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Read an Interview with Eyad Zahra on making THE TAQWACORES

THE TAQWACORES

(United States, 2010) Dir.: Eyad Zahra; Scr.: Michael Muhammad Knight, Eyad Zahra

35mm, 83 min., color, narrative

As the lights go up on THE TAQWACORES, Eyad Zahra’s adaptation of Michael Muhammad Knight’s seminal 2003 novel of the same name, we are introduced to Yusef, a straight-laced freshman engineering student attending an unnamed university in Buffalo, New York. Yusef, a first-generation Pakistani, is also an orthodox Muslim, and as he is eager to move off-campus in search of affordable housing, answers an ad seeking roommates in an apartment of other Muslim college students. The apartment building — a multi-story brick building in a sketchy part of town that looks more crash-pad than student housing — is the first tip-off that the rest of Yusef’s freshman year is not going to be like any other.

In short order, Yusef is ingratiated into a world in which his traditional Muslim beliefs come into sharp conflict with the decidedly unorthodox lifestyles practiced by his housemates, a collision of revised (some would say debased) Muslim tenets consistent with how they live their lives and of Taqwacore, a Muslim brand of punk rock practiced on the West Coast. There is Jehangir, a Mohawk-wielding rocker more Joe Strummer than prophet Muhammad who takes Yusef under his wings; Rabeya, a riot grrrl who dresses in a full-length burqa and crosses out huge passages of the Quran that she feels she can do without (read: are sexist and outdated); Amazing Ayyub, a Shi’a skinhead whose hedonism runs him afoul of the house politics; Fasiq, an otherwise ernest Indonesian Muslim sk8terpunk who can’t seem to distinguish Islam from Rastafarianism; Muzzamil, a queer Muslim from San Francisco who is visiting friends in the house; and Lynn, a white girl who associates with the members of the house and befriends Yusef. All are under the overbearing eye of Umar, the lone holdover from the previous wave of housemates and as hard-core a practitioner of traditional Islam as one can get.

THE TAQWACORES is a resounding feature-length debut for director Eyad Zahra, a Cleveland, OH native who studied cinema production at Florida State University. The film casts an observant eye on young people whose ideas of faith and ideology are challenged, reimagined, and repurposed — a brash and confident rejoinder to the ethnic and religious xenophobia prevalent in this country post-911. In a world defined by profound disenfranchisement, the film posits a world united by punk and nonconformity, and even spotlights music from the movement, courtesy of L.A.-based Taqwacore outfit the Kominas.

— Abraham Ferrer

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