“Tag” by Stephen May

Cinnamon Press treats their readers to this wonderful weave of two sides of a disturbing chain of events between a young Talented and Gifted (TAG) student Mistyann and her older teacher.

The prose is raw and a little sentimental despite its irony, which keeps me riveted. We move from the male to the young female mind, which are of course quite different. This texture only strengthens their particular and peculiar relationship.

“Mother of the Believers” by Kamran Pasha

They say behind every great man there is a woman. In his intimate story about the early years of Islam, Kamran Pasha suggests that behind a historical giant such as Muhammad there is a girl, her co-wives, a community, and of course the creator. Although Pasha tries to tell a story of an individual woman, Aisha bint Abu Bakr, the youngest wife of the Messenger of Islam, the story cannot but be about a community, which developed from a crowd of both slaves and nobility, both women and men, and children, rich and poor, all burning for social changes in the sixth century Arabija. This community was formed in response to the Divine revelation of The Qur’an. After the death of Muhammad’s wife Khadija, nine-year-old Aisha becomes the mother of the believers, of the ever growing Islamic Ummah that would become a vast empire within her life time.

I must admit I envy Pasha for writing this book. I have always wanted to write a novel about Aisha and when my publisher asked me what my next project would be, I said the life of Aisha. I have waited too long and Pasha beat me to it. Just like he puts it in his introduction, most of us, both Muslim and people of other faiths or no faith who know her history have been besotted with Aisha. As a man in his thirties I can hardly imagine taking on even the fraction of the responsibility Aisha had as the teacher-mother of her community, the guardian of Islamic knowledge who came to lead an army and forever be held responsible for some internal struggles between Muslims.

I was at first put off by Pasha’s writing because it did not meet my artistic expectations, but I do not want to quibble about that. Pasha’s book oozes with the kind of passion and intimacy that made it difficult for me to put it down even though I actually know exactly what will happen next. I would have used a much more realist style to emphasize that which Pasha is after, the everyday lives and struggles of those people, who were by no means saints or holy figures and therefore much easier to identify and enter into dialogue with. Pasha’s is not just another from the historical fictions genre. There is too much heart invested in it. It is project. It has an agenda, a part of which could be expressed as “Cut Aisha some slack.” Aisha raises everything from love to hate in Muslim hearts, so Pasha deliberately emphasizes everything about her that could be considered a fault, a moral deficiency, and even a little bit of evil, and challenges the judgmental readers to cast the first stone at her. He has Aisha frequently examine the fitna of her own heart, and thus asks the readers to check what small-time or big time evils they succumb to. Aisha learns she harbors one fitna, of which she has never been conscious, is her excessive love of her husband. Pasha dramatizes this self-revelation in connection to the false accusations of adultery. Aisha, who is supposed to be the prime example of virtue in love/marriage is suspected of having had a relationship with a man who when he saved her from the burning desert. Aisha is shattered in that not even her husband nor her parents believe her innocence. When the Divine revelation vindicates her, making it punishable by law to spread malicious gossip about people and display distrust that is not grounded in hard evidence, Aisha realizes she has not been a complete Muslim, half her Islam having consisted of her devotion to Muhammad and not exclusively God. She says, “I had loved him with such youthful ferocity that I had turned him into an idol, a pristine icon of perfection, when in truth he was of the same flesh and blood as the rest of us, with same doubts and fears that plagued the hearts of other mortals.” Her new love becomes “without the taint of idolatry.” This particular struggle against fitna is what to Aisha is the greatest jihad. This makes Pasha’s decision to tell the history of Islam as a love story a good one.

Pasha dramatizes, of course, many more beautiful and intriguing episodes from Aisha’s life, like the time when Muhammad forgets about his statemanship and plays with Aisha’s dolls, or races with her, or when he decides to die lying in her lap and not any of his other wives, or relatives. Pasha does not miss to point out that despite the centuries of enmities between the Muslims and the Jew, one must not forget the fact tha it was only after the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem (from Byzantine rule) that the Jews were allowed to return to their native Palestine.

Pasha’s agenda seems to be to show the complexities of the early Islamic community that orthodoxy has neglected over centuries and especially in our modern times. This is gesture I call fundamentalizing of fundamentalism, a deep look into the origins of the faith one confesses to to escape ideology and dogma that keeps haunting it. Although I quite dislike many of the books termed page-turners, Mother of the Believers is one worth reading and remembering.

