Islamopunk

Taqwacore


Our Flemish correspondent VH sends this fascinating material about the emergence of a new musical genre: Muslim punk.

The article quoted here was already in English, and VH has translated one of the Dutch-language comments accompanying it.

From Dutch website HoeiBoei:

Taqwacore ‘the birth of Punk Islam’

Three years in the making, this feature documentary follows the progression of the Muslim Punk scene: from its imaginary inception in a novel written by a white-convert named Michael Muhammad Knight to a full-blown, real-life scene of Muslim punk bands and their fans.

“This song is for all the homosexuals!”

[WARNING: some of the language in this video is not PG-13.]


When he was 17, Michael Knight left his mother’s home in Rochester to study Islam at a Pakistani madrassa…

– – – – – – – –

…It was his first act of rebellion — against his abusive, schizophrenic, white-supremacist father. Years later, burned out on the demands of religious dogma, Mike rebelled once more — by penning a Muslim Punk manifesto called The Taqwacores. His work of fiction struck a chord with young Muslims around the world and before long, real-life Taqwacore bands were creating a scene. This film follows Michael and his band of Muslim punks as they journey across the U.S. and Pakistan, transforming their worlds, their religion and themselves through the spirit of Taqwacore.

A comment at HoeiBoei [vanhetgoor]:

Today by chance I again discussed in a conversation with someone the book Blood by Roel van Duyn [Sixties Amsterdam left-wing extremist hippie “Provo” frontman, nowadays GreenLeft — translator]. It takes something that is so repulsive to open people’s eyes. But while opening these people’s eyes there are always individuals who do not understand that it is a deliberate reversal and exaggeration.

This is just something like that. Someone who adopts Islam to shock, acquires followers who will not see it as an act like that of Marilyn Manson. But still this is a dangerous phenomenon, not because it mocks common sense but because they themselves can be taken in by the lies, and then there is no possibility anymore of escape.

Note: Taqwa means God-fearing, or “fear, clinging to obedience to Allah”.

7 thoughts on “Islamopunk

  1. Excellent, the cultural subversion begins. Turning Muslim youth on their fundamentalist culture is the only non-genocidal answer solution to Islam.

  2. Orlando: Excellent, the cultural subversion begins. Turning Muslim youth on their fundamentalist culture is the only non-genocidal answer solution to Islam.

    A heartwarming notion, save for the fact that punk and (c)rap music, both largely (and evidently), embraced by Muslim youth, are intensely death-oriented to begin with. The only “subversion” involved is that of twisting the already perverse nature of these violent, disrespectful genres into even more hostile and aggressive venues for the dissemination of anti-Christian, anti-White and anti-Western motifs.

    None of them, Islam, included, have anything to do with life, liberty or glorification of the human spirit. They all share in common one essential and unavoidable precept, NIHILISM.

    It is this nihilistic and suicidal theme that pervades so much of modern “youth” culture. Be it skulls, satanic symbols or an intensely death-oriented phraseology regarding nearly everything to do with daily life, it is these commonly accepted icons which allow so many young consumers who participate in this Cult-of-Oblivion™, to give it a polish whose sheen better describes the ebon luster of a long-buried casket.

    This new adjunct of suicidal and apocalyptic Islam represents a less-than-zero surprise. If the Muslim embrace of (c)rap music comes as no sort of shocker, then its further acceptance of punk should be nothing more than an expected and easily anticipated extension of the same intentionally offensive dogma that it has spewed for over a dozen centuries.

  3. Suicide bombings as performance art, fizzy islam easier for the west to swallow, as it ferments into the toxic waste of FUNdamental islam.

    This is the same propaganda techniques employed by the counter-culture of the 1960s.

  4. from a culture of convenience you knew this was coming. for certain Islamopunks are a contradiction. you don’t ‘submit’ to punk any more then the possibility of a gay Purple Jihad without getting the death sentence in Iran or Saudi Arabia.

  5. dangerous mix of things.. from one side I agree with the cultural subversion, but are we sure all of the followers of such bands will be subversives? it can also be another weapon for destroying our cities’ quarters..

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