notion of
‘youth’ later in this chapter to understand why it is often a prominent characteristic of punk rock social movements.
The History of Social Movements in Sociology
Sociology was the first discipline to take an interest in studies of youth and social movements. Until recently, “surprisingly little of this research was informed by anthropology.”15 Even in the early 20th century, most anthropologists were interested in youth and adolescence as a biological and psychological stage of human development, not as a cultural category.16 In this section I will give a brief and broad overview of the origin of social movement theory, as this approach will be most conducive to my argument.
In 1895, French sociologist Emile Durkheim published “The Nature of Social
Action”, a manifesto that tersely stated what sociology was and how society should be
15 Bucholtz, Mary, “Youth and Cultural Practice.” Annual Review of Anthropology Vol. 31 (2002), 525 16 Ibid, 25 studied.17 With the establishment of the discipline of sociology by leading intellectuals in their respective countries–Durkheim founded the first European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux–a foundation and framework began taking form that would provide sociologists and anthropologists with the necessary means to understand, analyze, and discover meaning in the social movements of the time.18 But what exactly is a social movement and how was the term defined by the founders of modern sociological thought?
A second wave of globalization–the first wave arriving around 1500–rattled the world from 1850 to 1914 as long-distance trade and migration, capital flows, transportation, and increased communication blurred cultural, economic, and political boundaries.19 The study of youth and social movements emerged in this context in 19th century Europe in order to better understand the rapidly and drastically changing social climate. Between 1850 and World War I migration currents around the world were heavy and far-reaching. The following migration numbers give an indication of the scope of migration: 3 million Indians, 9 million Japanese, 10 million Russians, 20 million Chinese, and 33 million Europeans migrated from their home territories to other parts of the globe.20
This second wave of globalization also lead to the consolidation of state power, which augmented state control over resources and regulation of trade.21 The response to
17 Hannigan, John. “Social Movement Theory and the Sociology of Religion: Toward a New Synthesis.” Sociological Analysis Vol. 52 (1991), 311 18 Rose, Fred, “Toward a Class-Cultural Theory of Social Movements: Reinterpreting New Social Movements.” Sociological Forum Vol. 12 (1997); 465 19 Tilly, Charles, “Social Movements Enter the Twenty-first Century.” Conference on Contentious Politics and the Economic Opportunity Structure (2003), 5 20 Ibid, 5 21 Tilly, Charles, “Social Movements Enter the Twenty-first Century.” Conference on Contentious Politics and the Economic Opportunity Structure (2003), 5 the consolidation of state power and control, which created disparities in wealth, was an assemblage of organizations and networks of the lower-middle class to create “new relations with the centers of power.”22 A surge of organization became necessary in an increasingly disorganized world, not just for the underprivileged but for the governing bodies as well. Organized labor, states, capital, and political parties became a priority during the second wave of globalization.23
The processes by which the increasingly industrialized and secularized world was advancing became a subject of profound interest for sociologists such as Max Weber,
Emile Durkheim, and Marcel Mauss. Around the same time, the German philosophers and social scientists Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx were considering the relationship between social classes and social mobilization. In The Communist Manifesto of 1848 they defined this relationship in brief when they wrote, “society is the history of class struggles…The modern bourgeois society…has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of old ones.”24 Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels are not primarily remembered for their contribution in the field of social movements, yet they were among the first people to write about the common conditions of oppressed classes who found power in their commonalities and resisted the dominant classes that suppressed them.
If we look at the history of the notion of “social movements” we find that most sociological theorists did not outright announce their definitions of “social movements” in their writings. “It is worth noting that Marx was inconsistent in his theory about the
22 Ibid, 6 23 Ibid, 6 24 Rose, Fred, “Toward a Class-Cultural Theory of Social Movements: Reinterpreting New Social Movements.” Sociological Forum Vol. 12 (1997), 465 overthrow of capitalism, particularly regarding the role of the working class.”25 Many of the earliest sociologists oscillated in their methodologies and theories, compelling contemporary sociologists to become architects of the definitions of social movement using the material provided by the first sociologists. Marx’s materialist interpretation of history led contemporary sociologist Fred Rose to conclude that Marx would define social movements as the advancement of class interests as they relate to the material accumulation of wealth.26 It is evident that the first theories of social movements sought to explain social organization by class. As the study of social movements transitioned to
America in the 1940s, there was a shift from an emphasis on class politics to an emphasis of identity politics.27
New Social Movement Theory
Sociologist Steven Buechler writes in 1995 in The Sociological Quarterly:
The term "new social movements" thus refers to a diverse array of collective actions that have presumably displaced the old social movement of proletarian revolution associated with classical Marxism. Even though new social movement theory is a critical reaction to classical Marxism, some new social movement theorists seek to update and revise conventional Marxist assumptions while others seek to displace and transcend them.28
New social movement theory emerged as a response to the inadequacy of previous social movement theories for analyzing collective action.29 These inadequacies included the premise that all social action derived from “the fundamental economic logic of capitalist production and that all other social logics are secondary at best in shaping such action”
25 Ibid, 465 26 Rose, Fred, “Toward a Class-Cultural Theory of Social Movements: Reinterpreting New Social Movements.” Sociological Forum Vol. 12 (1997); 465 27 Hale, Charles. “Cultural Politics of Identity in Latin America.” Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 26, (1997), 568 28 Buechler, Steven, “New Social Movement Theories.” The Sociological Quarterly Vol. 36 (1995), 442 29 Ibid, 441 and that “social actors will be defined by class relationships rotted in the process of production and that all other social identities are secondary.”30 By contrast, new social movement theory began to look at other factors that may determine the way people group themselves in social action such as politics, ideologies, cultures, and religions.31 What accounts for this shift in how social movements are perceived and organized and why did this shift occur?
The shift towards new theories of social movement began in the 1960s as the professional classes became more critical of society than the middle class on a range of foreign and domestic, social and political affairs.32 “As the movements of that era entered more conventional forms of politics, less was heard of these theories of middle-class revolt.”33 In the 1970s, the erosion of cultural, political, and economic boundaries due to a third wave of globalization led an era of social movements that crossed class boundaries.34 Theorists began looking the new ways in which people were unifying themselves. To an extent, theorists continued to understand new social movements as class-based because presumably social class is still responsible for organizing social perceptions and behavior. However, attempts to interpret new social movements as aspects of class “fail in several ways.”35 One of the ways a class-based approach failed was that it oversimplified the goals of a social movement. For example, environmentalists did not become direct beneficiaries of the green movement, nor did the social class to which they belong. This is because the participants in this social movement were
30 Ibid, 442 31 Ibid, 442 32 Rose, Fred, “Toward a Class-Cultural Theory of Social Movements: Reinterpreting New Social Movements.” Sociological Forum Vol. 12 (1997), 462 33 Ibid, 462 34 Ibid, 466 35 Ibid, 466 motivated by a cause outside of their social or economic positions. Furthermore, the framework of social class was not enough to explain ones participation in this social movement.36
There are multiple definitions of “new social movements.” Steven Buechler summarizes one of them as a “diverse array of collective actions that have presumably displaced the old social movement of proletarian revolution associated with classical
Marxism.”37 Despite the various interpretations of new social movements, they all seem to hold a core premise that is less class based and more identity based. This exact shift in both the organization and theory of social movements is important because it reveals the same shift from a punk rock social movement organized by class in the 1970s to a punk rock social movement organized by identity in the United States today. Even though social class is a factor in one’s identity, social class alone could not explain how and why punk rock has become a popular tool for self-expression among Muslim American youth today.
Key Characteristics of Social Movements: Liminality and Youth
Having looked at the emergence of social movement theory of 19th century sociologists and the shift to new social movement theory in the 20th century, I will now explain two characteristics of social movements that will help us understand why punk rock has historically been considered a social movement.
The first characteristic of social movements is Liminality. This characteristic can be explained using the framework devised by the cultural anthropologist Victor Turner to
36 Ibid, 466 37 Buechler, Steven, “New Social Movement Theories.” The Sociological Quarterly Vol. 36 (1995), 442 understand ritual ceremonies. Mathieu Deflem, a professor of sociology at the University of South Carolina, believes that Turner’s work on rituals very directly relates to social movements especially in the temporal structure of both ritual ceremonies and social movements.38 Turner’s framework for understanding rituals is a three-stage progression by which an individual experiences ritual ceremonies. The first stage, called ‘separation’ or the ‘pre-liminal,’ is when “a person or group becomes detached from an earlier fixed point in the social structure or from an earlier set of social conditions.”39 This separation can manifest itself as personal isolation or as a collective disassociation with a particular element of society. The second stage of the ritual process is called ‘margin’ or the liminal. During this stage “the state of the ritual subject is ambiguous; he is no longer in the old state and has not yet reached a new one.”40 The third and final stage of the ritual process is called “aggregation” or the post-liminal in which the subject “enters a new stable state.”41
This three-stage processes originated out of Victor Turner’s study of rituals but we can also use this framework to understand the phases that many participants in social movements experience. In my interviews with Basim Usmani and Imran Malik, these three phases were not explicitly addressed yet it was very apparent that the musicians’ experiences within a social movement followed a similar course, beginning with a separation from their families, their heritage culture, and their religion. This, as we will discover in chapter two, led to a liminal stage where Basim and Imran began redefining their identities using punk rock as a vehicle to do this. When I spoke with Imran Malik in
38 Deflem, Mathieu. “Ritual, Anti-Structure, and Religion: A Discussion of Victor Turner’s Processual Symbolic Analysis.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion Vol. 30 (1991), 7 39 Ibid, 8 40 Ibid, 8 41 Ibid, 8 person in January of 2011 he reflected on a time when he was seriously confused about his identity and he expressed to me some of the conclusions he had arrived at as a result.
Imran seemed empowered by his experience of deconstructing and then rebuilding his identity. At the same time he appeared disillusioned by the punk rock social movement in which he had participated and spoke about it in the past, which can only mean that he, as an individual participant, as entered the post-liminal phase as described by Victor Turner.
Liminality is the second phase of a three-stage process as described by Victor
Turner and it is this second stage that overlaps with new social movement theory.
Understanding liminality as a characteristic of new social movements means recognizing the ambiguous states that many social movement participants experience. The participants of social movements often have the directional support that comes from a collective purpose, but the stage of liminality is profoundly personal and transcends the normative ways of understanding social movements and collective identity. In sum, those in a stage of liminality are “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony.”42 Liminality, as a transitional process, may be superficial and quick or long lasting and extremely profound, including all the degrees in between. The extent to which a subject is sucked into a liminal vacuum is entirely a matter of the individual and the degree to which he or she explores and accepts personal change.
***
Another prominent characteristic of social movements is that of ‘youth’. Like liminality, ‘youth’ assumes “the betwixt and between” nature as an individual transitions
42 Deflem, Mathieu, “Ritual, Anti-Structure, and Religion: A Discussion of Victor Turner’s Processual Symbolic Analysis.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion Vol. 30 (1991), 14 from one position in life to another.43 It is a phase between childhood and adulthood in which a youth’s identity formulates. Many scholars of youth cultures view this space as tense and sometimes very productive depending on the resources provided by society and on an individual’s ability to attain those resources.44 This concept of ‘youth’ must be defined contextually since youth is perceived differently around the world and is contingent upon changing circumstances such as population and economic shifts.45 Many western scholars now understand youth to be an assumed identity instead of a predetermined and inevitable stage of human development like adolescence or adulthood.
'Youth' can overlap into various stages in our life because it is in many ways a fading phenomena both in its beginning and its end.
Social scientists and cultural critics have long been intrigued and profoundly perplexed by ‘youth culture.’ The study of ‘youth culture’ in the United States began in the first half of the 20th century as new concerns of deviant subcultures created an atmosphere of anxiety.46 Some social scientists were even quick to define adolescence– which is not synonymous with youth–as a social problem.47 The Birmingham School had already done a fair amount of research on youth culture to conclude that becoming a delinquent is “largely the result of the labeling process,” and the targets were punk rock music listeners, groupies, and musicians.48 The foundation of youth studies had been laid several decades before at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in England where working class youth identities in a growing industrial
43 Epstein, Jonathon, Youth Culture: Identity in a Postmodern World (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 4 44 Ibid, 5 45 Bucholtz, Mary, “Youth and Cultural Practice.” Annual Review of Anthropology Vol. 31 (2002), 527 46 Ibid, 536 47 Epstein, Jonathon, Youth Culture: Identity in a Postmodern World (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 3 48 Ibid, 8 metropolis seemed to be the primary concern for scholars.49 “Some of the most influential work within cultural studies,” Bucholtz writes, “currently retains in Birmingham School’s focus on music-based subcultures in capitalist societies.”50
Studies of counter-cultures and subcultures often merge with studies of youth culture because the majority of the participants have assumed a ‘youth’ identity.
Subculture, unlike the culture of a small community or a high school, operates on three distinct premises: on the basis of historical ideas, on the level of values, and on the level of material expression.51 These premises often permeate all avenues of an individual’s life since there is no isolated domain that is restricted to the expression of a subculture or a counterculture. An important point to mention about subcultures is they are often very homogenous in their demographic make-up. Even the punk rock movement in Britain and the United States in the 1970s was almost entirely made up of white, middle class men.
***
Social movements are contingent on a number of political, social, and cultural factors.52 Charles Kurzman, in his article in the Anthropological Quarterly titled,
“Introduction: Meaning-Making in Social Movements”, discusses the concept of meaning-making about which he writes, “at its core [it] means the human desire to understand the world around them.”53 The imposition of “meaning” becomes a goal or mental process that requires acts of identification, valuation, and engagement. Depending on perspective as shaped by time and place, the projected meanings may be very different
49 Bucholtz, Mary, “Youth and Cultural Practice.” Annual Review of Anthropology Vol. 31 (2002), 536 50 Ibid, 539 51 Epstein, Jonathon, Youth Culture: Identity in a Postmodern World (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 11 52 Polletta, Francesca and John Jasper, “Collective Identity and Social Movements.” Annual Revue of Sociology Vol. 27 (2001), 285 53 Kurzman, Charles, “Introduction: Meaning-Making in Social Movements.” Anthropological Quarterly Vol. 81.1 (2008); 5 but Kurzman reminds us that this process occurs all the time and is especially conducive to social movements.
A recent trend in the study of social movements has involved scholars working to identify with their subjects as a means of better understanding a marginalized community, and this methodology is certainly anthropological in nature. But what risks do outsiders face by trying to pose as insiders in an effort to gain perspective by using a less top-down approach? This is a question that I have asked myself throughout the researching and writing process for my thesis. On the one hand, my research would be trivial if I did not attempt to understand how Muslim American punk rock musicians place meaning in their music and on their actions, and this attempt could only succeed by situating myself in a way that lets me experience their vantage point on the punk rock social movement. After my interviews with Basim and Imran in January it became clear to me that I was researching a social movement that they thought had already passed.
Because of this, the meaning of this social movement for its participants was delivered as a reflection, not as something they were presently constructing. I am not implying this is good or bad, it is simply an observation of the vantage from which two Muslim American youth are understanding the punk rock social movement in which they participated.
Punk Rock Characteristics and Definitions
Can punk rock be considered a social movement? The characteristics of punk rock music and lifestyle as determined by its participants, its followers, its observers, and the media support the premise that certain historical contexts of punk rock are social movements. The historical and contemporary examples of punk rock provided in this paper are exemplars of social movements.
Media coverage of punk rock today, as in the 1970s, assumes the same role as that of a label maker. Many articles report on the use of punk rock by Muslim American youth as tersely as possible, hitting all the major points and leaving out the details.
However, the points that are hit in most of these articles are ones used for shock-value and hype. If the adjacency of ‘Islamic’ and ‘Punk’ generates a more profound fear, confusion, intrigue, or anxiety, among readers, then this notion, however exclusive or inadequate it might be, becomes established for its desired reaction. Almost every news article covering the topic of “Islamic Punk Rock” directly or indirectly alludes to it as a social movement. In 2007, when “Islamic Punk Rock” and Taqwacore music started receiving a lot of coverage, Newsweek published an article by Matthew Philips titled,
“Slam Dancing for Allah.” In the article, Philip writes “Muslim punk movement” to refer to the burgeoning scene.54 The BBC refers to Taqwacore as “an emerging subculture” as does The New York Times in the article titled, “Young Muslims Build a Subculture on an
Underground Book.”55 These articles are not necessarily wrong to consider this use of punk rock by Muslim American youth as indicative of a social movement or subculture.
Countless other news articles have used some derivative phrasing of “Muslim punk movement” to connote the same idea. Media coverage of punk rock in the 1970s offered the same defining terms of punk rock. In a 1978 Rolling Stone article titled “Never Mind
54 Philips, Matthew. “Slam Dancing for Allah.” Newsweek, June 18, 2007, http://www.newsweek.com/2007/06/17/slam-dancing-for-allah.html. 55 Maag, Christopher. “Young Muslims Build a Subculture on an Underground Book.” The New York Times, December 23, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/us/23muslim.html. the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols,” Paul Nelson uses ‘movement’ to refer to the “punk- rock New Wave’ in the U.K.56
Media has not always covered punk rock surges the same way. In 1970s England, nobody was defining punk from within.57 Media, journalists, and reporters, “could not dramatize the movement in a way that fired people’s imagination,” thereby making it difficult for England’s punk scene to have an influence beyond its geographic boundaries.58 On top of this, the mainstream music industry in England was not sympathetic to new groups that wanted to make abrasive, socio-cultural noise. This not the case with today’s emerging punk rock scene in the United States made up of Muslim
American youth. For one, media coverage is much more prolific, but besides technological advances, the media has been able to successfully create hype and perhaps some fear in their coverage of “Islamic Punk Rock” in the United States. However, the musicians in this scene actively define their music and their personal conceptions of punk rock in their interviews with media outlets and online blogs, leaving little room for reporters to play with their image and beliefs.
