Book Report: Taqwacores

I’ve been trying to take notes as I read books now. I tend to totally forget what a book was about a few months after I read it. This is an attempt to counter that a bit.

My friend Karl mentioned he had read this book, so I decided to give it a go. I’m stoked I did.

Taqwacores is a book about a college student in Buffalo, NY named Yussef that moves into a Muslim Punk house. The beginning of the book spends a lot of time creating the environment of the house. Wild punk parties intermixed with daily prayers. There’s a lot of different ideas of what Islam is and the book spends a lot of time exploring that. He draws a quick parallel with punk, a lot of people have different ideas what that is and it’s interesting to explore that as well. There’s also a bit of general boy growing up exploration that happens: Yussef starts making out with a girl and eventually demurs. His roommates get him a Victoria secrets catalog so he can learn to masturbate. He needs to decide how his sexuality works at that point. The books ends with a large show of west coast mulsim punk bands put together by a house member named Johnger. At the end of the show, the female member of the house gives a male member a blowjob on stage and spits the cum out at the audience. This causes a riot and one of the punks dies. An intense (and somewhat random) ending!

I’d recommend reading the book just to think about how elastic Islam (or any religion/idea) really is. Also to learn some terms you probably hadn’t heard before. I hadn’t heard ‘haram’ before, but after reading the book I noticed hearing it randomly. I’ve heard the author, Michael Muhammad Knight’s, other writings are interesting, so something to check out later.