The powerHouse Arena and the Asian American Writers' Workshop are pleased to invite you to

TAQWACORE NIGHT

featuring
Michael Muhammad Knight
Author of The Taqwacores novel

Kim Badawi
Photographer, author of The Taqwacores: Muslim Punk in the USA

And moderated by
Hua Hsu
music critic and professor at Vassar College


Saturday, October 3, 7–10PM
powerHouse Arena · 37 Main Street (corner of Water & Main St) · DUMBO, Brooklyn

Join the Asian American Writers' Workshop at the powerHouse Arena for a celebration of the burgeoning subculture of American Muslim punk, featuring the photographer who documented the scene's seminal tour and the novelist who wrote about it before it even existed.

About The Taqwacores (Soft Skull Press)

A Muslim punk house in Buffalo, New York, inhabited by burqa-wearing riot girls, mohawked Sufis, straightedge Sunnis, Shi'a skinheads, Indonesian skaters, Sudanese rude boys, gay Muslims, drunk Muslims, and feminists. Their living room hosts parties and prayers, with a hole smashed in the wall to indicate the direction of Mecca. Their life together mixes sex, dope, and religion in roughly equal amounts, expressed in devotion to an Islamo-punk subculture, "taqwacore," named for taqwa, an Arabic term for consciousness of the divine. Originally self-published on photocopiers and spiral-bound by hand, The Taqwacores has now come to be read as a manifesto for Muslim punk rockers. The Taqwacores has been adapted as an indie feature film to be released in late-2009.

About The Taqwacores: Muslim Punk in the USA (powerHouse Books)

Unbeknownst to Michael Muhammad Knight (see above) a real Muslim punk scene emerged, based on the one he had imagined for his book. Photographer Kim Badawi first met Knight around this time, and bore witness as the taqwacore phenomenon began to take hold. Beginning in 2006, Badawi traveled across the U.S. with the musicians who had been spurred to action by Knight's creative vision. In 2007 he was invited to accompany the TaqwaTour, traveling to major cities across North America alongside bands including Al-Thawra, the Kominas, and Secret Trial Five. As the genre continues to take shape and influence a rising generation of artists and intellectuals, Badawi's The Taqwacores stands as a photographic companion to the original text and an indispensable document of the making of a movement.

Michael Muhammad Knight is a novelist, essayist, and journalist. He converted to Islam at 16, after reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X, and traveled to Islamabad at age 17 to study at a madrassa. His books have been taught at numerous universities, and he is a frequent speaker at colleges and academic conferences. Knight is also the subject of a forthcoming documentary, directed by Omar Majeed, on the taqwacore movement spawned by his first novel.

Born in Paris in 1980, Kim Badawi is an American photojournalist and documentarian of French, Egyptian, and Slovenian background. He began his photographic career photographing the plight of refugee families from Mississippi to Texas in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, while still interning for Contact Press Images and Magnum Photos in New York. Selected for publication by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, Badawi's work appears in 25 Under 25: Up-and-Coming American Photographers (powerHouse Books, 2008).

Hua Hsu teaches in the English department at Vassar College. His work has appeared in the Atlantic, The New York Times, Bookforum, Slate, the Village Voice, the Boston Globe "Ideas" section and The Wire (for whom he writes a bi-monthly column). He was on the editorial board for the forthcoming New Literary History of America. He currently blogs at: correspondents.theatlantic.com/hua_hsu.

The Asian American Writers' Workshop is a national not-for-profit arts organization devoted to the creating, publishing, developing, and disseminating of creative writing by Asian Americans.