Even if punk rock participants, be it musicians or followers, did not deem the function of their activities as contributing to a greater punk rock social movement, many of them defined punk in a way that characterized it as such. Fugazi is a punk rock band out of Washington D.C. that emerged in 1987. Guy Piccotto, one of its members, says,
“the whole concept of punk was something that was against whatever seemed normal or
56 Nelson, Paul. “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols.” Rolling Stone Magazine, February 23, 1978, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/never-mind-the-bollocks-heres-the-sex-pistols- 19780223. 57 Savage, Jon, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond (New York: St. Martins Press. 1991), 200 58 Ibid, 200 whatever seemed kind of handed down. To me the basic tenets have always been; no set of rules, no set of expectations, and that it always challenges the status quo.”59 In an email exchange, Basim Usmani narrowed punk rock down to two distinct features:
1. “A DIY (do-it-yourself) industry that has its own set of ethics (handmade clothes, painting logos or patches, pins for bands, singles being sold for 5 -7 $ even if bands should be allowed to mark those up nowadays.) 2. “An attitude towards concerts that destroys the audience/performer barrier. Where the show is really happening in the mosh pit, on the dance floor, and people are jumping on stage, musicians are leaping off of it.”60
These features understand punk rock first as an industry, and second as an attitude.
The first feature implies some level of collective and economic manufacturing that goes into the production of punk rock. The second feature implies an individual’s position towards music that discredits the normative behavior for musicians while they perform.
According to Kevin Dunn, the characteristics that define punk rock movements are far more intentional than they may appear to observers. Dunn writes:
Viewed from without, punk was (and is) frequently characterized by its evocative embrace of rage and violence, which often led the music and the large scene to be dismissed as nihilistic and (self-) destructive. But viewed from within, the employment of violence–both performative and real –became an important device for disrupting what many considered to be the stultifying effects of everyday life in modern capitalist societies.61
I will now turn to the history and development of punk rock by examining the atmosphere in which it arose in 1970s England. What are the scholars saying, what are the punk rockers saying? How is punk rock defined from within and from without and
59 Dunn, Kevin, “Never mind the bollocks: the punk rock politics of global communication.” Review of International Studies Vol. 34 (2008), 197 60 Basim Usmani, email exchange, February 17, 2011. 61 Dunn, Kevin, “Never mind the bollocks: the punk rock politics of global communication.” Review of International Studies Vol. 34 (2008), 195 what are the key characteristics of punk rock. Do the individuals within the punk rock scene consider it to be a social movement?
Punk Rock History
The beginnings of punk rock are still debated since many people have varying definitions of what punk rock is. Some people argue that the first punk scene was in New
York while others believe it began in England with the Sex Pistols. Time and place aside, to understand punk rock means grasping the often complex social settings in which punk rock movements are born. The spawn of punk rock as a social movement is contingent upon the climate of a particular society, which may include elements of societal dysfunction such as economic recessions and social unrest. In the early 1970s both of these factors were in effect in England. In July of 1975 England was in a deep recession as was evident by the country’s unbalanced economy and high unemployment rates.62 As a result, social life disintegrated and the working class became resentful towards the government, blaming it for creating their steady social and economic demise. “The
English national emotion is depression and it is endemic,” which may make hard times even harder in a country whose general disposition is sour.63 The radical currents that created England’s counter-culture social movement were also kindled by a heat wave that struck the country in the summer of 1976, adding fuel to the already volatile and suspicious atmosphere.64
62 Savage, Jon, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond (New York: St. Martins Press. 1991), 108 63 Ibid, 191 64 Ibid, 202 In the 1960s, England’s music industry and music culture expanded as popular groups like the Beatles, The Animals, and the Rolling Stones dominated England’s music scene but satisfying only a certain strata of Brits. Pop music offered an expanding source of capital for the handful of multi-national companies that dominated sixty percent of
English markets.65 The hippy culture of the 1960s ran with notions of freedom and spirituality as a means of anti-establishment resistance while the new punk rock movement of the 1970s discarded such idealistic ideologies and opted for a more realistic, palpable frustration, which “is one of the great things in art; satisfaction is nothing,” according to author Michael McLaren, the four-year manager of the Sex
Pistols. In 1968, the same year that McLaren wrote the previous statement, a revolt in
Paris erupted, headed by students with anti-communist and anti-establishment messages for France’s government and President Charles de Gaulle. “The objectives,” writes The
New York Times reporter Peter Steinfels, “were self-management by workers, a decentralization of economic and political power and participatory democracy at the grass roots. The great fear was that contemporary capitalism was capable of absorbing any and all critical ideas or movements and bending them to its own advantage. Hence, the need for provocative shock tactics.”66 This event is also indicative of how youth populations are more geared towards correcting the inequalities in their respective societies.
Michael McLaren and Vivienne Westwood were both deeply mistrusting of the direction of England’s social progress, which glorified the free and easy attitudes of the hippie culture. “England wasn’t free and easy; it was repressed and horrible,” says
65 Ibid, 123 66 Steinfiels, Peter. “Paris, May 1968: The revolution that never was.” The New York Times, August 2 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/world/europe/11iht-paris.4.12777919.html. McLaren in an interview.67 With a wave of anarchistic ideals and radical currents rippling through parts of Europe, two Brits in particular were skeptical of England’s static society, which had a strongly defined ruling class, and decided to do something about it. The introduction of new drugs also heavily influenced the internal social dynamics of the punk rock movement as well as the artistic manifestations. Amphetamine was the drug of choice at the time and would later be understood to have greatly affected 20th century pop music. “Just as the Ramones sped up the pace of Punk, so did amphetamine define its mental state and attitude.”68 Bands became linked to certain derivatives of amphetamine– the Sex Pistols to amphetamine sulphate–and consequently their cult-like followers of bohemians, prostitutes, and all general categories of outcasts became addicts themselves, not necessarily for reasons of emulation but due to the availability and the escalating curiosity.
In his book titled, Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond, author John
Savage explains at length how McLaren and Westwood created the arena and provided the outlet for the increasingly disgruntled middle class youth in England. Their vision was a punk rock movement that would penetrate the mass markets and help promote their own ideals, which were hardly well articulated or even well established but were contradictory to England’s cultural values at the time. “Malcolm McLaren didn’t invent punk. All he did was envisage it, design it, clothe it, publicize it and sell it,” writes Paul
Taylor somewhat sarcastically.69 Michael McLaren and Vivienne Westwood are almost
67 Savage, Jon, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond (New York: St. Martins Press. 1991), 9 68 Savage, Jon, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond (New York: St. Martins Press. 1991), 435 69 Taylor, Paul. Impresario: Malcolm McLaren and the British New Wave (Cambridge, Mass.; The Mit Press. 1988), 11. entirely agreed upon by anyone familiar with the punk rock movement as the founders of the “new wave” of punk rock in 1970s England.
The Sex Pistols began in a miasma of antagonism and mutual suspicion between the upper class of English society and the youths of blue-collar backgrounds. Before the formation of the Sex Pistols, a youth movement was brewing in England but between
1970 and 1975 it was mostly stagnant, until Malcolm McLaren threw together a band of four disheveled and irritable teenager. More than just a spicy alternative to bland pop music, punk rock spawned in reaction to the decline of Britain’s economy and consequently, standard of living.70 The Sex Pistols, as most people, historians, and scholars will agree, breathed life into the punk rock movement, even though the band members may have adopted and adapted what they heard and saw from other music scenes, particularly in the United States.
“Punk Rock in England was always more socially involved and publicly visible than its American counterpart, and as a result the American bands gained neither the fame nor the notoriety of the Sex Pistols”,71 writes Caroline O’Meara in a review of the documentary film “End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones”. The rock movement, which, “dominated popular music over most of the world for almost a decade from the early 1960s” produced bands like The Velvet Underground, The Who, and Cream, a band recognized as “rock’s first ‘super-group’”72 who collectively produced, along with other
70 Bennett, Andy. Cultures of Popular Music (England: Open University Press. 2001), 58 71 O'Meara, Caroline Polk. “End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones”. American Music. Vol 23.4., 2006. Pp 372-375 72 Sadie, Stanley, The New Grove: Dictionary of Music and Musicians Vol. 15 (London, England: Macmillan Publishers), 115. bands, the movement of rock music in the United States and England, the two hegemonic powers who dominated the production and distribution of music.73
Punk rock has a much more definitive birth date than many other counter-cultural movements of the time.
Between the autumn of 1976 and the summer of 1977, a particular music, a highly visible subcultural style, and an increasingly public crisis momentarily fused together. Punk burst upon an unsuspecting London and quickly acquired the propensity to act as a new folk devil…[the] punk’s pallid body perforated by safety pins, draped in pvs and locked in a dog collar; those glassy, amphetamine blocked eyes staring out from beneath shocks of garishly dyed hair. These were the signs that briefly capture the horrified fascination of the outside world.74
Around the mid-70s, the American punk rock scene was gaining speed in New
York City but for different reasons. Punk was becoming an international archetype for antsy, obnoxious teenage youth, but this archetype did not accurately represent all the emerging punk scenes and its individual participants. “In England, Punk is not a passing fad but is doesn’t look like it will happen with the same kind of impact, because the social climate is different. It’s more positive here.”75 Relative to the punk scene in
England, the American punk scene could be seen as having a higher degree of subtlety and couth, but that does not mean it was without confrontation.
American punk rock confronted social anxieties around music and dance, the mega-media conglomerations, and the Vietnam War. While media was much more diverse in the United States than in England, it was also more monopolized, so if punk rockers did not want to follow the rules of the media they would be shut out, and they
73 Ibid, 119 74 Chambers, Iain. Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985), 175-6 75 Savage, Jon, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond (New York: St. Martins Press. 1991), 435 were. Localized communities of punk rock emerged as a result, creating forums and networks where they could reach out to other punk scenes in different U.S. cities.
Punk Rock music became a popular medium for post-war social commentary.76
As youth populations became more socio-politically informed, so did their lyrics, which not only helped to educate people on capitalist domination but also worked towards a collective identity for a counter-culture movement. “The dominant sociological interpretation of counter-culture”, according to Culture of Popular Music author Andy
Bennett, “suggests that it consisted of white middle class youth who were disillusioned with the way their parents’ culture ‘controlled’ society”.77 It is important to understand the privilege necessary to be involved with a counter-culture such as the punk rock movement as I will address in more detail later. Dominant ideologies of the sixties foreshadowed youth resistance in the 1970s. Young people began addressing issues of nuclear energy, homosexuality, feminism and local autonomy.78 In protest and rally form driven by political and cultural efforts these issues were attacked but music and lyrics became another avenue for dialogue and outlet for frustration.
As mentioned above, there were a number of reasons for protest in the 1960s and early 1970s that contributed to the formation of a quite tangible punk rock social movement by the mid-1970s that directly or indirectly attacked the government and a number of large-scale issues. One question we might ask about the participants in punk rock social movements is, What’s in it for them? Are shared interests enough to motivate the youth to participate in punk rock movement? Loyalty to a particular movement must
76 Bennett, Andy. Cultures of Popular Music (England: Open University Press. 2001), 24 77 Ibid, 25 78 Polletta, Francesca and John Jasper, “Collective Identity and Social Movements.” Annual Revue of Sociology Vol. 27 (2001), 286 have underpinnings of self-interest that come from a place of dissatisfaction. In my interviews with Imran Malik and Basim Usmani, they expressed personal frustrations with stereotypes of Islam in the United States and the way many Muslims are treated.
They also understand how their personal frustrations feed into a larger, more collective frustration harbored by Muslim youth in the United States.
The signifier that tells me that the use of punk rock by Muslim American youth is part of a social movement is the way in which this specific strand of punk rock in the
United States is being used as a site of identity negotiation for Muslim American youth.
As we will further explore in this thesis, Basim Usmani from the punk rock band The
Kominas understands his music as contributing to a larger movement of artistic expression by Muslim American youth.
Chapter Two
Taqwacore: Creating a Space for Punk and Islam
Introduction
The Taqwacores is the name of a fictional book written by Michael Muhammad
Knight. The book has played an important role in the lives of many young Muslim
Americans who find they can relate to the premise and protagonists of the book. The
Taqwacores was also one of the primary catalysts for a punk rock scene for Muslim
American youth. I begin this chapter by describing the qualities of the book and the characters in it that have appealed so greatly to a number of Muslim American youth.
How did the book The Taqwacores evolve from a piece of literature that barely got published into manifesto that has buttressed the use of punk rock within a larger social movement? In order to understand the transition this book took from fiction to reality, we will look at the story of the books protagonist, a Muslim American named Yusuf Ali, who can be understood as an extension of his creator, Michael Muhammad Knight, also a
Muslim American. I will then explain how the author of The Taqwacores Michael
Muhammad Knight came to write such a book and what his role has been in the Muslim punk rock scene in the United States.
The Taqwacores
The premise of Michael Muhammad Knight’s 2004 book, The Taqwacores is the spiritual journey of Yusef Ali, a college student and a practicing Muslim within the context of traditional Islam, who arrives at a college co-op in Buffalo, NY only to find that his understanding of Islam is not like that
of anyone else’s living in the house. “The
house includes a mixture of individuals
including Yusef, a college student who
abstains from much of the debauchery that
often ensues, Umar who is a straightedge
practicing Muslim with multiple tattoos,
Rabeya, a feminist riotgrrrl who always wears
a burqa, and Jehangir, a punk Muslim who
indulges in the sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll
lifestyle.”79 Surrounded by leather-clad and
Mohawk-sporting Muslims, Yusef learns to question what the true meaning of Islam is and what it means to be Muslim. Written from the point of view of Yusef, the reader’s journey with him as he wades through the various interpretations of Islam that are present under one roof. The catch that makes Yusef’s living situation and the novel itself not only entertaining but also perplexing, is the punk rock scene that fuels the behavior, style, and language of the co-op inhabitants.
As Islam and punk rock come together in the book, the world is one of stark incongruity and resistance but we hardly ever get the sense that the characters are leading hypocritical lives, which is a common conclusion made by many who do not understand how punk rock and Islam may fit together. Why would many Muslims in the United
States argue that Islam and punk rock are incompatible? Punk rock music is often
79 Hosman, Sarah Siltanen, “Muslim Punk Rock in the United States: A Social History of The Taqwacores” (M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina, 2009), 22 accompanied by punk rock ideologies, styles of dress, and attitudes that for many
Muslims would not be considered appropriate in Islam. In The Taqwacores, many of the characters drink, smoke, and cuss on one page and then pray and recite Qur’anic verse on the next page. Michael Knight’s point is that Muslims should not have to follow a certain type of Islam as conceived of by religious elite. Muslims should be able to decide what
Islam means for themselves without being accused of blasphemy or succumbing to temptations.
The book concludes with a huge Taqwacore concert that is facilitated by a main character named Jehangir, a Muslim punk rocker who brings together all the Taqwacore bands from California to New York for a show. There are many ideas and bold messages in Knight’s novel. Hosman writes in her dissertation on Taqwacore that, “Perhaps one of the main ideas expressed by the novel is that Islam as a religion or a concept is broad enough to not only include but also embrace those who stray from the mainstream, who question religion, question themselves, and ultimately decide for themselves what being
Muslim means.”80 In addition, she found through her interviews that the non-Muslim members of Taqwacore bands were able to relate to the novel’s larger issues of identity and confusion.
Michael Muhammad Knight
In 2004, Michael Muhammad Knight found a publisher for his first book, The
Taqwacores. The offbeat novel was picked up by Soft Skull Press in Berkeley, California but only after months of handing out his book as spiral-bound photocopies out of the
80 Ibid, 30 trunk of his car at his local mosque.81 By 2009 Knight had published six books, the last being Journey to the End of Islam. Knight is now studying at Harvard University and is a frequent speaker at colleges and academic conferences.
His conversion to Islam and his confrontations with Islam are the subject of many of his books. For many converts, their new religion is the answer they have been searching for their whole lives and they adopt their new set beliefs with ardor and practice them with consistency. This has not been the case for Knight whose conversion to Islam has surfaced more questions then it has answers. The author explains his relationship to Islam to Imran Malik with the following analogy:
It’s like when you’re a little kid and you think your parents are superheroes who can do no wrong. But when you’re a teenager, you wake up to their bullshit, and it hurts, so you start fights and storm out of the house. Then you get older, and you gain a little wisdom. Yes, your parents were human beings and made mistakes and whatever, but you’ve reached a place in life where you can better understand them.82
Knight, whose mother is Irish Catholic and father was a Pentecostal preacher converted to Islam in his teenage years after becoming initially interested in the religion at age thirteen through song lyrics by Public Enemy’s “Party for Your Right to Fight” that references Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, two prominent leaders for black
Muslim Americans.83 Through his own research, a young Mike Knight learned about
Islam’s place in American history and found that he preferred the teachings of Islam to those of the Catholic church. In identifying with Islam, he felt he was distancing himself from his racist white classmates. “I needed something to completely tear down the world
81 Ghomeshi, Jian. “The Taqwacores Breathes Life into Muslim Punk.” CBC News, February 24, 2009, http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/film/story/2009/02/24/taqwacore-book.html. 82 Knight, Michael Muhammad. Journey to the End of Islam (Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press, 2009), 23 83 Crafts, Lydia. “Taqwacore: The Real Muslim Punk Underground.” National Public Radio, July 25, 2009, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=107010536 that I knew. Islam seemed to be such a critique of everything that I knew.”84 Michael
Knight continued to embrace Islam as a sophomore at St. Francis DeSales High School in
Geneva, New York. “When our lacrosse team prayed to the school’s Mary statue before games, I was the one standing while everyone around me kneeled. They asked for Mary to help us in the game, and I’d repeat the shahada85 to myself: there was no god but
God.”86
In the years after Knight’s conversion to Islam he wondered how religion could be defined by a set of pillars and traditions that a lot of Muslims would blindly obey, or not obey at all. “I kind of burned out on the demands of organized religion.”87 It was in this space between believing in Islam but being done with its demands that punk rock became a portal back into Islam for Michael Muhammad Knight.
