Snapshots from the Muslim-Punk Underground

This week on Studio 360, Nick Heling talks to Muslim punk rockers The Kominas about taqwacore, the movement inspired by novelist Michael Muhammad Knight’s 2002 novel The Taqwacores. Photographer Kim Badawi met Knight shortly after Taqwacores was published, and in 2006 began tagging along on tours with taqwa bands The Kominas and Secret Trial Five, snapping pics of the scene in its infancy. Now that taqwacore is a raging adolescent, Brooklyn publisher powerHouse (which specializes in not-your-mamma’s coffee table books) has come out with a beautiful new book of Badawi’s photos: The Taqwacores: Muslim Punk in the U.S.A.. What I love about Badawi’s photos are the juxtapositions: there’s the obligatory sex, drugs, and thrashing guitars, but also veiled heads, prayer rugs, and band members bowed towards Mecca.

Bassist Basim Usmani getting married shortly before The Kominas’ 2007 TaqwaTour…

…and playing a basement show in Chicago with Shahjehan Khan

Taqwacores crash on the floor of a mosque

Listen to Nick’s interview with Michael Muhammad Knight and The Kominas: