[film] Taqwacore: the birth of punk Islam

[kaberett]

Taqwacore! It is pretty awesome.

So then I dug out the 2009 documentary, expecting it to be really awesome, and instead found that it focussed entirely on the ~spiritual journey~ of a white dude... via the medium of his collecting a bunch of punk Islam youth and going on a road-trip with them. Almost everything was reflected back through him, rather than through the kids who were actually making the music.

I was disappointed.

On the plus side, it introduced me to Secret Trial Five, a queer political punk rock band fronted by a drag king. (Who have subsequently distanced themselves from taqwacore.) So that's awesome too.

Comments

[mustela_nivalis]

There is also a fictional film written by the same white guy, which plays on queer stereotypes in ways I find vaguely annoying? (i.e. queer guy is always femme) Additionally, there was kind of awkward thing about burka as political statement that seemed kind of confused. Also made Islam sort of monolithic and ignored the bit where Islam is not the sole defining feature of any given culture in ways I consider typical of white gaze.

[Aside from lazy noldo: whoops, I didn't realise you were watching the documentary and not the fiction or my opinions would've been not the same. Also, the fictional thing is better in that not centering actual white person, just vaguely enwhitened worldview. Also does the hilarity of uh simultaneously Islam as magic exotic thing which improves lives and um Islam as repressive system which one must punk against it is v. odd.

Also the peanut gallery here is agreed that Dominic Rains is cute, in case you needed to know.]

[hairyears]

I have a glimpse - and a very narrow glimpse - of Anglo-Islamic culture in my hometown. Or rather: cultures - there are several distinct threads, roughly aligned with national origin; but the threads aren't "one end a bit like Orthodox Judaism, and the other one like Reform Jews" at all... They sort of unravel into Anglicised vs Old Country, liberal vs salafist, and "No f***ing way are we having anything to do with those loons from the Kingdom" vs "We are all one Umma".

I saw - in glimpses - the intermingled subcultures of my Islamic schoolfriends and, while it is a conceit of adolescents that their parents' generation have no clue what's going on, I do believe that their actions, conversations and beliefs were completely unknown outside their own microculture.

Among other things, all of them got into Sufism, in different forms, despite it being considered eccentric in some households and Kfir - pagan, or heathen - in others.

I have no idea what happened in different towns, and in different boroughs of London. But I'll make a guess: not more of the same, more of the different.

And now it's turning up in music, on YouTube. Yay! For free access to media!

At work, I got the backchat between S, a woman from a liberal family in a religiously-conservative North African country, and her boss: a publicly-liberal and privately-conservative French Moslem with a family background of Socialist Islam.

Tease out the conflicting - and collaborating - cultures in *that*. And those countries will have even more diverse youth subcultures: some of these will be even wierder than anything we've seen on TV.