Knight tried latching himself to different Muslim communities in the United
States.88 He tried Pakistani Islam and African American Islam but preferred “to mix and match” rather than fully adhere to any one community. His flexible Islam allowed him to step in and out of the geographic and spiritual boundaries of different Muslim communities in New York.89 One of the luxuries of being an American convert to Islam was that he had no tradition or community requirements that can hinder a person who is trying to discover how religion fits into their life. “I was homeless in Islam, my practice from no family or national identity, no tribe or Islamic Republic.”90 Michael Knight
84 Ibid. 85 Shahada is the Islamic confession of faith. 86 Knight, Michael Muhammad. Journey to the End of Islam (Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press, 2009), 85 87 Crafts, Lydia. “Taqwacore: The Real Muslim Punk Underground.” National Public Radio, July 25, 2009, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=107010536 88 Ibid, 85 89 Ibid, 11 90 Ibid, 9 wrote The Taqwacores as convert to Islam without being a part of a Muslim community.
The book is revealing of this if we understand the protagonist as an extension of Michael
Knight. Yusef Ali, a Muslim who thought he knew exactly what being Muslim entailed, walked right into a community that made him question his, at the time, myopic perspective of Islam. The device that Michael Knight used to raise questions about Islam was punk rock.
At age seventeen, Knight took a trip to Pakistan to learn about Islam–the country’s official name is The Islamic Republic of Pakistan and is 95% Muslim.91
Reflecting back on the experience after his second trip to Pakistan fifteen years later,
Knight realizes that the Islam he had experienced had been narrow, recalling an experience that only taught him one, very singular perspective of Islam. Not until Knight returned to Pakistan at age 32 at the beckon of a few close friends did he finally feel the beating pulse of Pakistani Islam. At this point, he had already authored a number of books, including the widely acclaimed novel, The Taqwacores, and even though he credits the book and punk rock with lending him a portal back into Islam, Knight has continued to leave Islam open to rediscovery and reinterpretation.
When the book was first published it was met with heavy publicity and skepticism, especially in the England. The Taqwacores was released in 2007 after publishers won their demand for censorship. Ultimately, Michael Knight allowed the censorship and reflects on the reasons behind these changes in his latest book:
If these changes were motivated by a fear of violence from offended Muslims, then the publisher has supported an image of violence as a Muslim’s natural response, while also justifying the threat of violence as a means to govern speech…If the publisher’s intention was to show respect for Islam, it was only a certain kind of Islam–the monolithic Islam of
91 Central Intelligence Agency website. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world- factbook/geos/pk.html. 3/5/2011 uncompromised orthodoxy, the Muslim community as defended by its most conservative members, in which all Muslims are assumed to believe and practice in one uniform fashion.92
No censorship was placed on the book in the United States and many young
Muslims appreciated the books take on Islam in an American context. Even though the story of Muslim punk rockers living in a co-op in Buffalo, New York was fictional, it gave young Muslims a very real opportunity to express their religious concerns through music and online forums, an option that they did not feel they had before The
Taqwacores because they did not think that any other Muslims in the United States would be interested in punk rock as well.
Reactions to The Taqwacores
For some young Muslims the fusion of punk rock and Islam was outlandish yet intriguing. For others, the fusion of punk rock and Islam was a relief. Shahjehan Khan of
The Kominas told Sarah Hosman in an interview for her dissertation that the book was something he was “probably looking for his whole life…it was something that I really related to. The main character I felt was in me in ways.”93 Another young Muslim
American, Hana Arzay says, “This book is my lifeline…it saved my faith.”94 Even if
Muslims in the United States have a community to which they can turn with questions about faith, they are still a minority in a non-Muslim country. Kourosh Poursalehi, a teenager of Persian descent living in Texas thought the characters were real. “It all came together for me like, ‘Wow–I’m not the only one experiencing this. There are other kids
92 Knight, Michael Muhammad. Journey to the End of Islam (Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press, 2009), 82 93 Ibid, 23 94 Maag, Christopher. “Young Muslims Build a Subculture on an Underground Book.” The New York Times, December 23, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/us/23muslim.html. out there into all this kind of music.”95 Michael Muhammad Knight introduces the book with a poem titled “Muhammad was a Punk Rocker”. One section reads:
Muhammad was a punk rocker He tore everything down Muhammad was a punk rocker He rocked that town
All the people in Mecca Knew Muhammad’s name They knew him by his fucked-up hair And dangling wallet chain96
After reading the book, Kourosh put the poem to music and sent an audio clip to Michael
Muhammad Knight who passed it onto Shahjehan Khan, a founding member of the
Taqwacore band The Kominas.
Shahjehan Khan was in his early twenties and living in Boston when his childhood friend Basim Usmani introduced him to The Taqwacores. The book inspired him and his friend Basim to create a tangible Taqwacore band the way the punk rockers in the book had. The two friends, both Muslim and both of Pakistani descent, had already been playing music together before the book entered their lives. Inspired by the imagination of Michael Muhammad Knight, a space called Taqwacore was created where
Muslim American musicians could find inspiration and support. Quite suddenly, young
Muslims across the United States recognized their similarities with the characters in
Knight’s book and through these characters they were able to reconcile seemingly contrasting areas of their lives, ones that included Islam, American culture, heritage culture, and punk rock. Like nineteen-year-old Kourosh of Texas who formed the band
95 Crafts, Lydia. “Taqwacore: The Real Muslim Punk Underground.” National Public Radio, July 25, 2009, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=107010536 96 Knight, Michael Muhammad. The Taqwacores (Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press, 2004), 13 Vote Hezbollah after reading the book, Shahjehan and Basim reacted by forming The
Kominas.
The Muslim American youth who read The Taqwacores and are now part of a
Taqwacore band or invested in the movement, somehow connected to the characters and ideas about Islam that were presented in the novel enough to reach out to the author.
When I interviewed Basim Usmani in January of 2011, he said this about The
Taqwacores: “There’s something brilliant to be said about what Mike did…He took two ideas that were really, really charged. There are people that are overly invested in punk too.”97 By this Basim means that just as there are devout Muslims there are devout punk rockers who are perhaps less spiritual but equally dedicated to punk rock as a belief system.
Imran Malik, who joined The Kominas in 2009, had heard about the book when
Mike (as his friends call him) was handing out copies before he found a publisher. A few years later Imran read the book. “Everybody’s got a different viewpoint on Islam and a different relationship with Islam. One of the things I found so cool about the The
Taqwacores book and the whole scene was just that it’s a space for people to have these conflicting ideas and kind of just come together and peacefully coexist and talk to each other about it,” Imran told me when I interviewed him in Los Angeles.98 Creating a website called Taqwacore Webzine became a virtual outlet for these questions and when
Michael Knight and five Taqwacore bands decided to come together for a tour, the virtual space became an intimate face-to-face experience.
97 Basim Usmani, in-person interview, Boston, January 11, 2011. 98 Imran Malik, in-person interview, Los Angeles, January 28, 2011. The Taqwa Tour and the Documentary
The Taqwacore Webzine was created as a virtual forum both for and maintained by the musicians in Taqwacore bands. The site lists these bands as Taqwacore bands:
• Al-Thawra (Chicago, IL)
• The Kominas (Boston, MA)
• Secret Trial Five (Vancouver, Canada)
• Sarmust (Washington, D.C.)
• Diacritical (Washington, D.C.)
• Vote Hezbollah (Austin, TX)
• Sagg Taqwacore Syndicate (Scotland / California)
• Dead Bhuttos (Islamabad, Pakistan) 99 • Noble Drew (Lahore, Pakistan)
Once the bands were in contact with each other and with Michael Knight, they decided to pool their resources and go on tour through the Northeast. The year was 2007 and Omar Majeed, a Canadian Muslim filmmaker wanted to make a documentary out of the tour. “Omar Majeed was looking to make a documentary about Muslims and music and when he came across Taqwacore he followed it,” said Imran of The Kominas.100 Mr.
Majeed accompanied the new faces of the burgeoning Taqwacore scene in their green school bus.101 The documentary begins with author Michael Muhammad Knight reading this excerpt from The Taqwacores:
I stopped trying to define punk around the same time I stopped trying to define Islam. They aren’t so far removed as you’d think. Both began in tremendous bursts of truth and vitality but seem to have lost something along the way–the energy, perhaps, that comes with knowing the world has never seen such positive force and fury and never would again. Both have suffered from sell-outs and hypocrites, but also from true believers
99 “Taqwacore Webzine.” 2009, http://taqwacore.wordpress.com/about/ 100 Imran Malik, in-person interview, Los Angeles, January 28, 2011 101 Abdalla, May. “On Tour With the Taqwacores.” BBC News, October 2, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/7024784.stm. whose devotion had crippled their creative drives. Both are viewed by outsiders as unified, cohesive communities when nothing could be further from the truth. I could go on but the most important similarity is that like punk, as mentioned above, Islam is itself a flag, an open symbol representing not things, but ideas. You cannot hold punk or Islam in your hands. So what could they mean besides what you want them to?102
The definitions of punk rock and Islam, according to Michael Knight, are elusive, and if people ever do arrive at definitions of the two, they must recognize that their definitions are self-constructed and thus can only be self-applied.
Basim Usmani is a Muslim American musician who is featured in the documentary and who Michael Knight felt embodied the type of character he had envisioned for his imaginative punk rock co-op. At the time the documentary was filmed,
Basim had a purple Mohawk that lay flaccid for most of the film until his pre- performance regimen in which director Majeed films Basim in the bathroom of a venue spiking his Mohawk. As the Taqwacore bus weaves through different North American cities, the punk rock bands and Knight come across people who are intrigued not just with their catchy image but with the questions the bands raise about identity and religion.
The most contentious show of the tour was at the annual convention for the Islamic
Society of North American (ISNA) in Chicago in 2007. During the convention, the
Muslim Students’ Association organized an open mic where the only requirement for potential performers was signing up on a clipboard.
The first Taqwacore band to take the stage was Secret Trial Five, an all-female band out of Toronto, Canada who takes their name from a group of Muslims suspected of terrorism and held without charge in Canada.103 A floor of young girls all wearing
102 Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam, DVD, 2009 103 “Taqwacore Webzine.” February 2011, http://taqwacore.wordpress.com/about/secrettrialfive/ hijabs104 sat cross-legged, gazing up at lead singer Sena Hussein as she hollered
“MIDDLE EASTERN ZOMBIES ARE THE WORST KIND, PRESIDENTIAL FLESH
IS WHAT IS ON THEIR MINDS.”105 It was not the absence of a hijab or her boyish buzz-cut that had Sena and the other Taqwacore bands escorted out of the convention by the police. A female ISNA organizer was interviewed after the show saying, “I told them there’s no female singing, there’s no dancing…no cussing. Islamically appropriate means all of those things, but I specifically said no female singers.”106 The organizer says that the rule against female singers is not necessarily reflective of her opinion but it is what
ISNA policy says. The film concludes in Lahore, Pakistan with Basim Usmani and
Shahjehan Khan playing a rooftop show under their band name Noble Drew, which they began Pakistan.
“Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam”, made its premiere at the 2010 Sundance
Film Festival. It has also aired on a few college campuses and at a number of small film festivals across in the country and in Canada. Because of the documentary many of the bands, namely The Kominas, received a lot of media attention. “The media caught on to it right from the beginning”, says Imran.107
The Media
“They hear the name, Islamic Punk Rock, and they [people, the media] think there is something to agree or disagree with….It’s not a thesis though in and of itself.”108
Basim Usmani isn’t asking people to agree or disagree with his music, which he self-
104 A hijab is a headscarf worn by many Muslim women. 105 Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam, DVD, 2009 106 Ibid. 107 Imran Malik, in-person interview, Los Angeles, January 28, 2011. 108 Basim Usmani, in-person interview, Boston, January 11, 2011. labels as punk rock. Whether his music is Islamic or not is another issue that is a bit more complex. At a café in downtown Los Angeles, Basim’s band-mate Imran rhetorically asked me, “Are punk rockers that are Muslim ‘Islamic punk rockers’? But if they’re not singing about Islamic stuff then is it really Islamic punk rock? The label doesn’t really fit.”109
One topic that came up more frequently when speaking with Imran was the role of the media in defining and directing the Taqwacore movement. The “Islamic Punk Rock” label was not one that the Taqwacore bands had adopted themselves, but they did not vehemently reject it either. “The media likes that angle a lot and the majority of the press that we’ve gotten has been based on that.”110 For Imran, this label is a problem because it only defines a part of what The Kominas are about and excludes the rest. The original conception for The Kominas, according to lead singer Basim Usmani, was as a
“Bollywood Punk” band in which traditional Pakistani and Indian music was presented with a punk rock backdrop. Many of The Kominas songs are in Punjabi and not all of them deal with issues of political Islam but the songs that do deal with issues relating to
Islam have warranted the most attention thereby leading to the label “Islamic Punk.”
There are punk rock scenes in Indonesia, Malaysia, Latin America, and throughout the Middle East. However, there is no indication that any of the Muslim- identifying musicians from Muslim countries classify their music as ‘Muslim Punk’ or
‘Islamic Punk’, nor is their evidence of media uses such labels. The religious distinction of ‘Muslim Punk’ only becomes important in the U.S. When Shahjehan and Basim traveled to Pakistan and started a band called Noble Drew, the ‘Muslim’ was dropped and
109 Imran Malik, in-person interview, Los Angeles, January 28, 2011. 110 Basim Usmani, in-person interview, Boston, January 11, 2011. they were just punk rockers. There was no need for themselves or anyone else to distinguish them as Muslim.
When minorities, as collectives or individuals, produce art or exhibit any form of creative expression, this art, whatever the medium may be, is often understood relative to the person or groups minority identity. Thus, when young Muslims create music it is deemed either ‘Muslim’ or ‘Islamic.’ This is important to take into consideration because there is also an authentic American component to the art they are creating that is not mutually exclusive from the ‘Islamic’ or ‘Muslim’ component. This practice of labeling
American artistic expression as uniquely ‘Muslim’ is comparable to the ways in which
Islam has been posited against the west, both in isolation, as if the two had never informed each other in their religious careers and cultural histories.
The label “Islamic Punk Rock” has been used in numerous newspaper articles to describe the sounds and ethos of a number of punk rock bands in the United States comprised of Muslim youth. The media has been a significant actor in shaping and even directing the Taqwacore subculture. While many musicians resent the exclusive categorization of their music as “Islamic Punk,” they also acknowledge the label’s ability to bring attention to their craft and stimulate an interesting dialogue as to why “Islamic” and “Punk”, when used adjectivally to describe the other, seem incompatible and perhaps oxymoronic. But this leads to another question: Why Islam and why Punk? Addressing this exact question in our first interview, Basim told me, “They are both things that mean what you want them to mean. But more so punk and Islam because of the number of youth versus the older generation in the Muslim world.”111 The sweeping majority of
111 Basim Usmani, in-person interview Boston, January 11, 2011. youth populations in Muslim countries has contributed to international pockets of punk rock subcultures because punk rock has historically been conduit for youth populations.
The Meaning of Taqwa
The term Taqwacore was first used by Michael Knight. Unlike many other labels, this one was been constructed and defined by a Muslim American and embraced by other
Muslim Americans. The name has become something to hold on to and be proud of unlike the label “Islamic Punk Rock” which many of the band members have eschewed for various reasons. Since Taqwacore is a term that many Muslim musicians have readily embraced, I take it seriously when defining and exploring its construction, usage, and general connotations.
To understand what Taqwacore means we must look at its two separate part, taqwa and core. The most important usage of the term taqwa for the purpose of this thesis comes from the book itself, The Taqwacores.
There’s no word for me but taqwa to call what beamed form his empyreal profile: the hair reaching for heaven, black leather vest crowded with spikes reflecting the sun, guitar dangling freely on its strap as he let go. I just looked at him, my body charged with a kind of holy nervousness…112
In this passage the narrator, Yusef Ali is on the rooftop of the co-op observing Jehangir
Tabari performing the adhan (Arabic name for the Islamic call to prayer) on this guitar while his friend Fasiq takes deep drags of weed and recites Qur’anic verse under his breath. As Yusef stands in the periphery and absorbs this unusual scene he begins to feel a sensation entirely new, as if the vibrant six-stringed call to prayer allows him to understand Islam as it is being interpreted in this moment. The only word left to describe
112 Knight, Michael Muhammad. The Taqwacores (Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press, 2004), 13 his rooftop experience is taqwa. This passage reflects a degree of self-awareness on behalf of the speaker.
