Taqwacore

The Taqwacores is a book written by Michael Muhammad Knight.

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Here's a synopsis I found on ebay:

Synopsis An underground cult classic among young, disaffected Muslim-Americans, TAQWACORES (combining "Taqwa" or "piety" with the "core" of "hardcore punk") is a novel about a Muslim punk-rock scene in Buffalo, New York. The popularity of Michael Mohammad Knight's book has led to the birth of an actual Islamic punk-rock movement in the United States

Originally published as photo-copied zine and distributed for free. It achieved some measure of popularity and found publishing with the radical press Autonomedia of Brooklyn, NY and endorsed by Hakim Bey (a radical poet and philosopher) who produced the T.A.Z. (Temporary Autonomous Zone) which I discovered recently - I haven't read it yet, but it looks fantastic. It depicts a fictitious scene of Islamic punk rock, but evidently has inspired a number of punks, queers, and other such outsider Muslims and Arabs to create that scene, which took the book's title as its namesake. It is evidently a multi-media platform, though largely associated through the music/punk scene that was depicted in the book. Evidently, the book has been turned into a film, written by the Author, and according to imdb has completed filming and will be released in 2010. There is even a documentary on the Taqwacore scene going to the next Sundance.

Anyway, the great news is that Michael Muhammad Knight is going to be appearing at the Bowery Poetry Club on Wednesday, January 6 at 10 pm (along with the Kominas, one of the Taqwacore bands who has attained a modest about of popularity and, from a brief listen to their myspace, they sound pretty good). Nice timing, eh? It's in promotion of his new book, Journey to the End of Islam, in which he visits holy sites in Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, and Ethiopia culminating his travels in Mecca, where he performs the hajj.

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I found out about this by accident while looking at an article by ABC News from my iGoogle widget for "Psychology Headlines from Around the World" about Muslim-Hindu Punk Rock Bands Part of New Movement. Strangely, it has a direct connection to the Hakim Bey and his T.A.Z. (Temporary Autonomous Zone which I recently discovered and encouraged me to start this blog). Thus, I should say, "by accident." The more often I think or use that phrase, the more I disbelieve it. These things all seem to interconnect, like some ectoplasmic river running under the bridge of the world. Join me, won't you?