Invasion of the Taqwa-Punks: The 2005 ISNA Convention

By Michael Muhammad Knight

Malcolm X’s grandson had told me to go read God’s Unruly Friends by Ahmet Karamustafa, which dealt with medieval Sufi groups that “real” Islam has swept under the rug: butt-balling Qalandars, genital-piercing Haydaris, boozing and self-lacerating Jamis and the Madaris of northern India who had long matted hair, rejected rituals, smoked hashish all day and rubbed their naked bodies with the ashes.

Karamustafa suggested that orthodox Islam had spread as the product of an Arab cultural elite, only to be undone by the conversion of isolated and non-Arabic-speaking peoples: lower-caste Hindus, Turkish nomads and sub-Saharan Africans. Left on the ummah’s geographic, economic and linguistic fringes, cut off from the big universities, they could only be Muslims of their own design.

It also happened in the wilderness of North America, where Islam took new forms—irrefutably Black, with its own Black scriptures, Black symbols and Black holy men—that the immigrant kids would never get. The Black Islam even spawned strange white culture-seeds; from the Moorish Science Temple came the Moorish Orthodox Church, with chendoh-waltzing Warren Tartaglia/Walid Al-Taha and his student Peter Lamborn Wilson/Hakim Bey using “the black man’s code to fit their facts” like Norman Mailer said of the Kerouacs and Ginsbergs. Many these days would also view the Progressive movement as a homegrown heresy, and American Muslim women have fired the first shots to create a whole other Islam for themselves. And now even the bums and punks are starting to stand up on the margins—kids like Shahjehan and Basim of the Kominas—to claim their corner.

You’d have no problem finding young Muslim musicians in this country, especially at the self-promotional opportunity of an ISNA convention, but most of it comes off as timid daw’ah fare. Islam-oriented rappers and boy-bands may present an interesting quirk to non-Muslims, but there’s no frightening honesty, no open challenge. It’s the taqwacore bands that present a new kind of character—instead of putting on the false mosque-face and living out a social schizophrenia, and instead of winning over the community with pussy-footed tact, they’d openly and passionately revel in their fuck-ups. That’s why we’re not Progressive Muslims, Muqtedar.

For this year’s Islamic Society of North America convention the taqwa bands put together a comp CD and called it Hamza Don’t Surf. We had the Kominas on there with a new version of “Rumi was a Homo (Wahhaj You’re a Fag),” Basim’s other band Malice in Leatherland, Vote Hezbollah and Cihan’s band 8bit. Basim pressed a mess of copies and I brought a pile of The Taqwacores wrapped protectively in my Wesley Willis hoodie. After walking four miles to the gas station, I met up with the Kominas, filmmaker Labid Aziz and Shahjehan’s dad, who had rented a van. I climbed in and we took the I-90 to Chicago, driving through the night and arriving shortly after 6:00 a.m.

Shahjehan’s dad and Labid retired to their respective hotels while I went with the Kominas to the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center. The place was set up and ready but completely deserted so we ran wild in the empty bazaar, jumping on tables and singing taqwa songs loud. I had a pile of counterfeit badges with names like Ben Ishmael and Al Rukn but wasn’t sure if they’d do the job later, so Shahjehan went behind the media booth and added our names to a Post-It list of registered journalists. Then we went upstairs, napped for a few hours on the couches and went back down as things were getting alive. We approached the media booth and told them that we needed badges. The guy running things looked at his little yellow Post-It, saw our names and wrote them up. Now we had all-access media passes.

Omar tipped us off to the press conference featuring Karen Hughes, Department of State Undersecretary of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs and Bush’s representative to the ISNA convention, ostensibly centered around the earth-shattering announcement of a brochure condemning terrorism. Hughes elevated the affair to engage ISNA stars Nur Abdullah, Ingrid Mattson and Sayyid Syeed in a mutually meaningless handjob session: Islam is great, America is great, American Muslims contribute to American life in so many ways, American Muslims love America, America loves its American Muslims, rich fabric of diversity, beautiful mosaic of cultures, forging partnerships for the future and so on and bullshit forever.

It was obvious that we didn’t belong in there, and not least of all to those charged with protecting the event. A police officer and big man in a suit came over and asked us to come outisde. Just beyond the door, the big man flashed his badge and said, “Special Agent, U.S. State Department.” He had us open our bags and then compared our ISNA passes with our drivers’ licenses, making me glad I hadn’t used my Ibrahim Hooper badge.

“Who do you write for?”

“MuslimWakeUp,” I told him.

