Muhammad Rocked the Casbah

• ---

Listen to the Music

• The Kominas - Dishoom Bebe
• Vote Hezbollah - Poppy Fields
• Secret Trial Five - Middle Eastern Zombies
• Al-Thawra - Naura al Hamra

Muhammad Rocked the Casbah

San Antonio's Muslim punk scene goes national, and Europe is next.

Lydia Crafts | December 14, 2007 | Books and the Culture

Kourosh Poursalehi was a 16-year-old Sufi from San Antonio in 2004 when he created a song that made a fictional punk-rock movement come alive. Hypothesizing that no one in the world was like him, Poursalehi went looking for other Muslim punks and discovered The Taqwacores, a novel written by Muslim-convert Michael Muhammad Knight about a fictional underground Muslim punk-rock scene in upstate New York. In the book, the punks called themselves taqwacore—a combination of the Arabic word taqwa, meaning consciousness of God, and hardcore.

Poursalehi thought the taqwacores were real and set out to meet them. He found a poem written by Knight at the beginning of the book called "Muhammad was a punk rocker" that portrays the Prophet rebelling against the oppressors of his time, smashing idols and sporting a spiky hairdo. Poursalehi put the poem to music—spawning the first-ever taqwacore song.

Article continued...