Michael Mohammed Knight originally wrote The Taqwacores after his initial immersion in a more traditional form of Islam had ended and he found he didn’t share many of the attitudes to women, gay people and alcohol held by some of the faithful. This lead to him dreaming up a world where Islam “didn’t have an absolute definition, and you had the power to define it yourself.” For Eyad, Knight’s book isn’t so much an absolute truth that all Muslims must now come to grips with, but that “it’s a different part of the spectrum that needs to be added to the whole. We need to be able to go to the far left, and be a little more liberal in exploring some of these things.”
The strength of Taqwacore is not so much in religious disputation, but how it furthers self-acceptance. Knight felt, “the punk kids inspired me to not be afraid of who I was.” Likewise, Eyad reflects that “we’ll see how Islam continues to grow, but as someone who came through a very strict and rigid Islamic household, it’s a release that I needed and I’d imagine others needed too.”
This warm, accepting face of Islam is embodied in Dominic’s character, Jehangir. “He’s a character that loves,” as Dominic succinctly puts it. “He’s able to take off the balaclava of religion or punk, he uses them to bring the people together, but he rises above it in the sense that he knows that the bottom line, the foundation for any of it, exists in the most innate human traits of love, compassion, gratitude, camaraderie, humility.”
In true ‘method’ style, Dominic got into character a whole month before shooting started and began dressing as Jehangir and skating around LA. Luckily, he says, the character had been drawn with a great deal of detail in the book and he managed to develop him even further with a help from Eyad and Michael Knight. For Eyad, “sometimes you had to ask ‘Jehangir’ to do something, but for the most part he was in his own world and you just had to capture that.”
Towards the end of The Tawqacores, Jehangir gives a significant sermon at the Friday prayer. With all the punk misfits gathered in the prayer room, which doubles as a gig venue, he enunciates the spiritual message at the heart of the film: “Islam is a fuckin’ surrender… Allah is too big and too open for my Islam to be small and closed.” Although Dominic feels that the speech is beautiful and clear enough not to need further explanation, he will say that it gives a good indication of Jehangir’s character. He goes on to draw a more temporal analogy, “when you meet a woman for instance, sometimes if you just surrender and allow that thing to be what it is, it’s far more beautiful than if it’s controlled and if you want to direct it in a certain way.”
The Sufi poet Rumi‘s lovers of God who “have surrendered themselves to Love’s commands” come to mind. Lest the more sceptical among us get put off, Eyad reminds us that “it’s not just something that’s Islamic.” He believes the essence of these perceptions are universal, “if you’re an atheist, you can know that you’re part of something bigger… and you’re just part of that and not king of the galaxy. I really appreciated that element of his speech and I think it’s something true to all of us, the basic essence of human life.” Amen, or rather, Amin.
Read our review of The Taqwacores here.
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