We Made It To Oprah
You know you’ve made it big when you are on Oprah. Allright, so The Taqwacores wasn’t on Oprah, exactly. It was the radio show the Derrick Ashong Experience that was premiering on Oprah’s Sirius network channel that day. The Taqwacores entourage followed Eyad Zahra and Mike Knight to the basement of a pop-up radio station set up in particular for Sundance.
As Eyad and Mike got ready for their interview, the rest of us grabbed seats to then back to watch the interaction play out.
“I first came up with The Taqwacores in the winter of 2002,” Mike said. “When I first created it, it was a fantasy. Nothing like this existed… You have to create your own culture. The scene became real. It was kind of a weird sociological experience.”
“ So you called it ‘Taqwacore’ pulling from the word “taqwa” meaning piety, and “core” referring to punk rock hardcoreness. But what does ‘taqwacore’ mean?” Derrick asked. It was a question that the media always asked, a word that people were always trying to define, but the more you got immersed in it, the more ambiguous it was.
“I felt the sense of taqwa is bigger than religion in a kind of way,” Mike responded. “When I came up with the term taqwacore, I wanted to encompass that. That’s why it isn’t Islamcore. It’s bigger than that.”
“How did you find Taqwacore?” Derrick asked, turning towards Eyad.
“I first came across The Taqwacores on Mike’s wikipedia page. It struck me. That night I went directly to the local independent bookstore and immediately bought the book. I was a confused kid growing up. At some points in my high school days, I was very religious. By the time I got to college, I put all that on a shelf. After discovering The Taqwacores, I started trying to define it and make it my own.”
“Together Mike and I co-adapted the screenplay and we co-produced the film,” Eyad continued. “It’s a real film but it’s done in a DIY way. We used a lot of the local kids and a lot of the local Muslim kids to make the movie. This is a movement that goes beyond religion and punk.”