In the documentary “Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam” the term taqwa is defined in the very first frame of the film as the “Islamic Concept of ‘God
Consciousness.’”113 Taqwa has been an especially difficult word for Islamic scholars to translate.114 “English doesn’t capture the meaning and entirety of ‘taqwa,’” said Professor
Mavani in my first class of his course titled, “The Qur’an and Its Interpreters.” He proceeds to explain to the class that taqwa means, “that at all times you are self-aware and this awareness should permeate the whole of our existence.” Mavani’s explanation makes evident just how abstractly the notion of taqwa can be described. Scholar of
Islamic Studies Fazlur Rahman writes that taqwa is “perhaps the most important single term in the Qur’an.”115 In his widely acclaimed book Approaching the Qur’an: The Early
Revelations, Michael Sells writes the following about the word taqwa:
The root meaning is that of protecting oneself or being vigilant. Islamic commentators describe taqwa as consistent and intense and intense moral vigilance. I have used the terms “mindful” and “mindfulness” here as the closest actively used English approximation.”116
Taqwacore is a single word where the Arabic meaning of taqwa and the English meaning of ‘hardcore’ coalesce to form another word without abandoning their separate meanings. What does “hardcore’ mean? The word is most commonly used to refer to a genre of post-punk music that was characteristically “more intense and more purist.”117
Hardcore can also be understood as a more extreme extension of punk rock music.
113 Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam, DVD, 2009 114 Sells, Michael. Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations (Ashland, Oregon: White Cloud Press, 1999), 87 115 Rahman, Fazlur. Major Themes of the Qur’an (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 28 116 Sells, Michael. Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations (Ashland, Oregon: White Cloud Press, 1999), 87 117 Punk: Attitude, DVD, 2005 Musically, the genre was more formulaic in its progression of verses and chorus and lyrically, much more incomprehensible.118 Sarah Hosman writes that hardcore is, “a term used to describe an individual or group of individuals characterized by an intense devotion to that specific group and its values who often reject the values of mainstream society.”119 Before learning about the Taqwacore scene or listening to Taqwacore music, we can already see how an outside audience could see Islamic piety and American punk rock as deeply contrasting.
Accrassicauda is a band from Iraq and was the subject of the 2008 documentary
“Heavy Metal in Baghdad,” which was turned into a book as well.120 In an email exchange with the lead singer Faisal Talal, he tells me he doesn’t like the Taqwacore music that he has heard because he thinks the music unfairly links Islam to violence.
Faisal is a Muslim from Iraq who has relocated to Brooklyn, New York with his band since the filming of the documentary. Accrassicauda’s use of heavy metal, which has a sound and aesthetic similar to punk rock, has been used as a visceral response to the social environment they live in. “If you really wanna know where is the attraction look around, we are living in a heavy metal world,” says Faisal.121 The band does not use heavy metal to raise questions about Islam. During my interview with Imran of The
Kominas we discussed Accrassicauda and Imran said the following about their relationship to Islam:
For them, they come form Iraq. Islam means something different. Here, as an American you’re able to question your identity. Over there, Islam is not something you mess with…It’s like that for a lot of kids that grow up Muslim. So the idea of saying something blasphemous, they don’t
118 Ibid. 119 Hosman, Sarah Siltanen, “Muslim Punk Rock in the United States: A Social History of The Taqwacores” (M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina, 2009), 21 120 Heavy Metal in Baghdad, DVD. Directed by Eddy Moretti and Suroosh Alvi. Vice Films, 2008. 121 Heavy Metal in Baghdad, DVD, 2008. understand the point of it, they are offended by it. They’re just heavy metal kids, they don’t want to mess with religion. They don’t think it’s something you’re supposed to mess with, or can mess with. For us, I think it’s something that should be messed with and should be questioned. It just depends on where you are.122
What this quotation indicates is the difference in how Muslim youth are using punk rock/heavy metal in Muslim countries versus how Muslim youth are using punk rock in the United States. The way punk rock is used by Muslim Americans is entirely contingent on their social setting and social atmosphere. These musicians are making music in a social environment that allows them to raise questions about religion without the serious political repercussions Muslim punk rockers in Muslim countries might face.
The Kominas
Michael Muhammad Knight wrote The Taqwacores as a final expression of his disillusionment with orthodox Islam. After finishing The Taqwacores, Knight intended to depart from Islam once and for all. But this turned out not to be the case at all, and the more young Muslims reached out to him, the more punk rock and Islam reentered his life.
“He thought it was all real,” Knight says of Kourosh Poursaleh of San Antonio, Texas. “I told him there weren't any Taqwacores. He said, ‘but I'm Taqwacore.'”123 The other
Muslim Americans that reached out to him felt the same way. But did religion really bring them together?
Michael Knight was not the only Muslim American in the Taqwacore scene that questioned the religious norms and standards of Islam, but his questions drove his punk attitude more than anything else. For the other Taqwacore participants, their punk attitude was not so much driven by questions of orthodox Islam as it was by frustrations with
122 Imran Malik, in-person interview, Los Angeles, January 28, 2011. 123 Akkad El, Omar. “A Muslim meld of punk and piety.” The Globe and Mail, December 28, 2007, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/a-muslim-meld-of-punk-and-piety/article805868/page2/ heritage cultural demands, religious restraints, and discrimination, in other words, with being of migrant background in the United States.
The Kominas is the brainchild of Basim Usmani, who is also responsible for the formation of three of the nine bands listed in the previous section. “I thought,” he told me over the phone, “if there’s ever a punk rock band that’s brown, it’s gonna be called The
Kominas.”124 He talks about The Kominas, not just the band members but its larger representation, with great pride and protection. Basim has started other punk rock bands, such as Noble Drew and Dead Bhuttos, but The Kominas is favored and nurtured to a much greater extent. The Kominas officially began in 2006, “around the time they
[Basim and Shahjehan] became friends with Mike Knight,” says Imran who would join the band three years later, “So they were feeding off of each others energy and it was kind of like this kindred spirits kind of thing.”125
Basim grew up in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. He is the eldest of three children and the son of Pakistani parents who emigrated from Pakistan to Berkeley,
California in the 1960s. Basim, who is now 27, speaks affectionately of his parents, especially his mother whose relationship with her eldest son has been much smoother than her husband’s relationship with Basim. Neither of them have always approved of
Basim’s extracurricular activities and punk rock look. Their disapproval reached its zenith when Basim began writing lyrics for songs like, “Sharia Law in the USA,”
“Suicide Bomb the Gap,” and “Blow Shit Up.” His parents can laugh at “off-color things,” he tells me, but this was just disrespectful. “They say two things to me, one–This
124 Basim Usmani, phone interview, March 10, 2011. 125 Imran Malik, in-person interview, Los Angeles, January 28, 2011. is disrespectful and two–Are you stupid?”126 When recording and releasing their punk rock tracks in Pakistan, Basim and Shahjehan use pseudonyms for safety reasons. Punk rock music is not well received in Pakistan because of its inflammatory nature. Basim’s parents do not condone his use of punk rock symbols to reinterpret his commitment, or lack thereof, to Islam but Basim says, “they’ve heard all the songs and they didn’t disown me!”127
The Usmanis moved back to Pakistan from the United States when Basim was ten and returned to the U.S. in time for Basim to enter high school in Boston. Moving back and forth between the United States and Pakistan, a transition he has made more than once, gave Basim a perspective on his cultural and religious roots, which he recognizes as a privilege that many first generation Pakistani Americans do not have. This privilege of knowing the language and having first-hand experience of his parents’ homeland gave
Basim an invaluable confidence in his roots and relieved some of the pressures that immigrant parents place on their American children.
In high school Basim delved further into the tentacles of punk rock, exploring its sounds and aesthetic. He continued to go to his local mosque, which is how he came to know his good friend and fellow band member Shahjehan Khan whose father helped run the mosque. I have not spoken with Shahjehan but it has become very apparent in my conversations with Basim how influential his fellow Pakistani, Muslim American friend has been in both his personal and musical life. Many of the lyrics on The Kominas first album were Basim’s collateral reactions to Shahjehan’s personal struggles. From what
Basim has told me, I know that Shahjehan grew up in a suburb of Boston that had
126 Basim Usmani, in-person interview, Boston, January 11, 2011. 127 Ibid. minimal diversity. “There was like one black kid, one Asian kid and then Shahjehan.”128
His parents, like Basim’s, are from Pakistan but unlike Basim’s parents, Shahjehan’s are trying to uphold the image of a more elite strata of Pakistani culture that is more concerned with the successes of the first generation than the traditions of past generations.
Imran Malik joined The Kominas in 2009. He had met Shahjehan and Basim in
Pakistan during the filming of the documentary “Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam” and when he returned to the United States he became part of The Kominas. Like the other two members of the band, Imran’s parents were born in Pakistan. He was born in Los
Angeles and grew up in Princeton, New Jersey. After his senior year of high school
Imran moved to Pakistan to pursue a medical degree in the city of Islamabad where he also played in a band called The Fatsumas. When I met Imran in Los Angeles in January, two weeks after I had met Basim in Boston, I was surprised at how differently they reflected upon the Taqwacore experience and its meaning. Imran offered a more sobering account of the Taqwacore experience, one verging on impatience. “I think people are kind of jaded on the whole idea. It’s difficult, I think there’s a next wave of Taqwacore that has nothing to do with the people that started it and if that happens then that will be what it is.”129 This reflection of Imran’s brings to mind the transition from the liminal stage to the aggregation of an individual back into society.
Taqwacore Space
128 Ibid. 129 Imran Malik, in-person interview, Los Angeles, January 28, 2011. Michael Muhammad Knight’s original conception of a Taqwacore movement was to create a space for young Muslim Americans like himself to talk about religion and spirituality with music and punk rock as a backdrop to this forum. Islam was a topic of discussion to some extent, but not to the extent that Knight had hoped. “Islam to him was an answer to what he was looking for in life. For the kids that are in the bands and the
Taqwacore scene generally there are no converts…There are a few but I haven’t really talked to them. Most of them are kids that are raised Muslim and had various issues with
Islam to begin with,” says Imran.130
What kind of space did Taqwacore create for young Muslim punk rockers? And why did it create the kind of space it did? I have not spoken with the majority of the
Muslim American youth who comprised the Taqwacore scene making it difficult to say why the majority of them gravitated to Taqwacore. “Everybody comes to it with a different intention,” says Imran.131 Having spoken to several members of The Kominas it is clear to me that there was a chasm between what Michael Knight wanted the
Taqwacore space to be and what many young Muslim Americans needed the space to be.
Knight, according to Imran, “was hoping the conversations would be more about Islam and less about music. His idea on the whole thing is different but he’s been very supportive of anyone who calls themselves Taqwacore.”132 Basim echoed Imran on this matter telling me that Mike Knight is a deeply religious person. For him, Taqwacore was about religion, but for Shahjehan and Basim “This is an American thing.”133
130 Imran Malik, in-person interview, Los Angeles, January 28, 2011. 131 Ibid. 132 Ibid. 133 Basim Usmani, in-person interview, Boston, January 11, 2011. Issues of Islamophobia were often addressed in the Taqwacore space.
Islamophobia, the fear of Islam and Muslims, became deeply entrenched in the United
States after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The ideologically charged events in the name of Islam in the past decade have been catastrophic in their nature and catastrophic in their impact on the daily lives and conscience of Americans, Muslim and non-Muslim. Shahjehan Khan of The Kominas remembers his life before 9/11 as “pretty comfortable for a while and then, bam! I hate the cliché, but it’s true that 9/11 changed everything for me. Not necessarily in an external way, but I was much more conscious of this other part of my identity.”134 Before September 11th, Shahjehan’s Muslim identity was one that he hadn’t paid much attention to or nurtured, revealing that some Americans would prefer to ignore that they have a Muslim identity altogether. The other option is acknowledging this identity by beginning a process of asking oneself questions about religion.
Media coverage directly following the attacks demonized Islam and forced
Muslims to question their faith and at the same time harbor strong sentiments of resentment, criticism and skepticism of American values and democracy. “There is a definite frustration for our specific experience. I think a lot of kids didn’t really think of themselves as different from anyone else until after 9/11.”135
Taqwacore: Part of an Emerging Social Movement
In chapter one I referenced several new articles that described “Islamic Punk
Rock” and Taqwacore as a subcultural social movement. My research and analysis has
134 Ahmed, Tanzila. “American Muslims Reimagined.” Wiretap Magazine online, July 26, 2007, http://www.wiretapmag.org/race/43176/. 135 Imran Malik, in-person interview, Los Angeles, January 28, 2011. shown that Taqwacore is part of a social movement in the United States driven by
Muslim American youth. In chapter one, a characteristic of social movements I define is that of liminality, which Turner defines as having three stages. Separation, the first stage, can manifest itself as personal isolation or as a collective disassociation with a particular element of society. Punk rock became a way for some Muslim American youth to gradually separate themselves from forces in their life that they perceived as oppressive such as their families heritage culture, their second-generation immigrant status, and their religion. Michael Knight began separating himself from orthodox Islam years before there was a Taqwacore scene. Imran Malik separated himself from religious belief entirely. “And when I asked myself certain difficult questions about the existence of god and things that didn’t make sense to me about organized religion in general, the end of that thought process was that I was agnostic.”136
I cannot know from what each Muslim Punk Rocker has separated themselves, but it is clear that Taqwacore, the idea and the movement, transformed this stage of separation to a space of identity negotiation for Muslim American youth. Taqwacore created a space that encouraged young Muslim punk rockers to unlock and re-examine their identities. This stage, called ‘liminality’, is profoundly personal but we could say that those involved in Taqwacore had the directional support that came from a collective purpose. The Taqwacore experience, which had no definitive beginning or ending, was a liminal experience for the musicians involved.
The third and final stage of Turner’s liminal phenomena is aggregation in which the subject reenters the social structure. This stage is a precarious one as participants are
136 Imran Malik, in-person interview, Los Angeles, January 28, 2011. either left “empowered or disillusioned, or both.”137 Throughout this thesis I have been referring to the Taqwacore movement in the past tense because those I have interviewed did the same. “That Taqwa Tour that happened, that’s never gonna happen again.”138
Imran was the most vocal in expressing this point. The Kominas continue call themselves
Taqwacore, but Imran firmly believes that Taqwacore as it was conceived will never be the same. As the case may be, the musicians I have spoken with, who took time off school or work to travel on the Taqwacore bus and to perform, have also had to leave that experience behind an reenter their lives before the tour began.
The last key characteristic I give for social movements is that of youth. All my interviewees are in their mid to late twenties. Michael Knight is thirty-four but was in his late twenties when he wrote The Taqwacores. But youth is not a formulaic requirement for social movements. It is a characteristic, not a rule of social movements.
Understanding the youth aspect of Muslim Americans punk rockers is important in understanding why a certain age bracket responded to the book The Taqwacores as opposed to thirty-, forty-, or fifty-year-old Muslim Americans. I am not suggesting that non-youth Muslim Americans did not read the book, nor do I want to suggest that those who did did not have any reaction. Michael Knight wrote his book with a younger audience in mind, and the majority of readers were probably Muslim and definitely young. So what does this tell us?
Punk rock is an attractive phenomenon to a younger crowd. This is not just evident in the punk rock movement in Britain and the United States in the 1970s, and in the Taqwacore scene. A youth majority of participants and followers in punk rock scenes
137 Yang, Guobin, “The Liminal Effects of Social Movements: Red Guards and the Transformation of Identity.” Sociological Forum Vol. 15, No. 3 (2000); 384 138 Imran Malik, in-person interview, Los Angeles, January 28, 2011. can be observed all over the world. Jeremy Wallach, an anthropologist specializing in
Southeast Asian popular music, writes in his 2005 article titled, “Underground Rock
Music: And Democratization in Indonesia,” that “Rock music has always been allied or at least associated with progressive social change and with the most future-oriented social category in modern and modernizing societies: youth.”139 In this study, Wallach investigates why young Indonesians were attracted to underground rock-music styles and music. President Suharto’s autocratic New Order government in 1997-8 led to protests by university students that eventually led to political upheaval and the dictator’s downfall.
The undergound punk scene that ensued was in response to political corruption and media representations of youth generations. In the 1980s, mass-media outlets in
Indonesia replaced the term “youth” with “teenager”, as if the former was too politically charged. The media also made a strategic intention to portray Indonesia’s underground music movement in a “positive light, emphasizing their idealism, autonomy, and uncompromising commitment to their creative endeavors.”140
These characteristics of social movements as defined in chapter one allow us to see the current wave of punk rock in the United States, commonly called Taqwacore, as part of a social movement that has the primary purpose of providing Muslim American youth with a space to reevaluate their identities. Now that we understand the origin, concept, and use of Taqwacore and how this social space has supported young Muslims in their motivations to reconfigure their identities, we will now look at how a Muslim identity is constructed and defined in the context of the United States.
139 Jeremy Wallach, “Living the Punk Lifestyle in Jakarta.” Ethnomusicology 52.1 (2008); 98 140 Ibid, 19 Chapter Three
Islam in the United States: The Construction of a Muslim Identity
Introduction
If punk rock is a site of identity negotiation for Muslim American youth we must understand how those who use punk rock construct their identities in the context of the
United States. There are approximately 6 to 8 million Muslims in the United States. 141
Even though there are many organizations and advocacy groups for Islam, many young
Muslim Americans struggle with how to engage with Islam when they feel disconnected from the guiding sources and supportive communities that can be more readily found in
Muslim majority countries. This chapter begins by looking at how a few Muslim punk rockers construct their Muslim identities. By contrasting how these musicians construct their identities with how some American Muslim scholars define Muslim identities it becomes apparent that there is no single way to define a Muslim identity.
Even though Muslims in America do not have a homogenous understanding of what it means to identify as Muslim, they do have in common the history of Islam in the
United States. For Basim Usmani the history of Islam in the United States has been crucial to his construction of both his American and Muslim identity. This chapter will look at the history of Islam in the United States in order to better understand how some
Muslim Americans draw upon this history to inform their identities. The history of Islam in the United States can be covered from a variety of angles. I have taken my cues as to how to approach the history of Islam in the west from my participants and Michael
141 Khan, Muqtedar, American Muslims: Bridging Faith and Freedom (Maryland: Amana Publications, 2002), 1
Muhammad Knight who have mentioned specific figures and details of this history that inspire them. This angle of history is also important because many of the musicians reference historical and heroic Muslim American figures in song lyrics, as we will discover in chapter four.