“Breadgivers” by Anzia Yezierska

This post has been written by Irma Crnkic, a Bosnian student of English literature.

After reading Breadgivers by Anzia Yezierska nothing seems impossible anymore, or at least, not as difficult as it was at first.

Sara Smolinsky is the brave protagonist in this partly autobiographical story. Through Sara, the author, another survivor from the New York suburbs, voices all injustices and obstacles women had to face. The New York is dreary and drab. She realizes at a very young age that life is not peachy. What should have been a breezy childhood abruptly turns into bare survival: “Nothing was before me but the hunger in our house, and no bread for the next meal if I didn’t sell the herring.” Her will and strong vision carry her through tough times into a colorful future.

As she grows up, Sara faces cruelty and inferiority in both family and society. She is from an orthodox Jewish family, one of five daughters of a submissive mother and a clerical, disillusioned father who scorns her unique potentials and frequently tells her that all she is destined to be is a mother, an obedient spouse and daughter. She detests constantly being fed the idea that a woman is petty without a man, which her derives from the Torah: ”Only if they cooked for the men, and washed for the men, and didn’t nag or curse the men out of their homes; only if they let the men study the Torah in peace, then, maybe, they could push themselves into Heaven with the men, to wait on them there.” Sara tries to educate herself, even though it means going against everything her father believes in.

The vivid images of life’s cruelty painted by a young girl are heartbreaking. Poverty, dirt and stench of New York slums become real like comfort, purity and pleasant scents of our own homes. We share Sara’s distrust and disappointment in her father as he takes the best of the meal without even considering offering some to his daughters: “We sat down to the table. With watering mouths and glistening eyes we watched Mother skimming off every bit of fat from the top soup into Father’s big plate, leaving for us only the thin, watery part.”

Sara proves to have a will strong enough to claim a big chunk of her own life: “Wild with all that was choked in me since I was born, my eyes burned into my father’s eyes. ‘My will is as strong as yours. I’m going to live my own life. Nobody can stop me.’”

Using everyday, yet powerful language, the author presents a rigid world through the eyes of a young girl. She is stubborn which keeps her from withering like her sisters. Sara goes on bravely and fights for her future, refusing to be put down or devaluated. The vigor of this book lies in the permeating hopefulness of the world despite everything. That’s what makes it special and absolutely worth reading.

Sara’s struggle is a metaphor for those who want to rise above their fears and seize the day. She gives up so much for the passion to learn, to achieve more and to follow her dreams when everyone has turned his or her back on her. She perseveres. Sara plots her own path rather than follow the road less travelled – an admirable quality, an essence that makes this story so great.

This book is not about right or wrong, nor black or white, because life itself is not that clear-cut. People are never completely happy, nor miserable. The experience of pain enables one to achieve and appreciate happiness.

“Tender Graces” by Kathryn Magendie

Tender Graces is about memory and what Tony Morrison called thick love, which is both present and past, both filling Virginia Kate Carey’s today and dissipating like ashes of yesterdays. The protagonist, Virginia Kate returns to her old house in the Smokey Mountains to find it empty and yet pregnant with the past.

Although the setting of Tender Graces is local, its appeal blows the borders of the South to such an extent that even a double foreigner like me (to the place and the local lingo) feels at home in the prose.

I could repeat all the praise that Magendie’s other reviewers have painted, but I feel it deserves much more than a cursive review that does not recreate any of the rich textures and aspects of the novel. I believe this subtle and intelligent, and yet somehow modest novel deserves a thorough literary analysis, which I will try to write in the near future. For now, I’d like to lift up a few aspects which distinguish this book from many literary pieces on the market. The first aspects would be with respect to the market. The novel is so deeply rooted in its subject, its characters, the places, that it is quite purged from marketing devices so omnipresent in much literature. This leads me to the most important feature of the novel: intimacy.

