By CHRISTOPHER MAAG
CLEVELAND - Five years ago, young Muslims across the United States began reading and passing along a blurry, photocopied novel called“The Taqwacores,”about imaginary punk rock Muslims in Buffalo.
“This book helped me create my identity,”said Naina Syed, 14, a high school freshman in Coventry, Connecticut.
A Muslim born in Pakistan, Naina said she spent hours on the phone listening to her older sister read the novel to her.“When I finally read the book for myself,”she said,“it was an amazing experience.”
Springing from the imagination of Michael Muhammad Knight, the novel has inspired disaffected young Muslims in the United States to form real Muslim punk bands and build their own subculture.
Now the underground success of Muslim punk has resulted in an independent film based on the book.
A group of punk artists living in a communal house in Cleveland called the Tower of Treason offered the house as the set for the movie. Filming took place in October, and the movie will be released next year, said Eyad Zahra, the director.
“To see these characters that used to live only inside my head out here walking around, and to think of all these kids living out parts of the book, it’s totally surreal,”Mr.Muhammad Knight, 31, said as he roamed the movie set. Born an Irish Catholic in upstate New York, he converted to Islam as a teenager.
As part of the set, a Muslim punk rock musician, Marwan Kamel, 23, painted“Osama McDonald,”a figure with Osama bin Laden’s face atop Ronald McDonald’s body. Mr.Kamel said the painting was a protest against imperialism by American corporations and against Wahhabism, the strictest form of Islam.
Noureen DeWulf, 24, an actress who plays a rocker in the movie, defended the film’s message.
“I’m a Muslim and I’m 100 percent American,”Ms.DeWulf said,“so I can criticize my faith and my country. Rebellion- Punk- This is totally American.”
The novel’s title combines“taqwa,”the Arabic word for“piety,”with“hardcore,”used to describe many genres of angry Western music. For many young American Muslims, the novel became a blueprint for their lives.
“Reading the book was totally liberating for me,”said Areej Zufari, 34, a Muslim and a humanities professor at Valencia Community College in Orlando, Florida.
Ms.Zufari said she had listened to punk music growing up in Arkansas and found“The Taqwacores”four years ago.
“Here was someone as frustrated with Islam as me,”she said,“and he expressed it using bands I love, like the Dead Kennedys. It all came together.”
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