Identifying as Muslim
There are young Muslim Americans who identify as Muslim but recognize that they fall outside of how many people define what it means to be Muslim. They may even fall outside of their own definitions. One of my first questions to Basim when I first met him was: Are you Muslim? He lowered his voice and leaned in closer to me saying, “I have been telling people for the past maybe year and a half that I’m a little on the outs because Muslim itself means someone who submits to the will of God.”142 I took this to mean that at least some of Basim’s insecurities about identifying as Muslim are his personal beliefs about the existence of a god and the idea of predetermination. He goes on to say that Islam has been tampered with throughout history, not just actively and intentionally, but because humans are forgetful in nature. The result, as I have interpreted from his answer, is the fractured and incomplete meaning of the word ‘Muslim’, the definition of which poses a problem for him personally because of the way “submission to the will of God” has been misinterpreted.143
Pakistan, officially named The Islamic Republic of Pakistan, has religious jurists, as in all Muslim countries, who answer questions about Islam and provide legal advice within Islamic standards. In a Muslim country like Pakistan, Islam is an ideology adhered
142 Basim Usmani, in-person interview, Boston, January 11, 2011. 143 Basim Usmani, in-person interview, Boston, January 11, 2011. to by the 95% Muslim majority. Basim said he did not become “properly aware” of this state-defined religion until his second three-year stint in Pakistan in his mid-twenties.
What Basim realized is something that Michael Muhammad Knight has talked about in several of his books. This realization was the rigidity with which religion was enforced in many Muslim countries as religiously homogenous as Pakistan. The enforcement comes from a heavy top-down consensus by a country’s religious elite who determine how
Islam should be singularly believed and practiced.
In many Islamic countries, voicing questions that starkly contradict the consensus made by religious elite is considered blasphemous. In fact, many Muslim American scholars believe that the United States is the best and perhaps safest place for Muslims to practice their religion. “Honestly, I believe that America is the best place for a Muslim today,” says Professor Hamid Mavani of the Claremont Graduate University. In the
United States, Islam is removed from political power allowing people can build it, to some extent, for themselves.
A Muslim identity as defined by American Muslim authors is quite different from how the young Muslim Americans I have spoken with understand their Muslim identity.
The difference begins with the need to ‘define’ a Muslim identity, which would require a broad enough definition so that it includes all identifying Muslims. According to author
Tariq Ramadan, “the Muslim identity…is therefore a faith, a practice, and a spirituality.”144 Ramadan’s definition does not suggest a range of Muslim identities.
Instead, he uses a definite article to signify that there is a single, standard Muslim identity. He also says “the first and most important element of Muslim identity is faith.”
144 Ramadan, Tariq, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 79 Many Muslims would revile Ramadans’s definition and opt for one with much more specificity. There are other Muslims who do not believe in god or pray but hold onto their
Muslim identity for cultural reasons. Thus we find that it may be impossible to create a universal definition for the Muslim identity. When universal definitions evade us, we can turn to smaller contexts to look for truths. Within the context of the United States is a concrete, all-inclusive definition of a Muslim identity possible?
When the topic of Muslim identity came up in my conversation with Basim he was quick to point out that, “This whole discussion about ‘your own identity’ and choosing that, that’s a 21st century conversation that we’re having. And that’s not what
Muslim was supposed to be ‘inputed’ into.” 145 Basim is commenting on how attaching the word ‘identity’ to the word ‘Muslim’ implies a compartmentalization of someone’s
‘Muslimness’ so to speak. Basim completed his undergraduate education at the
University of Massachusetts, a school that has a Muslim Students’ Association. Basim was never a member. He did not go into great detail as to why he was never a member but I suspect that his discomfort in identifying as Muslim was one reason. However,
Basim recognizes his own apprehension about Islam as a good thing. “If someone asks me, ‘Are you a Muslim’ and ‘what’s your identity?’ I can’t answer that for you, whereas very religious kids can answer that question. That’s the problem.”146 According to Basim, this shouldn’t be a question that is easy to answer, or with any answer at all. This further suggests that many Muslims do not recognize this identity as available for reinterpretation because they understand identities as fixed.
145 Basim Usmani, in-person interview, Boston, January 11, 2011 146 Basim Usmani, in-person interview, Boston, January 11, 2011. How do young Muslims identify as Muslim and what are the most influential factors in forming this identity? The responses to this question are far from uniform. I have interviewed Imran and Basim, both Pakistani American, both raised in New
England, both in their late twenties and both Muslim. Their overlapping categories create some similarities in how their Muslim identity is informed, but we can find differences in how they construct of their own Muslim identities based on their actual spiritual beliefs about the existence of god. A Pakistani American friend, Michael Sahi,147 who is also president of the Muslim Students’ Association (MSA) at the Claremont Colleges, responded to my email question about how he construct his Muslim identity and what he believes constitutes a Muslim identity:
It's a very loaded question and one that I think about constantly because I don't really know. I guess it would have to be someone who follows the five pillars of Islam. That does not mean that those who are able who do not fast during Ramadan are not believers, but that they are not "Muslim". There is nothing in those five pillars that contradicts any government or culture so I think being a Muslim first and foremost starts with the individual. As far as being a believer, that only constitutes believing that there is only one God and that you cannot equate anyone or anything to God. Islam does become a way of life, but its core in my opinion is affiliated only with this basic principle and is why the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w.) was so respectful of Christians and Jews.148
In his response, Mr. Sahi is making the distinction between a believer and a Muslim. The latter must follow at least a few of the tenets of Islam. Even if the practice and prayer is void of faith and spirituality, the individual is still engaging in the social and culturally constructed traditions. I know from meeting both Michael and Basim that they are two very different second-generation Pakistani Americans. Michael is the president his college’s MSA and Basim steered clear of the MSA in his undergraduate years, yet we find in both of their responses a hesitation to be definitive one way or another about what qualifies someone as Muslim or not. It is just not that simple.
147 The name given is a pseudonym at the speaker’s request. 148 Michael Sahi, email correspondence, March 15, 2011.
Desi Culture
Even in the context of the United States we find that Americans are drawing from different religious and cultural sources to construct their own meanings of Islam. Imran tells me he is Muslim because his family is Muslim. “I’m Muslim on a cultural basis more than anything else I’d say.”149 Interestingly, Michael Muhammad Knight, a convert to Islam, writes the opposite in his book Journey to the End of Islam: “a convert could walk in and out of religion and burn every bridge with Muslims on a whim. The community had nothing on me.”150 This quotation is important in highlighting how
Michael Knight is able to construct his religious identity without the inherited influence of cultural values and obligations. One of the ways Imran is culturally Muslim is by participating in and recognizing religious holidays. He may fast and pray during
Ramadan, the Islamic holy month, but because he is participating out of cultural necessity, his actions lack the religious conviction that other Muslims might have.
Imran’s way of identifying as Muslim is indicative of the difference between identifying with Islam and identifying as Muslim, where the two do not necessarily mean the same thing. The latter means identifying horizontally with the people in your life that also identify as Muslim. Identifying with Islam is a vertical relationship between an individual and god, one that is purely religious. This vertical relationship with Islam is something Basim and Imran both expressed as absent in their lives. The following quote from Imran indicates his apprehension to disassociate with Islam because of the horizontal relationships he has with other Muslims, especially his family.
149 Imran Malik, in-person interview, Los Angeles, January 28, 2011. 150 Knight, Michael Muhammad, Journey to the End of Islam (Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press, 2009), 19 If I were to leave and say ‘I’m not a Muslim’ it’s kind of like killing off a whole entire part of my identity. So I wasn’t comfortable with either, and I still remain in that middle ground. I’m not comfortable saying I’m a devout Muslim but I’m not comfortable saying that I’m not a Muslim either.151
Why Imran does not feel comfortable identifying as Muslim in a religious sense is hardly related to any external factors of influence in his life but his ability to ask himself challenging questions about religion and God.
And when I asked myself certain difficult questions about the existence of god and things that didn’t make sense to me about organized religion in general the end of that thought process was that I was agnostic.”152
Every Muslim has the capability of asking him or herself these questions, but not all
Muslims want to ask themselves these questions because they fear how they may answer the questions. Imran remembers sitting around with a group of close friends, also
American Muslim, and talking about the existence of a God. Even in an intimate and safe setting, Imran said the conversation became so uncomfortable that “we had to change the subject.”153 “It was very difficult to even think along those lines, it’s scary.
It’s like, to reject your God is a scary thing…but ultimately that’s what I believe.”154 The first of five tenets of Islam is testifying that “There is not God but God and Muhammad is his prophet.” The other four tenets–Prayer, Fasting, Charity, and Pilgrimage to Mecca– are considered obligatory but they are listed in order of importance. This first tenet is how
Michael Sahi came around to defining what it means to be Muslim. It is not a practice but an idea that is so deeply ingrained into the minds of many Muslims that even thinking about questions related to this tenet would feel blasphemous.
151 Imran Malik, in-person interview, Los Angeles, January 28, 2011. 152 Ibid. 153 Ibid. 154 Ibid. Imran is not committed to the belief that a god exists but does not fully reject the existence of a god either. A Muslims identity as a Muslim does not function in isolation from other social domains. Imran made it clear to me that he is Muslim “on a cultural basis more than anything else” and the influencing culture in his case is Pakistani.155 It is the identity he grew up with as part of a family where everyone else defined themselves as Muslim too.
If we look at the current members of The Kominas–Basim, Imran, and Shahjehan–they are all first generation Pakistani American. Although their music has been labeled
“Islamic Punk Rock”, it is important to keep in mind the other cultural influences that have penetrated their lyrics and sound. It then becomes important to understand how
Basim and Imran, as second-generation Pakistani Americans, organize their social world through culture, religion, language, and style.
The immigrants that came to the United States in the post 1965-wave were more connected to their languages and homelands through their communities than previous waves of immigrants, who migrated more as individuals.156 This closeness to homeland and native tongues has translated to the immigrants’ second-generation offspring who are expected to embrace their parents’ homeland culture. This expectation can be burdensome to the second-generation as they are trying to embrace and construct their
American identity at the same time. Basim Usmani, even as a small kid, was very aware of the chasm that lay between him and his white American classmates. He was also tuned into the differences between minority groups. “Growing up in Boston, you could always tell where people were from depending on their accent or what they talked about. They got that from their parents.”157 Anthropologist Shalini Shankar, in her talk titled “Style
155 Ibid. 156 Shalini Shankar. "Style and Language Use among Youth of the New Immigration." Paper presented at the Munroe Center for Social Inquiry, Pitzer College, Claremont, California, March 1, 2011 157 Basim Usmani, in-person interview, Boston, January 11, 2011. and Language Use among Youth of the New Immigration”, discusses the divisions between Desi youth in a public high school in Silicone Valley, California. She emphasizes the local relevance of her ethnography and after speaking with Basim it seems that many of her observations are comparable to his own observations in his high school in Boston.
Desi is a word used to categorize someone who is South Asian American. Desh means ‘homeland’ in Urdu/Hindi and Desi refers to the person from that homeland.
During Shalini’s extended participant observation at a public high school, she observed three divisions of Desi students: The Populars, the Geeks, and the F.O.B.s (an acronym for “Fresh off the boat”). These labels are not used in self-reference but most Desi students are aware of the social category to which they belong. After scratching the surface of these divisions beyond the confines of the high school, Shankar found that the labels denote the different classes of Desi students. The Populars are primarily second- generation youth with professional parents and living in affluent neighborhoods whereas the FOB’s are either second-generation or were born abroad and then moved to the
United States. They live mostly in working class neighborhoods and are typically more connected to their heritage language and culture.
Basim, a second-generation Pakistani American, moved to Pakistan for middle school and returned to the United States for high school. He does not refer to the same
Desi categories as Shankar but recognizes that there are very observable differences between groups of Desi students. In the broadest sense, he sees two types of Pakistanis in the United States: “The kids who are apathetic who are really into pop-culture stuff and the kids who are real defensive, going to Free Palestine rallies or are straight-up conservative.”158 He also admits to going back and forth between these two categories. I do not know if Basim would recognize himself within one of the Desi social categories as explained by Shalini Shankar or if those categories were even applicable to his high school. However, he did suggest that being American-born and returning to his heritage land gave him a confidence and perspective that many young Pakistani Americans do not have. It also allowed him to move between social groups, both in Pakistan and in Boston.
“If you have some degree of fluency in your native tongues [Punjabi and Urdu] you can conform to different social niches and castes.”159 Basim talked about not having the same
“hang-ups” as his good friend Shahjehan who, as Basim suggested, put himself through a lot of psychological violence. “Shahjehan’s questions were really an absence of culture.”160
Class plays a large role in drawing the lines between social groups but the way in which different Desi students assimilate to American culture really colors in the difference. Shankar says that the Desi students perceive assimilation in two ways: assimilating upward into ‘whiteness’ or assimilating downward into ‘blackness’, or a co- ethnic mix. This may be how assimilation is perceived but it does not mean that it is restricted one way or the other. Second-generation youth have an interesting vantage on
American culture that allows them, to some extent, to pick and choose. Basim commented on this as a privilege.
It’s definitely a trope, you know, because a lot of people are from two cultures but the big reality is that I got to be more determined about what I chose of American culture to absorb because I didn’t inherit it. Most of the culture I absorbed in America I chose for myself. I didn’t get it from my Parents. They have their own taste.161
158 Basim Usmani, in-person interview, Boston, January 11, 2011. 159 Ibid. 160 Ibid. 161 Basim Usmani, in-person interview, Boston, January 11, 2011.
It is hard to say how Desi youth choose what aspects of American they adopt and what they will reject. Basim found particular interest in the history, music, and culture of black
Muslims in the United States who constructed and engaged in their own interpretation of
Islam.
A History of Islam in the United States
The first major influx of Muslim immigrants to the United States was during the slave trade.162 Approximately one out of five slaves was Muslim.163 In 1861, when slavery was abolished, many slaves felt little relief and sought salvation beyond the confines of the white Christian church.164 Several black leaders such as Noble Drew,
Elijah Muhammad, and Malcolm X, who would work in succession to one another throughout the 1900s, stepped up to the plate for their fellow black Americans. Their messages were extreme, preaching black supremacy and predicting the demise of the white race, but the success of these leaders is evidence that their messages “filled a vacuum created by the rejection of the white world and Christianity.”165
Wallace Fard Muhammad founded the Nation of Islam in 1930 in Michigan. At the height of economic depression and social inequality, the African American silk- peddler very successfully “aroused the curiosity and interest of black in Detroit,” under the banner of Islam.166 Fard wrote his own doctrine of Islam that cemented a new black
Muslim ideology in the United States, one that preached black supremacy and promised
162 Hasan, Asma Gull, American Muslims: The New Generation (New York: Contiuum International Publishing, 2000), 17 163 Ibid, 17 164 Ansari, Zafar, “Aspects of Black Muslim Theology.” Studis Islamica No. 53 (1981), 171 165 Ibid, 171 166 Ibid, 137 black Americans liberation from the white race, identified by Fard as “blue-eyed devils.”167 Many of the teachings of this movement, which came to be called the Nation of Islam, were foreign to ordinary Muslims. The anthropomorphisms of God as a black male and the claimed prophet hoods drastically diverged from the teachings of the primary Islamic sources, the Qur’an and Hadith.168169 Certain notions of the Nation of
Islam seemed closer to Christianity than to Islam, most likely because of “the Christian milieu of North America where the movement arose.”170
The Nation of Islam quickly gained traction as a major force in the lives of black
Muslim Americans who found respect and interest in how the Nation rejected the status quo structure of American society.171 After the mysterious disappearance of Fard (which is examined in a song by The Kominas as we will see in chapter four), Elijah Muhammad assumed the role as the second leader of the Nation of Islam. Elijah, who met Fard in
1931, was recognized as the prophet to Fard who was the anthropomorphic God they called Allah.
Some scholars reflect on this black Muslim movement as inculcating anti-white sentiments, whereas others reflect on the movement as providing black Muslims with a community and education that honored and highlighted their experiences as Muslims in
America. This past January Michael Muhammad Knight posted the following on his
Facebook page: “Members of the NOI [Nation of Islam] have been friends and brothers to me, and I'm as white as it gets.” Knight wrote this in response to a comment that the
167 Ibid, 139 168 Qur’an is the divine scripture belonging to Islam, equivalent to the Bible or the Torah. Hadiths are tradition-based reports that record and comment on the life and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. 169 Ibid, 142 170 Ibid, 144 171 Ibid, 171 NOI is a racist organization. Regardless, this specific tract of history becomes relevant to the present day Taqwacore scene and the Muslim American musicians who embrace this history in their lyrics. I am not arguing that it is or is not, I am only recognizing that this was the first Muslim movement in the United States that sought to unify African
Americans Muslims under the banner of Islam. The Nation of Islam told black Americans how to practice and believe in a religion that was absent when the United States thought out and elaborated the laws of society.172
The 1950s and 60s saw a surge of Muslim immigrants to the United States as the country loosened its immigration laws for non-Europeans due to the advent of the cold war. The United States opened its doors to immigrants from so-called “third world” countries and financially supported foreign students to study at American Universities.173
Young, educated, and motivated Muslims built mosques and founded Islamic centers in
Chicago, Manhattan, Los Angeles, and Dearborn, Michigan.174 Elijah Muhammad, still the leader of the Nation of Islam at this time feared that this large influx of Muslims and emergence of active Islamic organizations would disrupt the insular nature of his institution.
