The Taqwacores

by Michael Muhammad Knight

Book Overview

A Muslim punk house in Buffalo, New York, inhabited by burqa-wearing riot girls, mohawked Sufis, straightedge Sunnis, Shi'a skinheads, Indonesian skaters, Sudanese rude boys, gay Muslims, drunk Muslims, and feminists. Their living room hosts parties and prayers, with a hole smashed in the wall to indicate the direction of Mecca. Their life together mixes sex, dope, and religion in roughly equal amounts, expressed in devotion to an Islamo-punk subculture,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1593762291
• ISBN13: 9781593762292
• Release Date: January 2009
• Publisher: Soft Skull
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 4.9" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

Will blow your Mind!

It's always great to discover another segment of American society that strives to create it's own identity and challenges assumptions, the mainstream and stereotypes. The Taqwacores does all of this in Spades!

Imperial Future

Knight's novel is a brilliant blend of reality and imagination. Character development is richly textured and his descriptive prose paints a vibrant texture that will stay with the reader long after reading the novel. The potential for Islamic cultural influences on very familiar popular cultural scenes is elegantly framed and cleverly nuanced leaving one with the sense of being wrapped in a world of the imminently possible rather than being in just an idiosyncratic world of a remarkably creative imagination. This book is a hidden gem that both shares and inspires new visions of tolerance and acceptance amidst the blood and gore found in the realities of recent American imperialism.

A book I'm sure Cat Stevens would love to burn!

This fun, smart, sexy, Muslim-American, punk rock novel is one of the best fictional books I've read in ages! The characters, the plot and its pro-feminist, queer-positive, anticapitalist politics will captivate you! Frankly, once I started the book I couldn't put it down! The ending is pure genius. At a time when anti-Muslim xenophobia is sweeping the country, this book is a necessary intervention. I can't wait for Knight to write another book!

way beyond brilliant!!

WOW. This is one of the most brilliant books i've ever read! Who would have thought that two things like Islam and Punk rock could ever overlap, let alone be combined in such a genius way. From the radical feminist in full burqa(her burqa is covered with band patches!), to the straightedge punk with Qur'an verses tattooed on him, to the mohawked drunk punk who plays the call to prayer on electric guitar from the roof of the house...this book is just genius in every detail! The only problem i can imagine is that he uses A LOT of arabic terms and Islamic references which may be hard to understand if you don't have background knowledge about Islam. But READ IT ANYWAY! Find somebody you can ask if you need the terms defined for you. This book is worth the time! (p.s.the word "fasiq" means "pervert") Not exactly for the conservative thinker...BEWARE, you will need to think outside the box on this one. Though the end result is something that is unexplainably...blasphemously reverent, dogma-smashingly righteous...what can one say?...allahu akbar!

necessary reading!

truly necessary reading, but only for the open minded. As a novel, this book is amazing. The characters to me cannot be fiction, they're way too real, that I almost refuse to believe Knight made them up. Whenever I remember Jehanger Tabari I think of him as a real person, and i find it hard to tihnk otherwise. what a great read. as islamic lit, it totally jumps at you, ripping away at all the lies and all the dust that's accumulated over true islam through centuries and cultures. for me, i think it will impact the way i tihnk about religion forever. there's only one thing that annoyed me in the book and that's putting ayesha's age at 9, which is a ridiculous myth that wouldn't make sense for anyone who reads a complete and detailed sira. when she was married she was somewhere between 16 and 20. that's my only complaint about this book which i highly recommend. you will find much wisdom in the drunken ramblings of Jehangir Tabari and the fantasy writings of Abu Afak in this novel.