Source: The Toronto Star
http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/movies/article/709786--2-passions-islam-and-punk
Let's get this straight: This is not just a story about "brown guys with mohawks." At one point during the documentaryTaqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam, its subjects – young, punk rock-playing Muslims – sit around and lament the tendency of the media to oversimplify their unlikely musical and religious amalgam.
While it's easy, even tempting, to focus on the gee-whiz nature of the scene – how often do you hear the words Islamic and punk together? – there's so much more to the story, as can be seen in Montreal filmmaker Omar Majeed's compelling doc showcasing these bands, which screens at the Royal Cinema this week.
In some ways, it all started with The Taqwacores, a novel by Michael Muhammad Knight, although he says he just gave something that already existed a name. Written in 2003, it depicted a house where Muslim kids were as hardcore about their music as their religion. Although it was fiction, it had a bit of a Catcher in the Rye effect, as many young Muslim readers felt it helped define them.
Then, in a life-imitating-art moment, those kids started bands, saying that they were Taqwacore. (Taqwa is the Islamic concept of God consciousness; the core comes from hardcore.)