Women Up the Taqx
At the bar, Riz Ahmed asked us all if we wanted a drink. Five of us passed. I looked around, realizing that half of us were the non-drinkers. Only around taqwacore types would being a non-drinker be alright. Riz Ahmed is an old skool Taqwacore, in from the UK for his film Four Lions which also showed at Sundance. His movie is a comedy about jihadists – it’s one of the other “Muslim” movies at Sundance. So basically, at the bar, we had all the Muslims at Sundance, ironically.
Riz was almost exactly how I pictured how he’d be in person, a fast talker and quick. I had seen him in Taqwacore: Birth of Muslim Punk documentary film, the doc about the Taqwacore scene. Riz started talking about how he was a part of the TaqwaTour in 2007 and how he met up with the tour at ISNA in Chicago. In addition to being an actor, Riz is an MC, and he performed on the TaqwaTour with the bands. It was cool to see how Sundance is bringing together random folks in our circles in our most beautiful way.
It was at the bar that we got into a conversation about women and Taqwacores. One former Taqwacore scenester had just commented towards Michael Muhammad Knight that “Rabeya would be a cool character if she wasn’t written by a man.” This statement irritated me to no end. As a writer, to me a well written character is a character, and if well done, the gender of the writer does not matter. Rabeya’s character is one that is needed.
I started telling Knight about all the other girls in the scene, and how for every girl that thinks that they’re a feminist for hating on Knight, that there were other women in the scene that really connected. I talked about tattooed and pierced Ari aka The Gaza Stripper who would be driving up from Austin for Sundance. There was Daniella the rock photographer flying out from Oakland. There was Kaitlin and her Cultural Sindicate team from Wisconsin who would be audio recording the Sundance weekend. And there were girls who wouldn’t be making it out to Sundance like the deaf playwright Sabina England or the adorable Norwegian sisters I had bonded with over twitter, Yumna and Momina. You even had around the world Stoney from Sydney and Farah from Melbourne. All these women had connected virtually with each other through twitter, skype and facebook – they had literally created a virtual community of taqwacore women that spread around the world.
The Taqwacores book and movie weren’t devoid of women either. The Sundance punk house would soon be seeing Rasika Mathur (who plays activist Fatima), Denise (who plays punk rocker Dee Dee Ali), Anne Leighton (who plays Yusef’s love interest), and of course, Noureen Dewulf (who plays the burqa clad Rabeya). There are also the many women that worked on the film who were also staying at the Sundance punk house. Taqwacore may seem male driven on the surface, but there’s a strong undercurrent of women running throughout it.
We sat there at the bar, sipping on sober drinks talking about Taqwacore. It was a great start to what was sure to be one of many conversations on Taqwacore and the start to a fantastic Sundance adventure.