“What’s that?”

“It’s an online magazine, I’ve written for it for three years now and these guys are with me.” The agent turned to an ISNA official and he vouched for us.

We got our IDs back and made a mildly awkward return to the press conference. As it wrapped up and everyone filed out, the ISNA guy smiled and apologized for harassing us. “You just need proper attire,” he said. Then he went over and told Shahjehan that he was okay, but they didn’t understand my Alternative Tentacles workjacket. Instead of just asking the question they went ahead and sent a special agent after us, but what can you do. Next came a whole other press conference devoted to the issue of ISNA’s Horizons mag on Islam among African-Americans, but nearly all the reporters and photographers had followed Hughes out. Too bad they missed poet Amir Sulaiman as he got up and delivered his famous “Dead Man Walking,” which no less than buried all the slick and generic show of the previous affair, telling us how he couldn’t speak of “shahadahs, Qurans and homemade bombs but the president can drop A-bombs and napalm.“ First time I heard those lines was with Jawad at a vegan punk show in Oakland, and by that part Amir had jumped off the stage and was exploding right in the punk kids’ faces.

Perhaps the most traditionally religious out of us, Shahjehan left for jum’aa prayer—if it wasn’t a Friday I would have joined him, but I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind for an ISNA khutbah. Basim and I sat in the food court and Shahjehan came back after making his sunna rakats, saying that it didn’t feel right. So we hit the bazaar.

HijabMan was there again, selling t-shirts to fund his overseas study. Kid’s going to be an imam someday. This year he stepped up his game to include twisting long balloons into animal shapes. Basim said that he’d better not make a balloon dog, or balloon angels won’t enter the convention center.

HijabMan made himself a pretty massive balloon hat and it was just fun to watch him work his magic with whoever walked by. For some time the Kominas and I claimed an empty space next to his booth, tossing all of our books and CDs to the floor and writing the prices on a piece of styrofoam. Shahjehan later went to his dad’s hotel while Basim and I hung out with a hijabi anarchist girl in Rage Against the Machine t-shirt (I won’t say her real name, but call her Ayesha after the Malice song) and her friend. They both wore Volunteer badges that they hadn’t stolen.

After a while their boss came over and said that Ingrid Mattson saw them slacking, so they’d better go circulate. We tagged along and the four of us wound up discovering a way to the outside balcony. Shahjehan saw us from the sidewalk and ran up along with Labid and one of his friends and the seven of us had a balcony party with juice and cookies (purloined from the speakers’ lounge) before everyone had to go do their things. At the end it was just me and the Kominas, Kings of ISNA leaning over the railing and watching girls below. They couldn’t hear us but we sang 8bit songs: “this ain’t a put-on or a verse out of the Quran—“ 8bit’s Cihan was a Turkish Sufi kid who came up in punk rock and Brooklyn beat-down crews and was as likely as not to shaheed himself someday outside a bar downtown. The guy could build on some serious Naqshbandi shit or just brain you with a pipe, and last summer he flew out to Hayward, California to join me on a bike trek to the grave of W.D. Fard.

Friday night Ayesha joined us on the top floor of the parking garage and we watched the ISNA crowd from something like five stories up. In a hotel window across the street we saw some girls bhangra dancing. They stopped when we waved at them.

The Kominas and I slept in the garage that night. Cops woke us up at maybe eight-thirty the next morning.

“Are you guys okay?” one asked. “We had a report of a man down.”

“We were just taking a nap,” I told him.

“You guys have hotel rooms?”

“Of course.” He walked away and it took me a second to register what a dumb exchange we had just shared.

The Muslim Students Association was holding its parallel conference in the Hyatt across the street. Saturday night they hosted a lecture called “Death: the Journey of a Lifetime” with Mokhtar Maghraoui. “The Prophet (saw) advised us to remember death often,” read the program, “to visit graves and reflect on what we cannot see but must inevitably experience.” Instead of hearing the lecture, I rode with the Kominas and Muhammed Al-Ahari El to Burr Oak Cemetery, resting place of Noble Drew Ali—the son of runaway slaves, adopted son of Cherokees, initiate of the Egyptian mysteries, angel and prophet on a giant button that Basim stuck on his baseball cap.

Muhammed’s a well-known and well-traveled cat in the American Muslim stories. He mastered the traditions of the Moorish Science Temple and Moorish Orthodox Church, attended FOI meetings in Harlem and the Blackstone Rangers’ mosque in Chicago, and in the 1980s he even had an encounter with Azreal, the Five Percenters’ death-angel.