Malcolm X was a young black Muslim American and an adherent of the Nation of
Islam but after an influential journey to Cairo and pilgrimage to Mecca in 1964, Malcolm
X broke away from the movement causing many other followers to rethink their commitment to the Nation of Islam. In his book titled The Five Percenters: Islam, Hip
Hop and the Gods of New York, Michael Muhammad Knights writes, “In New York,
172 Ramadan, Tariq, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 99 173 Moore, Kathleen, “Muslims in the United States: Pluralism under Exceptional Circumstances.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science Vol. 612 (2007), 122 174 Ibid. 236 Muslims at Mosque No. 7 were torn between their belief in the lessons [of the Nation of
Islam] and their respect for Malcolm X, who left the Nation amid bitter political conflicts and later converted to Sunni Islam.”175 Zafar Ansari, a scholar of Islamic Studies writes in 1981, “The personal charisma and eloquence of Malcolm X had a major impact on black Americans and led in the sixties and subsequently to the popularity of Sunni Islam
[in the United States].”176 The Nation of Islam was instrumental in popularizing and
“fostering pride in the Islamic identity” in the United States, but a new wave of non-
African American Muslims–a generation with cultural heritages from all over the world– would introduce the next stage of Islam in the United States.177
***
The population of Muslims continued to grow throughout the second half of the
20th century in the United States. In 1952, the U.S. government recognized Islam as an official religion.178 As a result of the population surge, subgroups began to organize themselves by nationality. There are several reasons for such divisions. The first is the convenience of proximity. When families migrate to the United States they will typically settle where they already have family and/or friends, creating smaller ethnic communities within larger metropolises. Another reason subgroups develop is because of differences in cultural and religious beliefs. Numbers are speculative but there is consensus that the top three groups of Muslims in the United States are Arab, South Asian, and African
175 Knight, Michael Muhammad. The Five Percenters: Islam, Hip Hop and the Gods of New York (Oxford, England: One Word Books, 2007), xii 176 Ansari, Zafar, “Aspects of Black Muslim Theology.” Studis Islamica No. 53 (1981), 173 177 Ibid, 173 178 Hasan, Asma Gull, American Muslims: The New Generation (New York: Contiuum International Publishing, 2000), 46 American. Other smaller groups include Turks, Iranians, Bosnians, Malays, etc.179 The largest concentration of American Muslims, approximately 1 million, is in California.
There are two major sub-groups of Islam in the United States: Sunni and Shiite. The division in the U.S. of 85% and 15% respectively, roughly aligns with global proportions.180 A very small percentage of American-Muslims are Sufis, another important strain of Islam.
Language, beliefs, practice, and culture have warranted different types of facilities for different communities so that today there are mosques for Moroccans, mosques for
Algerians, mosques for Pakistanis, etc. Basim talked about these separations telling me,
“Pakistani and Indians not only speak different languages, but they are totally different than Arabs and they are totally different than black Muslims.” In Boston, where Basim is from, there are different mosques for different communities, “and it’s the same in New
York.” 181 American Muslims are far from a homogenous group, but do Muslims in the
United States share anything in common?
There are an estimated 1,300 mosques and several hundred Islamic schools in the
United States today.182 These facilities along with a host of Islamic advocacy organizations dispersed throughout the country have played a crucial role in the lives of
Muslim Americans in helping them understand Islam and how it can be practiced in the context of the United States. Pioneered by immigrants in the 1960s, these organizations worked to preserve heritage cultures and promote dialogue between Muslims and non-
179 Moore, Kathleen, “Muslims in the United States: Pluralism under Exceptional Circumstances.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science Vol. 612 (2007), 122 180 Barrett, Paul, American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion (New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux Publishing, 2007), 7 181 Basim Usmani, in-person interview, Boston, January 11, 2011. 182 Barrett, Paul, American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion (New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux Publishing, 2007), 10 Muslims. In a post-9/11 America, Arab and Islamic advocacy groups have also played a critical role in pressing their constituents and public officials to report hate crimes that are anti-Arab and/or anti-Muslim. Two of the most well known national organizations are the
Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR, established in1994) and the Muslim
Public Affairs Council (MPAC, founded in1988). The umbrella organization for diverse
Muslim groups in the USA is the The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Muslim
Students’ Association (MSA) is another large organization that has chapters on college campuses across the United States. These organizations provide formative resources for many young Muslims who have questions about their religion or need a community to turn to.
***
American culture, Pakistani culture, and personal interests have fed into Basim’s understanding and construction of Islam. He thinks his travels back and forth between
Lahore and Boston made him less insecure about Islam and his heritage culture. “I could see upfront what it was,”183 Basim told me, referring to both Islam and Pakistan. Basim thinks that Shahjehan had more insecurities about his religion in part because he did not have the same cross-cultural perspective, and also because of the Boston suburb in which he grew up. He also talked about certain formative childhood experiences orchestrated by his parents to help educate him about Islam within his own cultural context. In fourth grade his father made him watch Malcolm X, a movie that contributed to Basim’s interest in black American Muslims. Basim remembers that even at the time he watched this movie he was very aware of the increasing Islamic militancy in other parts of the word–in
1994 the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan was bombed by Islamic militants and in 1998 Al-
183 Basim Usmani, in-person interview, Boston, January 11, 2011. Qaeda bombed American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania–and recognized his parents’ motivations to bring a more positive light to Islam. Even before the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2011, most young Muslim Americans were not oblivious to escalating fears of Islam among Americans.
September 11, 2001
The number reported of hate crimes targeting Arabs and/or Muslims revealed a
1,600% increase between 2001 and 2002 as reported by the FBI in 2002.184 In New York
City alone, reports by the NYC police state 117 incidents from September 2001 to March
2002. Categorizing the crimes has proven difficult for analysts and reporters because of the ambiguity of an “Arab” category. Because the orchestrators of the attack were both
Arab and Muslim, many Americans have come to equate the two terms and have also come to believe that Arabs and Muslims are a unified and coherent collective whole.185
Ten years later the number of incidents has declined but overall, anti-Muslim hate crimes are still five times what they were in 2000.186
A study in the February 2011 edition of the academic journal Social Problems looks at “spaces of hate” relative to Muslims and Arabs after September 11th. The authors’ use the term “Arab/Muslim” for convenience but recognize that it is imprecise since not all Muslims are Arab and not all Arabs are Muslim. The study found the following:
While the majority of racially and ethnically motivated hate crimes (i.e., anti-black, anti- Asian, anti-Hispanic) declined after 9/11, the number of anti-Arab/Muslim hate crimes increased sharply. This finding is consistent with reports from the FBI and from Arab
184 Disha, Ilir and James Cavendish and Ryan King. “Historical Events and Spaces of Hate: Hate Crimes against Arabs and Muslims in Post-9/11 America.” Social Problems Vol. 58 (2011), 21 185 Ibid, 26 186 Ibid, 22 advocacy organizations suggesting that 9/11 created a climate in which many Americans felt united against a “new enemy” and in which acts of hatred against Arabs and Muslims became “normalized” behaviors. This finding is also in line with the conclusions of numerous researchers who argue that historical events can serve as triggers that shape and enable the social construction of binary oppositions, such as “American citizen” versus “foreign alien,” increase levels of interethnic hostility and prejudice, and fuel inter-group violence through acts of vicarious retribution.187
The most interesting part of this study is that the predictors of anti-Muslim hate crimes– population size, age curve, and wealth–remain the same before and after 9/11 indicating that certain spaces had ripe conditions for these hate crimes before the terrorist attacks took place.
Islamophobia
The United States had anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiments before 9/11–Basim remembers being teased about Osama bin Laden years before the terrorist attacks–but
9/11 was an undeniable catalyst for increased Islamophobia in the United States. The media immediately began making the distinction of “good Muslims” versus “bad
Muslims” which helped instill in Americans a predilection to essentialize Islam and
Muslim. But some of the worst essentializing came from news sources. In January 2002 the Atlantic Monthly published an article by Bernard Lewis titled “What Went Wrong?” in which he wrote:
During the past few weeks the worldwide exposure given to the views and actions of Osama bin Laden and his hosts the Taliban has provided a new and vivid insight into the eclipse of what was once the greatest, most advanced, and most open civilization in human history.188
This example is one of several that professor of anthropology Mahmood Mamdani cites in his article “Good Muslim Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and
48 Disha, Ilir and James Cavendish and Ryan King. “Historical Events and Spaces of Hate: Hate Crimes against Arabs and Muslims in Post-9/11 America.” Social Problems Vol. 58 (2011), 40 188 Lewis, Bernard. “What Went Wrong?” The Atlantic, January, 2002, http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2002/01/lewis.htm
Terrorism,” as contributing to an atmosphere of suspicion. In this article, written in 2002 for the American Anthropologist, Mamdani questions the claim that political resistance should be seen as traditional cultural resistance to modernity, which downplays the encounter many Middle Eastern countries had with colonial power. This recognition, writes Mamdani, is crucial for post 9/11 analysis. This claim implies that some cultures are modern and some are pre-modern, a claim Mamdani vehemently rejects in his article.
The principles of Islam are simple but the presence of Islam in the West is still terribly complicated. There is a media-drawn line running through Islam dividing the religion into the “genuine” Islam and the “extremist” Islam. The American Muslims who are part of the Taqwacore scene were in their early teenage years when the attacks occurred. Imran does not recall any particular incidents of harassment or discrimination directed towards him but he does recall becoming hyper aware of his Muslim identity.
Michael Knight tells me via email correspondence that he has never been the victim of any hate crimes after 9/11, “Though it's always difficult for me to get back into the country after traveling abroad. My name and passport stamps freak them out a bit.”189
Basim says that he is detained for at least an hour every time he flies into New York City.
Even if Imran did not identify as Muslim, because of his name and the way he looks he is still “a Muslim to everyone else.”190 Arjun Ray, a previous member of The
Kominas is not Muslim but Imran says, “Everyone assumed that he was a Muslim too.
Even Sikhs had to deal with that because they have beards and turbans and people don’t know any better.”191 After graduating from high school in 2002, Imran moved to
Islamabad, Pakistan. He reflects on how the post-9/11 was strange enough to confirm his
189 Michael Knight, email, March 14, 2011. 190 Imran Malik, in-person interview, Los Angeles, January 28, 2011. 191 Ibid. decision to move abroad. “I really had a conflicted view point on my identity, and I really wanted to get to know Pakistan for what it was.” 192Although Basim did not have the same impatience in his voice as Imran when he spoke about his life after 9/11, he did lightly mention “growing up around kids who didn’t know the head to tails if it,”193 (it being Islam).
For Basim and Imran, and I suspect most of the Muslim American youth who were the Taqwacore movement, this process of questioning and redefining their relationships with Islam will not result in their self-labeling as a “genuine” Muslim or an
“extremist” Muslim. In fact, it is exactly this ultimatum that angers many young Muslims who, by the standards of “good” and “bad” do not fall into either category. Many of The
Kominas lyrics simultaneously confront and mock this binary. At the same time, many of their songs speak to their own frustration and to the frustration of other young Muslim
Americans. To be sure, there is no unified disaffection or common source to the frustration for young Muslim Americans. Imran points out that Michael Knight did not write The Taqwacores in response to 9/11, which is merely a contributor to the frustration of young Muslim Americans, not the source.
In the history of Islam there have been artists, musicians, and especially poets, who all fit into the same canon of contentious creativity. “I think the rigidity of religion has always sparked artists throughout Islamic history to say things that are blasphemous for the purpose of sparking dialogue or thought.”194 The craft of The Kominas would be considered blasphemous to many Muslims, yet we will also see in following chapter how
192 Imran Malik, in-person interview, Los Angeles, January 28, 2011. 193 Basim Usmani, in-person interview, Boston, January 11, 2011. 194 Ibid. their lyrics negotiate with political Islam and provide Muslim Americans with more than two options for their religious identity.
Chapter Four
The Music
“A South Asian mother’s worst nightmare.”195
Introduction
Aside from this thesis, the only other extensive study of Taqwacore and the recent use of punk rock by Muslim American youth is a dissertation titled, “Muslim Punk Rock in the United States: A Social History of the Taqwacores.” In this 2009 dissertation, author Sarah Hosman briefly comments on a few of The Kominas most notorious
Taqwacore songs but nowhere in this study is there an analysis or even a presentation of song lyrics from any of the Taqwacore bands. Similarly, hardly any of the books and articles pertaining to punk rock music that I used as research for this thesis presented the lyrics of punk rock bands; if lyrics were presented they were in small excerpts. The reason this chapter is entirely dedicated to the presentation and analysis of song lyrics is because it is precisely these lyrics that allow us to see the manifestations of a site of identity negotiation for Muslim American youth.
Throughout punk rock history, language and style have been important in inventing and maintaining an image for different punk rock scenes. Unusual punk rock fashion and its abrasive sound have always warranted attention from the media. What is often overlooked are the words themselves, written and sung by the musicians. “Punks question conformity not only by looking and sounding different, but by questioning the prevailing modes of thought,” writes author Craig O’Hara in his book The Philosophy of
195 Kisher. “The Kominas Release ‘Tunnnnnn.’” MTV Desi, October 6, 2010, http://mtvdesi.com/2010/10/06/the-kominas-release-tunnnnnn/. Punk. 196 When certain songs or lyrical excerpts do receive substantial attention it is usually because they are controversial, offensive, or both. This is not necessarily a bad thing for bands who profit from this coverage. The downside, however, is that bands become locked into a certain stereotype or image and the musicians’ credit as artists who frequently reinvent their craft is undermined.
Since the band’s formation in 2005, The Kominas have released two albums. The first titled Wild Nights in Guantanamo Bay features their most well known songs “Sharia
Law in the USA” and “Suicide Bomb the Gap.” The album was written and released at the nascence of the Taqwacore movement, and thus has received far more attention than their latest album Escape to Blackout Beach, which came out in August of 2010. The label “Islamic Punk,” caught on soon after Omar Sacirbey wrote the article mentioned above for The Boston Globe in which he never mentions any such label or genre of music.
The Kominas talk about some of their songs as “definitive Taqwacore songs, like
‘Suicide Bomb the Gap’, and ‘Sharia Law in the USA.’ The reason these songs are
Taqwacore is because they derisively address issues of political Islam and stereotypes in the United States. But Imran Malik, the current drummer, is quick to add, “There’s all kinds of other things we do to,” referring to the range of social commentary many of their other songs cover. “Calling it [their music] Islamic punk rock would be defining a part of what we do.”197 The original conception of the band was Bollywood Muslim Punk, which would infuse Bollywood music, traditionally from India, with an American punk rock sound. But even Bollywood Muslim Punk was a conception, not a category. Basim does
196 O’Hara, Craig. The Philosophy of Punk: More Than Noise (San Francisco, CA: AK Press, 1999), 27 197 Imran Malik, in-person interview, Los Angeles, January 28, 2011. not hold himself or the band to a standard because he believes it would greatly hinder their creativity and ultimately be misleading. “The intent,” Basim tells me, “Wasn’t to be authentically Muslim or Pakistani. The intent was to disrupt authenticity.”198 For this reason, within many of the The Kominas songs a listener can hear a mélange of Punjabi,
Spanish, poetry, or rap. Perhaps punk rock is the only consensus the musicians and the media can reach regarding the sound of The Kominas. “Just the sound of the music and the ethic of how we play and how we are onstage…we are a punk rock band,” says
Imran.199 Basim Usmani and I have spoken at length about his band’s lyrics although at the beginning of our conversation he said, “I don’t want to spell it out too much.”200 Part of the beauty of songs is their ability to be interpreted and become meaningful to listeners in a number of different ways.
This chapter examines the lyrics of The Kominas using three key points. The first point will look at how The Kominas react to certain stereotypes and events that pertain to
Muslims in the United States. The second point will examine the use and influence of punk rock and anarchistic movements of the past and why these two phenomena are often linked. The third point will illuminate how different cultural, linguistic, and stylistic elements from Pakistani culture have influenced the music of The Kominas. This third point will also examine how the history of Islam in the United States is used in one of their songs. For each point I will introduce excerpts from two to three different songs.
Keeping in mind that the excerpts provided in this chapter are detached from their vocal and visual presentations, we can understand the lyrics as a vital component of within a larger package.
198 Basim Usmani, in-person interview, Boston, January 11, 2011. 199 Imran Malik, in-person interview, Los Angeles, January 28, 2011. 200 Basim Usmani, phone interview, March 10, 2011
Mocking the Image
About The Kominas first album Basim tells me:
It’s collection of over stated things I always wanted to say to certain people as a response to their ignorance. Like in high school that I never had the opportunity to. It’s sort of letting off steam. Even before 9/11 there was a baggage. Gulf war, the ayatollah…201
1. “Rumi was a Homo.” The first article ever written about The Kominas came in response to the band’s first song. Basim and Shahjehan sent their friend Michael Knight a rough cut of their song “Rumi was a Homo” who then circulated the song on the internet.
“Rumi was a Homo” first caught the attention of The Boston Globe in April of 2006.
Basim tells me that he thinks it is the best article ever written about them. Even though the song was lauded by some Muslim Americans “Rumi” was also heavily criticized because of its critical stance on homophobia.
