Category Archives: Music and Dance

Taqwacores: Punk Rocking Islam

Literature, Music and Dance


Michael Muhammad Knight, the author of “The Taqwacores,” which a college professor has called “The Catcher in the Rye” for young Muslims. Photo by David Ahntholz for The New York Times.

Young Muslims Build a Subculture on an Underground Book

By CHRISTOPHER MAAG, The New York Times, December 23, 2008

CLEVELAND — Five years ago, young Muslims across the United States began reading and passing along a blurry, photocopied novel called “The Taqwacores,” about imaginary punk rock Muslims in Buffalo.

“This book helped me create my identity,” said Naina Syed, 14, a high school freshman in Coventry, Conn.

A Muslim born in Pakistan, Naina said she spent hours on the phone listening to her older sister read the novel to her. “When I finally read the book for myself,” she said, “it was an amazing experience.”

The novel is “The Catcher in the Rye” for young Muslims, said Carl W. Ernst, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Springing from the imagination of Michael Muhammad Knight, it inspired disaffected young Muslims in the United States to form real Muslim punk bands and build their own subculture. Continue reading Taqwacores: Punk Rocking Islam →

Preserving Yemen’s Oral Heritage

Development, Music and Dance, Yemen

Dr. Jean Lambert: Adopting a National Strategy for Preserving Yemen’s Oral Heritage is Necessary

Sheba Center for Strategic Studies, November 2008

In his lecture delivered on Nov. 11, 2008, at the SCSS, French researcher and anthropologist Jean Lambert prompted the adoption of a national strategy for preserving Yemeni oral heritage and recording it in a well-studied methodology. He pointed out that Yemen’s cultural heritage contains a long and rich list of the narrated heritage which is falling into oblivion and facing extinction as a result of carelessness. He also pointed out that the areas rich with this culture are overlapped and interconnected, making it clear that singing is related to tales, stories and different walks of daily life such as poetry, dancing, and afternoon and evening entertaining sessions, and that all of these areas are fertile grounds for determining the features of any culture. Continue reading Preserving Yemen’s Oral Heritage →

Music in the World of Islam

Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Central Asia, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, Morocco, Music and Dance, Syria, Teaching Resources, Turkey, Yemen

A year ago from August 8-13 an international conference on “Music in the World of Islam” was held in Assilah, Morocco, jointly sponsored by The Assilah Forum Foundation (Assilah, Morocco) and the Maison des Cultures du Monde (Paris, France). The papers from this conference are now available in pdf format online. Music and dance are described for Afghanistan, Algeria, Andalusia, Azerbeijan, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Central Asia, East Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kurdistan, Kuwait, Liberia, Malaysia, Morocco, Russia, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkey and Yemen.

A description of the conference is described by its main organizer, Pierre Bois: Continue reading Music in the World of Islam →

Muslim Metal

Books You Should Read, Immigration Issues, Islam in America, Islam in Europe, Music and Dance

Muslim Metal
Bands crank up multiculturalism in the Islamic world

By MARK LEVINE, The Chronicle Review, July 4, 2008

The first time I heard the words “heavy metal” and “Islam” in the same sentence, I was confused, to say the least. It was around 5 p.m. on a hot July day in the city of Fez, Morocco. I was at the bar of a five-star hotel with a group of friends having a drink — at $25 a piece, only one — to celebrate a birthday. The person sitting across from me described a punk performance he had seen in Rabat not long before we had met.

The idea of a young Moroccan with a Mohawk and a Scottish kilt almost caused me to spill my drink. That the possibility of a Muslim heavy-metal scene came as a total surprise to me only underscored how much I still had to learn about Morocco, and the Muslim world more broadly, even after a dozen years studying it, and traveling and living across it. If there could be such a thing as a heavy-metal Islam, I thought, then perhaps the future was far brighter than most observers of the Muslim world imagined less than a year after September 11, 2001. Continue reading Muslim Metal →

Hip hop subculture gets spotlight in Sana’a

Music and Dance, Sanaa, Yemen


One of the competing breakdancers, Khaled Sinjab, performs complicated dance
moves for his crew “Blast Boyz.”

By Fares Anam, Yemen Observer, Apr 26, 2008

An enthralling show performed by Arab youth was held Wednesday night at the Yemeni Center for Studies and Research. Enlivened by hip hop music, these students studying in Yemen competed to be recognized as the best dancers and singers in Sana’a.

The hip hop festival, titled “Common Ground,” brought this unique American art form together with Arab youth by offering music and dance to the capital. The hip hop party was organized by the French Culture Center in cooperation with the German House, under the control of the Arbitration Commission. The event was supervised by French dancers Romo, Gohen and Fred Burki, in addition to DJ Malik and the Yemeni-American singer, Haggagi. Continue reading Hip hop subculture gets spotlight in Sana’a →

TO BANISH THE “LEVANTINE DUNGHILL” FROM WITHIN

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Iran, Israel, Music and Dance

TO BANISH THE “LEVANTINE DUNGHILL” FROM WITHIN: TOWARD A CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING OF ISRAELI ANTI-IRAN PHOBIAS

By Haggai Ram, International Journal of Middle East Studies 40 (2008), 249–268.

Held since 1956, the Eurovision Song Contest is an annual event traditionally dedicated to the eternal themes of love, peace, and harmony. Yet Israelis asked to pick a song for the 2007 contest in Helsinki paid little heed to these themes. Instead, they settled for “Push the Button,” a controversial number by an Israeli punk group called Teapacks; the song is generally understood as a description of life under the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran with its “crazy rulers.” Meanwhile, an Israeli fashion house (Dan Cassidy) commissioned a series of photos at a construction site in southern Tel Aviv that showed a topless model lying in a pit. The project was designed as a warning against the “holocaust” that would follow Iran’s possible nuclear attack on Israel; the pit, as the project’s creative director explained, represented “the mass grave of complacent Tel Aviv residents.” Continue reading TO BANISH THE “LEVANTINE DUNGHILL” FROM WITHIN →

The Habib and Remy Show

Gender and Sexuality, Humor and Satire, Music and Dance, Terrorism Issue, YouTube Watch

Many things are not funny, but most things can be poked fun at. Certainly the ongoing violence, destruction and daily killing in Iraq is not funny. But when we stop belonging to Homo ludens as a species, we lose yet another part of our humanity. There is a lot of prejudice against Arabs, Iranians, and Muslims in general. This is no more funny to most Arabs, Iranians, and Muslims than Black Sambo is to African Americans or Chief Wahoo to Native Americans. But there are times when laughing at yourself is a way of dealing with tragedy. In the real world Arabs are not a bunch of bearded, hook-nosed, camel-smelling harem masters, so making fun of the stereotype can at times be like streaking naked in front of a boring commencement speaker. Such raw moments are provided by Habib, an Iraqi, and Remy, a Virginian, in a YouTube rap video called A-R-A-B: the Rap. Continue reading The Habib and Remy Show →