Magendie excels in creating intimacy to such an extent that there is some kind of intimacy even between characters that lack intimacy. Here, I am thinking of a wider, more profound intimacy that permeates every line of the novel, something only masters such as Michael Ondaatje can accomplish. I am not speaking merely about intimacy between characters, between human beings. Intimacy seems to be the ground of everything in this novel, that which holds together a world of humans, animals, things, nature forces, spirits, machines, ashes and the mountain winds. Everything seems to touch something else. There is even a kind of (maybe perverse) intimacy in the scenes of violence and abuse.

There is intimacy between this text and the reader so that the reader feels as if she or he is being made in the act of reading, growing from the same soil as Virginia Kate. This, I believe, has to do with Magendie’s language. It is not fixed, black on white, words but not love, as one of the characters says. To the contrary, it is alive, growing, rooted as VK is rooted in her past and yet growing on. It has a fleshy texture, it climbs like the boy Micah, it curls like hair, it smells like wood, it swirls like ashes being flushed down a toilet, and it burns like a picture of a monster. To use another phrase from the novel, like a woman, even if the text loses a few pounds here and there, they find their way back to the body of the text.

View the official trailer.

Taqwacores by Michael Muhammad Knight

The Taqwacores is a novel about a strange community, to put it mildly. To even try and come up with a single word or a sentence that could capture even the gist of the crew of Muslim punk artists is mindwrecking.

The title, “Taqwacores”, combines taqwa, the Arabic word for “piety,” with “hardcore,” used to describe many genres of angry Western music (and also adult movies). So the protagonist Yusuf Ali experiences “taqwacores” as deep Muslim piety mixed with angry hardcore music (played in praise of God), and mixed with a dose of sex (both soft and hardcore). When I say mixed, I mean piety/music/sex often coincide. The story begins when Yusuf, who comes from an average Muslim family of Pakistani origin, lodges in with a group of Muslim youth in Buffalo.  There stops mundaneity. Every trace of the average, the regular, the orderly vanishes. There is not a moment Yusuf’s mind is not twisted and bent. What fascinates him the most is perhaps the burqa-wearing feminist guitar player who leads men in prayer and delivers sermons. A lot of stuff for some Muslims to be angry over. But Muhammad Knight, speaking through his characters, arguing back and forth through their own dialogues, seems to suggest, there are many things Muslims should be angry about such as Osama bin Laden and the likes of him, and their picture of Islam that they try to palm off on other people. The punk crew can rage against things such as the treatment of Muslims in the post 9-11 America as well as the moral-police in a Muslim country who let dozens of women burn inside a building because they would not let streetwalkers see women without traditional hejab (head-cover etc). 

Muhammad Knight was born an Irish Catholic in upstate New York and converted to Islam as a teenager. He studied at a mosque in Pakistan but became disillusioned with Islam after learning about the sectarian battles after the death of Muhammad. He said he wrote The Taqwacores to mend the rift between his being an observant Muslim and an angry American youth. He found validation in the life of Muhammad, who instructed people to ignore their leaders, destroy their petty deities and follow only God. In the novel, Muhammad Knight often makes references to various Sufi poets who were rebels of their times. One of the characters even claims boldly that the Islamic messenger Muhammad was the hard core punk artist of his time. The small community sing in praise of his anti-establishment actions, his smashing of false idols etc. The book paints the Muslim punk scene with such flavor I am not at all surprised some readers contacted the author and asked where and when were the forthcoming concerts. (Note: Mark Levine wrote a book about the current rock and punk scene in the Middle East, entitled Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam.)

One can say a lot about why and how disturbing and innovative, and yet how old-fashioned the book can appear in its focus on identity crises, a juvenile ending in which the narrator leaves the practice of Islam while “remaining a human being.” At the surface, the novel seems to be about diversity of Islamic practice in the US and a dramatization of some conceptual struggles within the faith, the novel is dully one-sided in its preference of juvenile (rather than real hardcore) rebellion and dismissal of all other types of Muslims.  