The Boston Globe article titled, “The clash: Punk meets Islam in a local band that shreds stereotypes,” says the following about the controversial song:
Basim Usmani and Shahjehan Khan had already decided they weren't going to play a song whose title includes the name of a 13th-century Muslim poet and a slur for homosexual. If taken out of context, they worried the song might be misconstrued as a bad joke and the musicians as a pair of gay-bashing Pakistani-American Muslims. In fact, the song is a farcical jab at Siraj Wahhaj, a tough-talking Brooklyn imam who is admired for his fiery sermons and anticrime programs but who in 1992 allegedly said he would burn down a proposed gay-friendly mosque in Toronto. The song is well known to young Muslims who read webzines such as MuslimWakeUp.com, where it was briefly available as an MP3, and get the references to Wahhaj and Rumi, the Sufi poet. But although the song's point has been made to Muslims, the mostly white audience at a Brooklyn bar called Galapagos last month probably wouldn't have gotten it.202
Basim was aware that these references made the song less accessible to a non-Muslim audience and ultimately The Kominas did not include the song on their first album titled
201 Basim Usmani, in-person interview, Boston, January 11, 2011. 202 Sacirbey, Omar. “The clash: punk meets Islam in a local band that shreds stereotypes.” The Boston Globe, April 18, 2006, http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2006/04/18/the_clash/ Wild Nights in Guantanamo Bay. The following is a section of the chorus from the song
Rumi was a Homo:
Rumi was a genius Siraj, you're an ass Rumi was a homo Siraj, you're a fag
As the article cited above shows, this song is attached to one specific event in which a prominent Muslim figure in New York expressed strong anti-gay sentiments. Rumi
(1207-1293 CE), perhaps the world’s best known Sufi poet, was considered homosexual.
Of the negative stereotypes and events that include Muslims in the United States why did
The Kominas choose to write about this issue? “You’re pulling everything out of box called Islam and everything out of a box called punk rock. They don’t have to add up to anything extreme.”203 The Kominas are not trying to be a reactionary band to September
11th and Pastor Terry Jones, the man behind ‘Burn a Koran Day,’ they are trying to uncover some of the less obvious Muslim stereotypes by bringing attention to more obscure events such as the incident of homophobia with Iman Siraj Wahhaj. Events like these, as highlighted by the lyrics of The Kominas, indicate that the negative perceptions of Muslims in the United States are not just perpetuated by the large-scale events that make headlines, but also by smaller, more localized incidents that gain enough traction to upset other Muslim Americans. This song also reveals a degree of defensiveness by The
Kominas who are holding one Muslim on a pedestal while condemning another. Even though the Muslim population in the U.S. is diverse in many ways, many Americans will associate the actions of one Muslim to all American Muslims who may then find that they have to restate and defend their views in order to stand apart from the negative
203 Basim Usmani, phone interview, March 10, 2011. stereotypes of Islam. The Kominas wrote another song that has a similar, jeering way approach to a relatively unheard of event. Their song, “I Want a Handjob” takes a stab at
Junoon, a Pakistani rock band, for launching a Muslims for Bush campaign in the 2004 elections.204
2. “Tunnnnnn.” A common theme on both of The Kominas’ albums is American consumerism. In October 2010, Music Television (MTV) Desi, a spin-off from the network MTV, interviewed Basim Usmani about this music video and Basim told the network the following:
I see this (Tunnnnnn) as an exploration of khwaari, or khwaar hona, Punjabi for not getting what you want. e.g. Humhe sharaab chahiye magr sharaab hai nahien. (We want alcohol, but there is no alcohol to be had.) The invocation of Karballah and being drunk is a motif in a lot of Qawwali music — when you take it into reggae, the real irony of comparing the thirsty water-starved people who were massacred in Karballah to drunks becomes apparent. So “khwaari” means not having something but also being consumed by it. A strain of Punjabi song lyrics are just incohesive sordid tales of alcoholism. This was my take.205
If the song is about not getting what you want, the musicians juxtapose this by getting everything they want in the music video, a medium that allows viewers to understand the song in different, more visual ways. There seems to be several layers to this song that
Basim touched upon in the quotation above. One layer is American consumerism. In the music video for the song “Tunnnnnn,” Imran, Basim, and Shahjehan are goofing around in a fancy hotel. As the musicians use and abuse the hotels amenities, security cameras follow them, perhaps signifying their intrusion. In between smoking hooka and playing instruments, they find a refrigerator stocked with condiments such as Heinz Ketchup and
Aunt Jemima Syrup and pour the condiments into wine glasses and drink them. At the end of the video the three musicians are caught passed out in a hotel bedroom and the
204 Butt, Riazat. “Islamic street preachers.” The Guardian UK, April 28, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/apr/28/popandrock.culture. 205 Kisher. “The Kominas Release ‘Tunnnnnn.’” MTV Desi, October 6, 2010, http://mtvdesi.com/2010/10/06/the-kominas-release-tunnnnnn/. video alludes to an escape without having to pay for the consequences, literally and figuratively. This layer of the song, mocking the relentless cycle of American consumerism, is a critique of perhaps their own American identity. Even though Basim emphasizes the ability of second-generation immigrants to pick and choose, to an extent, the aspects of American culture they will use to construct their American identities, he must also recognize how being American alone associates him and the other American members of The Kominas with the less desirable qualities of American culture.
Many of The Kominas lyrics offer a sentiment of disgust with the culture of
American consumerism. The ways in which they incorporate brand names is indicative of this. As Americans, their music reveals a perspective that perhaps could only be acquired by standing on the fringe of society. For many of their songs, one side will address purely
American stereotypes or faults and the other side will address the same notions as they pertain to Islam. “Suicide Bomb the Gap” is another satirical song that uses a brand name
(the Gap is a popular clothing chain) to mock American consumer culture and the portrayal of Muslim terrorists.
Another layer of “Tunnnnn” is the references to Sufism, a mystical strand of
Islam, and Karbala, a famous city in Iraq where a battle took place between the prophet
Muhammad’s grandson Husayn and the Umayyad Caliph, Yazid.206 Depending on the listener, this song will resonate in very different ways. This is true for any song but the draw to a song like “Tunnnnnn” is its ability to speak to the different cultural, religious, linguistic backgrounds of its listeners. The songs lyrics are predominantly in Punjabi but its sound draws from reggae and the 1970s punk rock band The Clash, revealing a very
206 The Umayyad Caliphate (661-750 CE) followed the era of the four “rightly guided” caliphs after Muhammad’s death. specific intersection between heritage culture and American culture that is specific to the three musicians.
3. “Beneath the Edifice.” There are other Taqwacore bands that address homegrown fears of Islam with less irony and more directness. Al-Thawra, a punk rock band from Chicago whose lead singer Marwan Kamel is of Syrian and Polish descent, has currently relevant lyrics that are overtly political. In an interview for the online forum called Metal Waves, the band says:
The most important thing to know about us is that we make music to erode the false dichotomy of east vs. west that's been set up by the mass media in the west. We’re neither here nor there, and we're putting our identity crisis out in the open for everyone to see. We're here for the Arab kid growing up in Chicago, just as much as we're here for the punk kid slam dancing in a pit in Beirut.207
The song “Beneath the Edifice” does not mock any image or stereotype related to
Muslims in the west, but it does offer perhaps a more realistic reality for the Muslims who live in a country ravaged by war yet unable to find an escape.
But these minarets are filled With snipers who study The maqamat208 of Rifle-round ricochets And the iqaa209 of Shells smashing Into flesh Far below. Just to divide A struggle globalized Masses of people With futures locked outside.
This song is most likely referring to a specific country and it may be the reflections of a specific experience of the writer, yet what is most striking is the intersection between violence in Islam in the song not in a way that relates to stereotypes of terrorism but in a
207 Interview. “Interview: Al-Thawra.” Metal Waves: Voices of Metal, March 30, 2009, http://www.metal- waves.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1032:interview-al-thawra 208 Maqamat can be understood as a repertoire of music. 209 Iqaa means sound. way that relates to the repercussions that Islamic terrorism has had for everyday Muslims in Muslim countries who are now the victims of violence at the expense of other
Muslims.
Punk Rock and Anarchy Influence
1. “Tunnnnnn.” Many of the The Kominas songs are packed with references and borrowed phrases, melodies, or poems from famous punk rock bands. On an online blog titled Sepia Mutiny, which covers anything related to Desi news and culture, posted an interview with Basim Usmani from October 24, 2008.210 In this interview Basim talks about the various sources from which he draws influence. One of the sources, predictably, is punk rock music. “The music Arjun, Shahj and I were listening to obsessively during The Kominas lifespan were as follows: Public Enemy, M.I.A, The
Clash’s London Calling, T.S.O.L, and the Dead Kennedys.”211 The Clash and the Dead
Kennedys are notable punk rock bands, the former from the U.K. and the latter from the
U.S. that greatly influenced the punk rock movement in the 1970s. The song titled,
“Tunnnnn” from The Kominas second album was inspired by The Clash song
“Armagideon Time.” Although The Kominas version is sung in Punjabi they use two lines from The Clash:
A lot of people won't get no supper tonight. A lot of people won't get no justice tonight.
In the previous section this song was interpreted as a critique on American culture.
Another angle allows us to understand how some of the most influential and categorically
210 Sepia Mutiny. “Wild Nights with The Kominas.” October 24, 2008. http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/005438.html 211 Ibid. punk rock bands in history have influenced Taqwacore bands today. The Kominas draw influence from The Clash because they have been particularly inspirational to them in a musical sense and from this we can continue to see a connection between the punk rock social movement in the 1970s and the punk rock social movement in the United States today.
2. “Sharia Law in the USA.” This song offers the most obvious references to the
1970s punk rock movement. In “Sharia Law” The Kominas mock the portrayal of
Islamists and draw blatant parallels to the 1970s Sex Pistols hit “Anarchy in the U.K.”
Lyrically the Kominas play on US expectations and media perceptions of Muslims and South Asians. So, songs such as Sharia Law in the USA and Suicide Bomb the Gap appear to tell those who only read the song titles exactly what they expect to hear from Muslims, with the subsequent outrage not far behind, not least on the kind of internet messageboards populated by the far right. The band's most vociferous detractors, though, come from within the punk scene.212
When I asked Basim about “Sharia Law in the USA” he told me, “I still remember what I was going through when I wrote it.”213 The song was written as Taqwacore bands were coming together and bouncing ideas off each other. Michael Knight had hoped that
Taqwacore would create a space where bands could talk, write, and sing about religion in a purging way. At the time, the Muslim musicians were still trying to figure out what
Taqwacore could mean because ultimately, it was up to them. Imran Malik was not a member of The Kominas at the time but talks about how the band’s new friendship with
Michael Knight made them want to explore the meaning of his newly coined term, which is a portmanteau of religious piety and extreme punk rock. Imran says that at the time nobody besides the musicians and Knight knew what Taqwacore was so, “They [the
212 Iain Aitch. “The Kominas bring Islamic Punk to Meltdown.” The Guardian UK, June 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/jun/10/islamic-punk-the-kominas-meltdown 213 Basim Usmani, in-person interview, Boston, January 11, 2011. bands] took that and tried to see what they could do with it [Taqwacore].”214 What The
Kominas did was write very caustic and poignant lyrics that earned them a sudden onslaught of publicity.
It is important to understand how and from which bands The Kominas draw punk rock influence because it will help us understand how these musicians relate to the most prominent punk rock musicians of previous punk rock social movements. As I wrote in chapter one, “The Sex Pistols, as most people, historians, and scholars will agree, breathed life into the punk rock movement, even though the band members may have adopted and adapted what they heard and saw from other music scenes, particularly in the
United States.” This statement holds true for The Kominas, the most acoustically and aesthetically punk rock Taqwacore band.
In 1976 The Sex Pistols released their most notorious single, “Anarchy in the
U.K.” The first verse reads as the following:
I am an antichrist I am an anarchist Don't know what I want But I know how to get it I wanna destroy passerby Cause I wanna be Anarchy
The first verse of “Sharia Law in the U.S.A,” from their self-released album in 2008, reads as the following:
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...
214 Imran Malik, in-person interview, Los Angeles, January 28, 2011. There are lyrical parallels and there are sonic parallels as well. Both singers, Johnny
Rotten and Basim Usmani, deliver the song somewhere between singing and talking with a grainy texture to their voice. Basim knows that this song is very “in your face” which is what he and the band intended.215 He tells me that he has enjoyed reading the Youtube comments, a website for posting videos, about the song over the years. “Before we used to get shat on,” he says, but recently he has noticed that people are picking up on what he’s trying to say.216 The songs brazen sarcasm also speaks to how Americans are primed to equate Islamic fundamentalism with all Muslims and vice versa. By singing as if the speaker is an Islamist reveals American tendencies to essentialize an entire religion with fundamentalism and terrorism.
3. “Blow Shit Up.” The Kominas have a number of songs that bring to mind images relating to violence. If The Kominas are drawing influence from punk rock of the
1970s, a social movement the media very much linked to violence, then we should expect to hear musical and lyrical elements that suggest disorder and chaos. In talking about punk rock in the 1970s, Craig O’Hara, author of The Philosophy of Punk, addresses two sides of violence in punk rock, one as reality and one as myth. He writes that the harmful stereotypes of violence come from mainstream media. “It is precisely the media distortion that has caused the bulk of the problems…portraying Punks as violent attracted people who were really violent to the scene.”217 In June 2010, The Times U.K wrote the following:
At Britain’s first official Taqwacore event, devout young Muslim musicians and artists will demonstrate how they balance morning prayers with sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. From the mosque to the moshpit, these self-styled “brown punks” are forging a new
215 Basim Usmani, in-person interview, Boston, January 11, 2011. 216 Basim Usmani, phone interview, March 10, 2011. 217 O’Hara, Craig. The Philosophy of Punk: More Than Noise (San Francisco, CA: AK Press, 1999), 44 identity by raging against negative stereotypes from both outside and inside their own community. They want a riot of their own.218
Words like “rage” and “riot” certainly connote violence. Other articles have praised Taqwacore bands for using basses, not bombs, to express their anger and frustration, which ludicrously implies that if Muslims American youth did not have the option of punk rock they would turn to extreme forms of violence. One of the reasons previous punk rock social movements have been framed as disorderly verging on violent is because punk rock ideology can be seen as threatening to capitalist social structures.
“When it comes to choosing a political ideology, Punks are primarily anarchists,” writes author Craig O’Hara of The Philosophy of Punk. “The Punk movement was originally formed in nations holding capitalist, pseudo-democratic policies. Because of this, capitalism and its problems became the first target of political Punks.”219
Anarchist thought and expression has been another source of inspiration for The
Kominas. In the song “Blow Shit Up” from the first album, an anarchist poem is quoted called “A Las Barricadas.” Basim tells me that it is an anarchist poem that was sung during the Spanish civil war. “At the time I was very political,” Basim tells me over the phone talking about this song and referred to being in “a certain state of chaos.”220 The poem is in Spanish and sung in Spanish in the song “Blow Shit Up”:
Negras tormentas agitan los aires (Black storms shake the sky nubes oscuras nos impiden ver. (Black clouds blind us Aunque nos espere el dolor y la muerte (Although death and pain await us contra el enemigo nos llama el deber (Against the enemy we must go)
In my interviews with members of The Kominas, the word ‘anarchy’ never came up but
Imran and Basim both talked about Islam in relation to authority. In relation to Pakistan
218 Dalton, Steve. “Never mind the Burkas, here’s the Islamic punks,” The Times UK, June 14, 2010, http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/ article7148397.ece. 219 O’Hara, Craig. The Philosophy of Punk: More Than Noise (San Francisco, CA: AK Press, 1999), 74 220 Basim Usmani, phone interview, March 10, 2011. they observed how, “Islam is enforced and defined by the Pakistani government.” After living in Pakistan for a few years Basim became “properly aware of that.”221 But The
Kominas do not need to spell this out in order to defend their distaste with authority.
Instead, The Kominas incorporate notions of anarchy into their music by connecting to past movements of anarchy through a powerful poem from the Spanish civil war.
The Influence of Islam and Desi Culture
1. “9000 Miles.” This song addresses a particular history of Islam and poses questions about the existence of God. When we talked by phone about this song, Basim said he is not sure if he believes in religion and pre-destiny but he has committed to infusing rhetorical ideas and questions relating to belief and pre-destiny in his music. The rhetorical questions in “9000 Miles” are directed towards God.
Do I strive for a hustle, when time slinks and snails its way by? Ran my thoughts in Chicago, remember how we slept in parking spaces that night? Searching for Noble Drew, our brain synapses fried, dear heart, pound less, this rib ain't caged to confine
How can I swim 9,000 miles? I'm 9,000 miles away from home
Mere moments away from doomsday, I see the tipping of the scale You knew how I would fare Why did you test me?
Basim wrote this song during a road trip he took with band mate Shahjehan Khan and author Michael Muhammad Knight in 2004 to the annual Islamic Society of North
American Convention. On the way, the three friends stopped in Chicago to visit the grave of a man named Noble Drew who was born into slavery in North Carolina before escaping and becoming a mystical leader of Islam.222 “I was raised with this religion, this
221 Basim Usmani, in-person interview, Boston, January 11, 2011. 222 Basim Usmani, phone interview, March 10, 2011. heritage,” Basim tells me, “Then all of a sudden to come across something so heretical and so American and a character I was sympathetic to, buried in Chicago!”223 Basim relates to a figure like Noble Drew both because he was American and because he worked hard at his relationship with Islam in order to construct it in a very personal and meaningful way. At the root of this song is a degree of skepticism about the intentions of a God that may or may not exist, planted in the questions like, “You knew how I would fare, Why did you test me?”
In the chorus, “How can I swim 9000 miles? I’m 9000 away from home,” the listeners hear what could be the voice of a freed slave wanting to go back home but not having the means to. This “home” could be interpreted as Africa or as Pakistan, which to the individual histories of the band members, could be viewed as the heart of Islam. The song, like Noble Drew’s entire life, is a journey to find out more about Islam.
Interestingly, this journey leads some Muslim Americans to discover an Islam cultivated in the United States.
