Taqwacore

Originally conceived in Michael Muhammad Knight's 2003 novel, The Taqwacores, the name is a portmanteau of "hardcore" and the Arabic word "taqwa" (تقوى), which is usually translated as "piety" or the quality of being "God-fearing", and thus roughly denotes reverence and love of the divine.

[1] In the 1990s, Nation Records act Fun-Da-Mental and Asian Dub Foundation emerged, solidifying the first examples of UK Muslim generated punk.

A group of self-identified taqwacore bands traveled in a caravan style tour around the United States as a sort of recreation of Michael Muhammad Knight's original novel in 2007.

it has also been wrongly reported that the inspiration behind secret trial five are the writings of michael muhammad knight: which is false ...There is not a definitive "taqwacore sound", and the scene is much more diverse now (2011) than the fictional one portrayed in Knight's novel, with artists incorporating various styles, ranging from punk to hip-hop, and musical traditions from the Muslim world; the Kominas describe their sound as "Bollywood punk", Sagg Taqwacore Syndicate are rap and techno inspired music while Al-Thawra uses the term "raicore", based on North African Arabic Raï music.

The concept of an individual's Islam is historically popular with Sufism and was solidified in a new American style with the publication of Michael Muhammad Knight's novel.

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 are viewed by outsiders as unified, cohesive communities when nothing can be further from the truth.One fictitious character in the novel named Fasiq, an Indonesian Muslim, openly smokes cannabis while reading the Quran.

The disenchantment and desire to reach a conclusion or catharsis of creating a personal Islam for Michael Muhammad Knight started with his Taqwacore project.

The extreme nature of his fictional characters spoke to young Muslims around the world, and sparked a movement of "Taqwacore" labeled bands.

While we did participate in a lot of the media surrounding it, we didn't start out as a "taqwacore" band, because the project was already underway before I even had any idea that such a thing existed.

We were hesitant to use the term, and reluctantly accepted it later on, only to be disillusioned again.The Kominas, while still labeled taqwacore, have expressed discontent with their reviews focusing on the Muslim aspect of their music instead of aesthetics or politics.

The Kominas are one of the most famous taqwacore bands, and they have reached the digital ears of people all over the world,[17] and have become interests of many academic articles and press.

I was very influenced by that and, as delusional as this may sound, is something that I hope to speak to when I started out on this project.Fun-Da-Mental are an explicitly political and controversial band with an outspoken concern with social justice (particularly in regard to Britain's treatment of its Asian and Afro-Caribbean citizens) and have been described as "articulat(ing) eclectically a kind of militant Islamic-influenced, pro-Black anti-racist identity politics.

articles, particularly accounts of the Islamic Society of North America's annual convention, in which he wrote of giving a "stink palm" to famous imam Siraj Wahhaj and Cat Stevens and engaging in a romantic encounter with a young Muslim woman.

The musicians also started a joke band named "Box Cutter Surprise", referencing the knives used to hijack planes on September 11.

Marwan Kamel, from a band on tour called Al-Thawra, Arabic for "revolution," said that the members created the group to shock audiences.

While not the same specific genre of music, the book covers a wide variety of topics and talks about crowds at shows "dressed in strange combinations of metal, hip-hop, and punk attire."

Another paper written by a number of masters students at the Roskilde University write in Looking for Cultural Space Discourses of Identity Formation on the case of Taqwacore,[24] on populations, groups, and individuals belonging in society.

[26] She questions the role of the Straight Edge music ideology in individuals lives, and how it potentially may relate to the taqwacore movement.

Their lifestyles are personalized, "touring bands do not perform salat five times day and although shows will open with a communal prayer, it is men and women praying together so constitutes haram."

John Hutnyk writes more specifically about the band that is considered to be taqwacore by some Fun-Da-Men-Tal in "THE DIALECTICS OF EUROPEAN HIP-HOP: Fun^da^mental and the deathening silence.

These include "interventions around race and representation", the historic and recent deciding factor that started "the war of ‘terror’", as well as what he calls "a radical version of human rights activism."

Amil Khan addresses similar issues, but on a wider spectrum in his book titled The Long Struggle: The Seeds of the Muslim World's Frustration.