One thing that strikes me is the way a community is described. We conceive of community as a gathering of people who have a common ground, a common essence perhaps. Community is often based on myth, be it of religious or secular nature. The motley crew of The Taqwacores indeed have something in common, their love of God. Yet, they are both religious and absolutely against religion. There is nothing they more respect and disrespect as Islam. They absolutely love it, and yet any “ordinary” Muslim would say they disrespect every single aspect of Islam, except perhaps devotion to God himself. To them, to maintain a dose of disrespect to religion is the best way to avoid what Islam is against, the worship of anything but God. They try to demythologize the myth of Islamic community and at the same time uphold it. Their community is not a single thing connected to for instance body, fatherland, nation, leader, language. Any such community, to them, loses the essence of what J-L. Nancy called being-in-common, and the with-together. Even though they believe in God, their “in-common”, their being-in-common does not amount to a substance that absorbs everything. Rather what they share is a strong sense of finitude and a lack of substantial identity, ideal or empirical such. They are inifinitely aware of their finitude, of their lack of infinite identity in the face of the God they worship through they punk rituals (which are not even real rituals because they change from day to day). The interesting thing is that they are not really kids with shattered identities, simply alienated, and all that jazz. They are quite certain in their persuasions and do not hold back in their extreme need to express their positions, spiritual or political. They expose themselves totally, in the true sense of the word: they pose themselves as open to others in the deepest intimacy of their own being. This seems to me what makes their peculiar community, a community that is not society they react against. Community but not society.

In addition, I will add some words from an American convert, Dawud Khuluq, who has more insight into the “taqwacore” phenomenon:

There wasn’t really a genre of “Muslim punk/hardcore” before The Taqwacores came out, which is one of the problems with this particular phenomenon. That book has a lot of elements that are lauded within the story that I find reprehensible that I found reprehensible about the punk and hardcore scenes even before I converted to Islam. Which is why I was vegan straight edge and held an affinity for the Hardline Movement (which was a militant vegan deep ecology ideology). Many members of Hardline converted to Islam and it was through their writings and their music that I came to be interested in Islam.

So in a sense, you could trace the true origins of Muslim punk/hardcore not to the fictional story The Taqwacores that all these newjacks with little actual allegiance and regard for Islam, but to bands like Vegan Reich and Racetraitor. Vegan Reich, in fact, originated the Hardline Movement and was pretty much responsible for the vegan straight edge scene in the hardcore/punk world spawning many bands and vegan and straight edge people in their wake. Hardline was basically a movement with an ideology that adhered to what they called the “one ethic” that all life is sacred and has the inalienable right to its existence. The last Vegan Reich EP was titled “Jihad” and had Surah al-Zilzalah in Arabic and English on the back cover. Racetraitor had Muslim and Bahai members in the band, two of the guys were Iranian-Americans. They actually have some ayat of the Qur’an being recited in Arabic in the background of one of their songs… which is a very grindcore-ish metal sound. They were also vegan straight edge and some members were in the Hardline Movement. You could even trace things back to a side band of the Vegan Reich guys called Captive Nation Rising that was more of a reggae/punk band that includes references to Islam and other religions in its art, liner note essay, and lyrics. The Hardline Movement eventually morphed out of being an exclusively hardcore/punk phenomenon and became an Islamic organization with a definite Sufi/Irfani and Shi’i flavor.

That’s where I’m coming from, and to me the whole book and phenomenon is an insult to all of my friends who come from that background and actually precede by a number of years. I say this primarily because anyone that takes the tenants of the faith seriously and practices it according to what the Qur’an says regarding a number of issues (such as abstaining alcohol, extra-marital sex, and drugs, and actually keeping the prayers regularly) are depicted in a decidedly bad light in The Taqwacores. Proto-facist shaved bald Muslim punk bands that are supposed to be at once reminiscent of Wahhabis and Nazi skinheads; and the straight edge guys like Umar, who is a total a-hole until the last chapter of the book. The people who take Islam seriously and practice the religion earnestly are made the villians; while the characters that regularly break with the tenants of Islam are made out to be the heroes. I also find it ridiculous that they guy has his characters wear Israeli flag stars of David as some sort of vacuous rebellion akin to what some early punks in the 70s did with the swastika… which was a stupid attempt at rebellion, and one that would be met with violence in almost any punk/hardcore scene in this day and age because Nazis are not tolerated in those scenes. They’ve been driven out and have had to create their own Nazi scenes. A band like Screwdriver (a Nazi skinhead band) could never get on the same bill as Agnostic Front or Madball.

Note:  The Taqwacores is coming out as a film. Read more at Zabiha News. The picture below taken from this site.