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This is a really fascinating story of a super-small social niche—Muslim punks—who it never even occurred to me to think existed. The story itself was a little clumsy, the writing & structure a bit amateur-ish, but on the whole very readable and, like I said, fascinating. There's a ton of Arabic (Farsi?) sprinkled through, which jars harshly (as was of course the intention) with punk lyrics and plenty of profanity.

Basically there's this punk house, like any punk house anywhere—walls coated with posters & fliers, floor roiling with beer bottles and vomit and passed-out people—but everyone who lives there is a semi-devout Muslim. So the opening scene has people stirring on beer-soaked couches and getting up to set up prayer rugs and have a ceremony. Cool, right?

Other than the obvious strangeness of the setting, this is definitely a character-driven novel. And while the characters are a bit caricature-y, they're clearly set up that way so they can have really interesting conversations about Islam, punk, how to pray, whether women should have rights, how literally to take holy texts, etc.

There's a straightedge guy with dozens of Koran tattoos. There's a girl who wears a full burka—which is covered with punk band patches. There's stoners and mohawks and skaters and nerds and all the rest. There're even excerpts from a Muslim sci-fi series, where people are trying to figure out how to convert the Martians to Islam.

Anyway, here is my favorite passage from the book. I think you can replace punk in the below with lots of big-concept "movement"-type words, which is pretty neat.

I stopped trying to define punk around the same time I stopped trying to define Islam. They aren't so far removed as you'd think. Both began in tremendous bursts of truth and vitality but seem to have lost something along the way—the energy, perhaps, that comes with knowing the world has never seen such positive force and fury and never would again. Both have suffered from sell-outs and hypocrites, but also from true believers whose devotion had crippled their creative drive. Both are viewed by outsiders as unified, cohesive communities, when nothing can be further from the truth.

I could go on, but the most important similarity is that like punk as mentioned above, Islam is an open symbol representing not things but ideas. You cannot hold punk or Islam in your hands. So what could they mean besides what you want them to?



Oh! And this edition (which is I think only eight bucks) was put out by the super-fabulous all-volunteer-run Brooklyn collective, Autonomedia. Support them!!