The first film I saw at the festival this year, Taqwacore played well to a partially hometown audience [several subjects were in the house, and there was a performance to follow at a diner down the street]. Essentially, Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam is a doc about what happens when a bunch of Muslim kids in the states, inspired by a 2003 novel about Islamic punk kids by disaffected white Muslim convert Michael Muhammad Knight called The Taqwacores, start hardcore bands, subsequently go on tour, then land in lassitude in Lahore.
"Taqwa" means, roughly, "God consciousness," with hardcore's suffix grafted to the end. However, the transplant only sorta takes. The doc is entertaining, with a good sense of humor [witness the disastrous show at ISNA in Chicago, where the punk rock kids observe of the local constabulary come to bust things up, "Pigs aren't haram."]. But it feels like a missed opportunity.
The cinetrix won't go all topical, observing that the so-called Times Square bomber comes from a family of means and benefited from western educational opportunities and yadda yadda. But! My scribbled notes from the screening include the words "slightly bratty" and "spoiled!" Which are aspects of this "movement" worth considering and is where the doc falls down.
The filmmakers should be lauded for their inclusion of the openly queer drag king Sena Hussain, but I'd argue the real story is not gender but class privilege. Namely, the author of The Taqwacores comes to Islam from a grim, abusive, rough-and-tumble working class upbringing. It's said that with his novel "he wrote the future," but in the doc Knight gets grouped with born-and-raised punk ayatollahs, whose immigrant parents are white-collar professionals ensconced in bedroom communities.
Yet the film does nothing with this class disconnect, which only becomes more pronounced once the action shifts to Pakistan. These punk rockers from good families get lost in a haze of hash and privilege, lolling about in the cocoon of misbehavior money affords them there while Knight partakes in truly hardcore Sufi self-flagellation ceremonies and revisits the holy sites so important to his conversion, and perhaps salvation, as a teen.
I don't doubt for a second that, as one song's lyrics claim, "Muhammad was a punk rocker. You know he tore shit up." But ultimately the petit bourgeois rebellion we see these Taqwacores-after-the-fact espouse comes off more Hot Topic than true punk rock.