After spending two hours roaming the cemetery in search of Ali’s grave without flashlights, we followed Muhammed in a special Moorish prayer and then squeezed back out through the gate. Back at the convention, the hungry Kominas and I entered the food court to walk by each table and scavenge food from abandoned styrofoam containers. Girls who looked like they were the popular kids back in seventh grade gave us the kind of disdain that a popular seventh-grade girl might give, but then a brother called us over and offered some of his meal.

Later I was on the second floor of the Doubletree Hotel with Ayesha and she threw cushions at me while I tried to defend some unacceptable opinions. Basim came through and we wrestled on the couches. Met up with Shahjehan and Ayesha’s friend, who had a bag of equality so we all walked back to her car and elevated. With Hassan bin Sabbah and such there was enough shared history between cannabis and Sufis to make for a decent conversation if I had remembered any of it, but I could at least say that I owned a legitimate silsila (lineage), having been taught how to smoke by Azreal who himself was taught by the Father Allah, the former Clarence 13X. I could read on Shahjehan’s face that getting high with muhajabahs at the ISNA convention had reconciled two opposing worlds for him, that it was all okay and made sense now. We climbed out of the car and I lazily tossed myself into the nearby mesh fence like I was in a steel cage match.

“I’m gonna wrestle Hooper,” I told Shahj. “It’s happening, believe that.”

The weeded taqwacores stumbled back to the Hyatt and wandered through the Club ISNA scene of girls in sparkling hijabs and ass-pants and guys that Basim called “desi guidoes” with their hair gel and button-ups. I felt like we had fallen into a Naseeb ad. Intermixed with the ten million smiling young professionals floated a spattering of Muslim hipster t-shirts: “My Name Causes International Security Alerts,” “Muslims Do It Five Times a Day,” “Brown Trash” and “I am FOB.” Then there was one with a picture of a boat and the caption, “This is How We Got Here.” I looked at Basim and told him that I did in fact have a thought on all of this, but my brain had slowed down and I couldn’t do anything with it. Then I saw a guy’s homemade shirt that broke down ISNA as “I’m Single N’ Available” and offered his phone number on the back.

We meandered with the girls and spent some time sitting down in the elevator, yelling nonsense at people each time it opened on a new floor. We finally picked a floor and got off to sit outside the elevator, with random kids coming in and going out of our cipher. Shahjehan told me that he could sell my book, so I said sure and he took a copy to peddle and accidentally found himself in an argument with some guy over whether there could be different ways of praying. The brother told us all that we needed to learn our Islam, and I wanted to tell him that Elijah Muhammad had said that a new Islam was on its way and it would come via pamphlets in English and Arabic dropped to Earth from the Motherplane, but I wasn’t sure how he’d receive it so I let him go back to his old Islam whose time was running out. At 3:24 a.m. we were still sitting by the elevator when out came Omar from the Muslim boy-band 786. By then there were several girls in our crew and they all begged him to sing so he asked what song they wanted. Someone asked for “Make Du’a” so he busted out a few lines and then the Joey Fatone of a thousand ISNA conventions went on his way.

Rumors of a party in one of the rooms never materialized and the group split up. I went with the Kominas to search for a place to sleep, finally deciding on an MSA lecture room. Under the stage it was dark and we could stretch out and sleep hard without worrying about anyone seeing us. Shahjehan had on an MSA shirt that he had found, but it was a girls’ shirt and said “SISTERHOOD” across the front. With my bag for a pillow I knocked out to Basim singing a taqwa-punk Ramones tribute, “The MSA Took My Baby Away.”

By the time I woke up, Shahjehan had left and a lecture was taking place over my head: “Holding on to the Rope of Allah—Repentence, Forgiveness and Du’aa,” again with Mokhtar Maghraoui. I could have crawled out from the front of the stage and made an odd scene but Basim was still asleep so I just stayed there and listened. It was actually pretty good; Mokhtar kept it simple and heartfelt and delivered the talk in almost a tender whisper. Through it all I looked at the big safety-pinned Vote Hezbollah patch on my rucksack—picture of a Muslim man sitting in salat (julus) from one of those how-to-pray booklets, with spiked hair added—and as Mokhtar spoke of there being no tauba without tears, no repentence without earnest desire, I imagined Vote Hezbollah Man in that julus working his inner discipline. Vote Hezbollah Man had good julus posture, the straight spine of a man who knew what he was doing.