2. “Manji Vich Daang” and “Kuj.” The Kominas’ second album Escape to
Blackout Beach, features more songs sung in Punjabi and influenced by Desi music. “The first CD was an American animal, Escape to Blackout Beach is much more toned down,”
Basim tells me over the phone.224 With the first album, The Kominas were trying to understand their newly formed band in relation to Taqwacore, the idea and the movement. The result was a clever and somewhat snide approach to dealing with stereotypes of Muslims in the United States. They were also in their mid to early twenties and found their identities in much more turmoil than they are today.
223 Basim Usmani, phone interview, March 10, 2011. 224 Ibid. The second album is quite different in content and sound. “We’ve been singing more in Punjabi and doing stuff that more cultural and not religious, which was more important to the band a couple years ago. But that doesn’t mean we would ever say we’re not Taqwacore.”225 The Kominas is still punk rock but Basim admits to their music being a little more accessible to a wider audience who can now draw from a more culturally and linguistically diverse sound to satisfy a range of musical tastes. For instance, the song
“Kuj” is based on a famous Punjabi poem about the city of Lahore. Why the shift to more culturally Pakistani music? This is in part because the Taqwacore scene, according to
Imran and Basim, is over. Their music may still exist as Taqwacore but after reaching its zenith with the Taqwa Tour and the documentary film, the Taqwacore scene began to dissolve. Many of the musicians had to return to their jobs and Imran also talks about how “scene politics” over what Taqwacore meant was disrupting. Also, Taqwacore was used more as a space for the musician’s Muslim identities then for their Pakistani, Syrian, or other cultural identities. After the scene dissolved, bands like The Kominas shifted their focus from issues of identity and stereotypes related to Islam to their culturally rich
Pakistani heritage.
In an interview with the International Herald Tribune in October of 2010, Imran
Malik says, “There is a lot of curiosity about us, because we sing in English and Punjabi and do songs which no one else would ever touch like “Manji Vich Daang,” which is a cover of a Naseebo Lal song who is a famous female Pakistani singer.226 Of the seven
225 Basim Usmani, in-person interview, Boston, January 11, 2011. 226 Imtiaz, Huma. “Music channels are not taste makers, they’re just doing what sells.” International Herald Tribune, October 1, 2010, http://tribune.com.pk/story/57275/music-channels-are-not-taste-makers- theyre-just-going-with-what-sells/ songs on The Kominas more recent album, three are sung in Punjabi or Urdu and the other four are in English, but none of the songs address Muslim stereotypes.
Taqwacore Music
Taqwacore bands are similar in how they describe or sometimes label themselves as “Taqwacore.” Many of the musicians from various Taqwacore bands are close friends who engage in discussions of Islam and identity. While these two points of discussion can be found in the lyrics of many Taqwacore bands, their approaches to discussing these topics in their music differs. Where The Kominas infuse ironic lyrics to play up stereotypes of Muslims in the United States, Al-Thawra opts for a more direct stance on social and racial inequalities in their hometowns and abroad. Some bands, like The
Kominas, make their songs a mélange of cultural and linguistic ingredients, others stick to one language and musical genre per song. But when Basim and I spoke about his music he told me, “We’re not just mixing stuff up and being okay with it.”227 This indicates that the musicians of The Kominas mix stuff up in their music with the intention of creating a space of negotiation, which may not always be a pleasant space to occupy.
As we have seen in the lyrics of and interviews with members of The Kominas, what is being negotiated is not strictly a Muslim identity with an American identity. This self- created space is also used to negotiate the intersections between culturally contrasting ideas, traditions, and ways of life.
227 Basim Usmani, phone interview, March 10, 2011. Conclusion
In the histories of various urban social movements, punk rock has been used by youth generations to forge a message or a sentiment, however pointed or ambiguous, personal or collective that message or sentiment may be. Inherent in punk rock is its ability to provide a platform for youth to locate and negotiate their positions, status, and identities in specific socio-temporal contexts. By understanding the music of The
Kominas as a product of a site of identity negotiation, we have been able to situate their punk rock music within a larger context of a growing social movement in the United
States driven by the creative expressions of Muslim youth who are incorporating different cultural, ethnic, and religious elements into their various crafts.
The rejection of certain Muslim stereotypes and aspects American culture in The
Kominas music is transparent as discussed in chapter four. However, The Kominas’ artistic expressions also reveal an engagement with American culture and social and political issues relating to Islam and Muslims that should lead us to believe that their use of punk rock is not all about rejection and resistance. If Basim and Imran are able to find in their music a site through which to negotiate their identity, it is because they have embraced punk rock, an authentically American and British creation that has historically been precisely such a site of resistance and reformulation.
The 1970s punk rock social movement chose this medium to respond to their social environment that was discriminatory on the basis of class. The punk rock addressed in this thesis shows the use of punk rock in response to a social environment that stigmatizes Muslims. After speaking with Imran and Basim it was apparent that they have both experienced a great deal of turmoil at the expense of their Muslim identity. But to what extent do we say the punk rock used in both these social movements is in response to a social atmosphere and to what extent do we say it’s used to negotiate very personal experiences? Individual experiences inform a social atmosphere and a social atmosphere will determine the nature of personal experiences. When Basim talks about being teased about Osama bin Laden in high school, he recognizes his personal experience as relevant and applicable to the lives of other young Muslim Americans.
Interestingly, Basim seemed to be more preoccupied with his friend Shahjehan’s struggles with his Muslim identity. This goes to show that Muslim American youth harbor a frustration that is not exclusively their own but also the frustration of other
Muslim Americans. Recognizing the hardships of other Muslims and feeling defensive for them is almost enough to create a Muslim American community in the broadest sense.
When Michael Muhammad Knight wrote The Taqwacores, he created the potential for a smaller community to evolve that would presumably be made up of
Muslim American youth, and in fact it was Muslim American youth who responded to the book in ways that laid down a foundation for a community and perhaps a social movement. Taqwacore was built by Muslim Americans who were variously male, female, converts, straight and gay, but who all needed a space to negotiate their Muslim and American identities that unified them in the first place.
Punk rock is often talked about in ‘waves’, as something that will inevitably exist with enough force and swelling to form one powerful crescent of water that crashes mere seconds after its formation. For the punk rock social movement of the 1970s, the analogy of a wave is quite accurate, yet this sequence cannot be ascribed to all punk rock social movements to explain their formations and dissolutions. The Taqwacore scene, arising in
2004 with the publishing of The Taqwacores, dissolved a few years later though it is hard to say exactly when. As a concept and even as a label, Taqwacore continues to have a powerful presence for the Muslim American musicians who were part of the initial
Taqwacore community. While bands such as Al-Thawra and The Kominas still call themselves Taqwacore bands, they also admit that the Taqwacore scene has passed, and though it could be revived it will probably never exist as it did four years ago. Despite the passing of a Taqwacore scene, there is still a sense of unity among Muslim punk rock musicians who find that they are still operating within a larger artistic social movement.
Taqwacore did not come to a crashing halt, it simply faded as musicians returned to school and jobs. A sense of Taqwacore community may still exist, just not in a localized sense.
What makes this larger body of artistic expression by Muslim American youth a social movement is in part the inclusive and public nature of their work. My interviews with Basim and Imran revealed that there are Muslim American youth who are processing their identities in very tangible and public ways. The reason this thesis is possible is because some young Muslim Americans have chosen to publicly display their identity crises because they want to reach out to other Muslim Americans who are struggling with similar issues. Michael Muhammad Knight could have written out his imaginations of Muslim punk rockers in a private journal but instead he created The
Taqwacores, which had the ability to reach a large audience. One the one hand, Basim
Usmani and Imran Malik, along with the previous and present members of The Kominas, are a group of guys in a band who find great pleasure in playing music together be it in a garage or at a concert. One the other hand, The Kominas intend for their music to resonate beyond what listeners, Muslim and non-Muslim, initially hear.
The realm of artistic expressions by Muslim Americans is not necessarily a new frontier since presumably we can find many examples of Muslim Americans using art, and perhaps punk rock, in the past. However, what the Taqwacore movement has demonstrated is a collaboration between Muslim American youth where we can find degrees of reflection in the sentiments of their music. Taqwacore musicians also recognize that there are other Muslim Americans who are creating music or other art forms for similar reasons. In my first interview with Basim he mentioned a larger dialogue outside of Taqwacore amongst Muslim American artists.
On Heritage Culture
Identities cannot be studied or understood in isolation. Islam alone is not the defining framework of a Muslim identity. My interviews with Basim and Imran have supported the premise of this thesis that punk rock is a site of negotiation for Muslim
American youth. Analyzing song lyrics offered additional substantiation to this claim.
Yet as this thesis has revealed but not profoundly explored, many Muslim Americans are linked to a heritage culture that informs their Muslim and American identities. Basim
Usmani is still hesitant to identify as Muslim but he continues to do so with the conviction that his experience growing up as Muslim is indelibly tied to his Desi cultural heritage. Only in my reflections of my interviews and conversations with Imran and
Basim did I realize the formative influence of Pakistani and Desi culture in the construction of their identities and how their second-generation mentality was an additional facet to be negotiated. Basim and Imran’s Muslim identities are wedded to the culture of Pakistani Islam, meaning that Islamic rituals, traditions, and beliefs are customized to the national cultures in Muslim countries. Imran especially is not a religious person but he feels bound to Islam through his Pakistani roots. Understanding
Basim and Imran’s respective relationships to their parents and to Pakistan helped me recognize the complications that accompany those who are second-generation, especially when a lingering immigrant status is coupled with minority identities.
On Race
I approached my research by trying to deconstruct a Muslim identity in the context of the United States with the expectation that this identity would be rooted in religion. However, I have found that for the second-generation Muslim Americans I interviewed, their Muslim identity is more rooted in heritage culture than in religious conventions, which has forced me to reexamine how punk rock music has been used as a site of identity negotiation. In 2008, when asked by an online blog called Sepia Mutiny if
The Kominas had a broad underlying goal to their music, the band responded:
That race politics have a place in punk. That cultural sources aren’t just Black, American, or White, but that they come from all corners of the globe. That we aren’t Sand People from Planet Tatoiine. And to desis growing up in Valiyat228: that our culture is a lot more multi-faceted than any of our parents would lead us to believe.229
In our conversations Basim has lightheartedly talked about his “brownness” as another identity marker that sets him apart from many Americans but may bring him closer to his band mates. Arjun Ray, a former member of The Kominas who is studying biology at Brown University, does not share the Pakistani heritage culture or Muslim
228 Valiyat is Urdu for ‘foreign country.’ 229 Sepia Mutiny. “Wild Nights with The Kominas.” October 24, 2008. http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/005438.html identity that Basim, Imran, and Shahjehan have in common. Arjun is a second-generation immigrant from India with Hindu parents. Despite these differences, the musicians continue to find common ground on how people respond to the color of their skin. In these details of immigrant status and racial categories we find new reason and meaning for negotiating identities.
On Generation
A fascinating extension to this thesis would be to further examine the dynamics between Imran and Basim and their first-generation Pakistani parents. This relationship might illuminate other reasons for their use of punk rock that is tied to being second- generation Americans. Basim’s parents were Pakistani Muslims living in California in their early 20s yet using punk rock as a site of negotiation for their identities would probably seem ludicrous or at least unnecessary. This is partly because American society was less suspicious of Muslims in the 1960s but mostly because first-generation immigrants have experienced first-hand Pakistani culture and Pakistani Islam, which may allow for a more stable sense of self in an American context. One might expect that second-generation offspring would feel more secure in their identities because they haven’t had to uproot their entire lives and move to a foreign country, yet my interviews with Basim and Imran revealed just the opposite. Basim talks about always being the odd one out. “I’m too Pakistani to be American and I’m too American to be Pakistani.”230
This quotation is an appropriate way to conclude this thesis as it suggest two other identities, second-generation and Pakistani, that interact with each other and with the
American and Muslim components of Basim’s identity to create a number of
230 Basim Usmani, phone interview, March 10, 2011. intersections where identity negotiation can be found. In this respect, identity construction is an ongoing process and through the medium of punk rock and other forms of artistic expression, young Muslim Americans are creating their own understanding of what it means to be young, Muslim, American, and of migrant heritage.
***
In the context of the United States today, Muslim American youth are using punk rock as a site of identity negotiation by writing lyrics, creating communities, and asking questions that engage a public audience of both Muslim and non-Muslim Americans.
Basim Usmani told me he realized he could define things for himself through his music.
Instead of keeping his music to himself, he and The Kominas share it because they realize that other young Muslim Americans may need a site of negotiation as well.
Appendix
A. Lyrics
Artist: The Kominas Rumi Was a Homo
I want to be stoned on your love you give better handjobs than Asma Hasan conventional opinion is the ruin of souls Bhaijaan it's my prose I can't control
Rumi was a genius Siraj, you're an ass Rumi could fuck Shams Wahhaj has to wack
Rumi was a genius Siraj, you're an ass Rumi was a homo Siraj, you're a fag
Rumi's throat never tightened with fear naughty Wahhaj, don't use your teeth there. O Jaan, I like tinder O Jaan, set me ablaze with your fire
Artist: The Kominas Album: Wild Nights in Guantanamo Bay 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
Artist: The Kominas Album: Wild Nights in Guantanamo Bay BLOW SHIT UP
I DONT WANT ASSIMILATION I JUST WANT TO BLOW SHIT UP I DONT WANT ASSIMILATION I JUST WANT TO BLOW SHIT UP
Negras tormentas agitan los aires (Black storms shake the sky nubes oscuras nos impiden ver. (Black clouds blind us Aunque nos espere el dolor y la muerte (Although death and pain await us contra el enemigo nos llama el deber (Against the enemy we must go)
A LAS BARRICADAS A LAS BARRICADAS (To the barricades)
Wait, what if war was just another numbers game, and every killed president kept another nation safe? Wait, what if war was just another numbers game, and every killed president kept another nation safe? THEN WHAT?
Artist: The Kominas Album: Escape to Blackout Beach 9000 Miles
Do I strive for a hustle, when time slinks and snails its way by? Ran my thoughts in Chicago, remember how we slept in parking spaces that night? Searching for Noble Drew, our brain synapses fried, dear heart, pound less, this rib ain't caged to confine how can I swim 9,000 miles I'm 9,000 miles away from home
Lying in a ditch, a hung my eyes off the crescent, I rubbed the bristles on my chin, where do I begin? Mere moments away from doomsday, I still recall your visage, march down stairs through the hinges there into the daylight that jipped me that night you decided to pack to forget me how can I swim 9,000 miles I'm 9,000 miles away from home
Life's hard when you're singed, by the shades of the past, moments can be cinched, by the fear you'll be last, thaw my heart, thaw my heart, I've been frozen in old groves alternate verse: There's almost no line between fear and love sometimes I'm made of fire, sometimes I'm made of mud But I stand alone on my own here, still barely holding on.
The Kominas Album: Escape to Blackout Beach Tunnnnnn (with a translation in English)
Hum siraf wohi piyan ge We will only drink that Jo Iraq mein pi rehe hai That they are drinking in Iraq hum siraf wohi piyan ge We will only drink that Jo Karballah mein pi te thay that they would drink in Karballah
Hik chaati maari, You peeked once te mein sharmaya paea, and I was bashful chaatian marran da mood, When did you decide to kaddon charran paea, shoot my looks? hun tera naa da mein parra jhapda rehnda, Now I go counting your name on beads (parra jhapna) hun tera naa waastay savaan chadda rehnda, Now I save my breaths to say your name ghup anhera vich jarra niqaab chuko, In complete darkness, lift up your niqaab jidee voti chungi oda dukaan lutto, whoever has a beautiful wife, loot their storefront enj mein khaidh khaidh khaidh ke kati puri jindari, this is how I’ve gone about playing with my life juha khaidh khaidh khaidh ke kati puri jindari, This is how I’ve gone gambling through my life keriyan bottlan paea nay tuhaday kol?
Al-Thawra Album: Who Benefits from War? Eviction Sama’i
Mayor Daley calls the shots But I can see through his crooked cops Ghettos filled with vacant lots Ghostly gentry Olympic spots Five-day notice on my door You’ve got my rent on the fourth Tomorrow morning eviction court A slobby slumlord’s money sport Now, you say that we can’t smoke Voices filtered through dead votes Next you’ll take away our hope Chicago politics - - a joke
Al-Thawra Album: Who Benefits from War? Beneath the Edifice
Tears irrigate The uprooted olive trees. Our hopes live In their inert pits. Our future suckles On the bitter citron Made sterile in its shadows. The muezzin of misfortune Is ready to call.
But these minarets are filled With snipers who study The maqamat of Rifle-round ricochets And the iqaa of shells smashing into flesh far below.
Just to divide A struggle globalized Masses of people With futures locked outside.
B. Photos
Above: The Kominas from left, Arjun Ray, Shahjehan Khan, Imran Malik, Basim Usmani.
Above: Taqwacore Graffiti.
Author Michael Muhammad Knight in front of a poster for the motion picture film “Taqwacores” based off his novel The Taqwacores.
The cover of The Kominas first album titled Wild nights in Guantanamo Bay.
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Interview. “Interview: Al-Thawra.” Metal Waves: Voices of Metal, March 30, 2009, http://www.metal- waves.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1032:interview-al-thawra
*** Heavy Metal in Baghdad, DVD. Directed by Eddy Moretti and Suroosh Alvi. Vice Films, 2008.
Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam, DVD. Directed by Omar Majeed. Eye Steel Film, 2009.
Wild Nights in Guantanamo Bay, CD The Kominas, 2000.
Escape to Blackout Beach, CD The Kominas, 2010.
Who Benefits from War?, CD Al-Thawra, 2008.