The mastermind behind Vote Hezbollah, the spiky-hair julus patch and our silkscreened Khomeini t-shirts was a Persian kid named Kourosh down in Texas. Kourosh was our blood and guts but couldn’t make it out to ISNA because of issues he had gotten into with his parents. There was always something—one time his mom found his mushrooms and then threw away all of his song notebooks and Ayatollah shirts. He records all of his songs alone in his room, sometimes under parental house arrest. Kourosh’s contribution to the Hamza Don’t Surf comp was “Muhammad was a Punk Rocker,” a rendition of my poem that opened The Taqwacores. In the Vote Hezbollah version, Kourosh replaces my Rancid reference with a shout to the Fearless Iranians from Hell.

Instead of paying a combined $180 to go to the Naseeb Meet-Up down the street, we hit the CTA and went into the city to visit a Five Percenter I knew named Jura Shaheed Allah. Over beers the Kominas heard Jura do the knowledge. He said that Chicago had a special kind of energy, which we all readily recognized.

We talked about Muslims and Gods. Every community, Jura told us, had its own Ten (bloodsucker ruling class), Eighty-Five (deaf, dumb and blind) and Five (poor righteous teacher) Percenters. Even within the Five Percent existed its own Ten, Eighty-Five and Five. He then played a CD recording of the lessons read by First Born Prince Allah, a man unknown outside of the Five Percent but he’s a legend to me, a real sahaba for a whole new ummah. The question of whether Allah is Muslim can be a hot-button issue for the Five Percenters, but Prince floated in those gray areas between God and Submitter. Sometimes with his swollen gangrene leg he’d take a step over the line, attending jum’aa at Masjid Malcolm Shabazz and even making salat in the Allah School. Prince might have been a spiritual giant, but he paid the price for his gift by facing some giant-sized demons. Rest in peace.

The Nation of Gods and Earths is open, said Jura, and anyone can be a Five Percenter. There are some who read the Quran, but others might study the Bible or Tao te Ching. One is not more “Five Percent” than the other. We exchanged our peace and he wished us a safe journey. Then it was back to the CTAs that Wesley sang about.

At the Hyatt I threw down my bag and took a seat in the corner while Basim and Shahjehan made their tawafs around the scene. At one point a Shi’a girl that I had met at last year’s convention came over and we talked about the woman-led prayer. I told her that deep down, the woman-led prayer people were still pretty safe in their religion, and their agenda wasn’t at all to destroy orthodoxy (and that could be taken as good or bad). I’m glad that they brought genderless salat to this city and this weekend, and I appreciate that Pamela Taylor is still nice to me even when I talk smack about PMU.

My conversation with the Shi’a found itself on Muhammad; she told me that the Prophet was a perfect human being, and I answered that such ideas were why I had abandoned Christianity. Among Buddha’s unruly friends were medieval Zen heretics that called him a dry turd on a stick and burned holy scriptures, and they were actually devout Buddhists who only wanted to kick out the crutches. Rather than a “Progressive Muslim” movement, we need some of that serious lunacy.

I remarked that when it came to a healthy relationship with heterodox Islam, I actually owed ISNA some respect this year for positively including the Nation of Islam in its African-American history issue of Horizons and the accompanying press conference, but she countered that ISNA still won’t have anything to do with Shi’as.

Shahjehan got hammered and put himself in the middle of a sheesha party, and a jolly Basim would come back to me every now and then to offer his commentary. During one visit he sat down and wrote on my napkin in big letters, “I’ll see you after the club.”

“This is what we’ll tell the girls,” he said.

“What girls?”

“All the girls we happen to talk to in the next eight hours.” Then Shahjehan came through and told me of some guy walking around with a sign that read, “REMEMBER, ALLAH IS WATCHING.” It looked like Shahj was getting depressed and didn’t know why. On more or less the same page, I took out my phone and started calling sisters that weren’t there. Inur had given a talk at the MSA conference but had to go back home early, and she understood the gloom of watching Club ISNA from the outside. My call had woken her up so I let her go and woke up someone else—a desi ex-girlfriend back home who laughed at my ISNA conventioneering and said she’d never go in a million years. She had just come back from India and had a cream-colored shalwar kameez waiting for me when I got home. Then I called Helena, my ISNA girlfriend for the last two years, who had skipped this year’s convention for a road trip to New York.

Two girls walked by us in matching HijabMan shirts—“Good Things Come in Small Pakis”—and I told Basim that I’ve been that good thing once or twice. I was even accused of being one of those white convert guys who fetishize brown girls, and my only defense was that the Arab guys fetishize white convert girls so it all evens out.

There is undeniably such a phenomenon with the white boys, and I’m pretty sure that I’ve gone down that road. There’s a certain kind of blue-eyed kafr who converts and automatically gets hung up on the skinny virgin princesses with diamond Allahs around their necks. Whether he’ll admit it or not, the Muslim community becomes a new way to go after the same old bullshit. What he wants is a timid little thing that’ll make him gulab jamuns and look at his dick like it’s going to kill her, and then in paradise he’ll get 72 Japanese schoolgirls like Kagome on Inuyasha.

The Kominas went for the kinds of girls that were available in their respective circles. Back in Massachusetts, Basim was a local goth-punk hero so he got with the goth white girls. With his mohawk and leather jacket covered in patches and paint, he was too much of a deliberate failure for the desis. At the other end, Shahjehan was the kid who brought us to Bilal Musharraf’s house for dinner. He could put on a Lord & Taylor exterior, do coke with girls from the mosque and sneak into the secret lives of doctors’ daughters.

Word among the Club ISNA kids called the Naseeb Meet-Up a miserable failure and nowhere near worth the $60 they were charged at the door. If nothing else, the fiasco at least had value as an annoyance to ISNA’s upper tier; Naseeb was more or less openly the meat market that ISNA pretended it wasn’t. ISNA had even taped disclaimers to the convention center’s front doors warning that it had no connection with the Naseeb show. A highlight at ISNA’s live entertainment was comedian Azhar Usman, who was playing both events that night, telling the crowd that they could catch him later at Naseeb—which reportedly had Ingrid Mattson turning red and fuming, “he wasn’t supposed to say that!”

We eventually pulled ourselves up, met with Ayesha and her friend and left the Hyatt together. We all piled into the friend’s car, put on our Hamza Don’t Surf CD and peeled out while blaring “Rumi was a Homo” with the windows down. In the parking lot I almost thought I saw Sheikh Kabbani wearing HijabMan’s balloon headdress, the wind tugging at him by his long white beard. After hearing the Kominas’ line, “Rumi could fuck Shams” he turned toward us and looked to be absolutely bewildered.

The girls took us into the city and up Devon’s Little India strip of stores and restaurants, still playing the taqwacore songs, Shahjehan singing along at the top of his lungs. Crumpled in the back seat, feeling like a ninety-year old man with my bad posture, I squinted against the wind and watched the muhajabahs in front dancing to “Ayesha,” oh Ayesha, surf’s up—

Ayesha hangs ten but not Hamza, not no more.

I turned to Basim and said in his ear, “isn’t this some shit,” and that was about the best that I could articulate my observation. Something strange was happening—a crazy taqwa-punk dream turning real, a whole new scene of cast-offs and rejects but legit as far as we could care. The girls played 8bit’s “I’ll be Your Terrorist” and I wished that Cihan could have been with us, and they played “Muhammad was a Punk Rocker” and I missed Kourosh like hell even though I’ve never met the kid.

If there’s no room for any of us at a Naseeb Meet-Up, then fuck Naseeb and fuck 786 too. We could send just one crowbar-swinging Kourosh on all five 786 boys, or boyz as it were, and he’ll eat them alive—so there’s our next wrestling challenge, Vote Hezbollah vs. 786 on the roof of the Donald E. Stephens—

We ended up on the rocks by Lake Michigan, falling in and out of sleep. At half-awake times I relished the kids around me and fully loved Chicago, where Noble Drew Ali moved his temple because he said it was closer to Islam and where he said we’d find the new Mecca. I revisited my old dream of Basim with his mohawk sculpted to make Arabic letters and spell Allah’s Name down the middle of his scalp, then imagined Shahjehan playing an electric-guitar adhan on these rocks like Jehangir Tabari—and he could really do it, I had heard him play the call back in Boxborough with a guitar that once belonged to Salman from Junoon. Isn’t that some shit too.

It dawned on me that in a few hours we’d be back in the van and eastbound on the I-90 and these cool girls we had met would go poof into the air. Another whole ISNA gone, and another ISNA that turned out to be the social event of the year more than anything else, and another year that I showed up ready to tear it all down but left quite thankful that they have these things. Rock over Mecca, rock on Chicago—this is the miniature American hajj, no joke, and the only weed we had left was tajweed, our final soundtrack a Quran CD as Shahjehan’s dad drove us from the amazing life of Chicago Islam back to our normal days.

This is the third ISNA convention for Michael Muhammad Knight:
The Voice of God is Hamza Yusuf: The 2004 ISNA Convention
Wrestling With Muzammil: The 2003 ISNA Convention