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Warriors and Terrorists: Antagonism as Strategy in Christian Hardcore and Muslim “Taqwacore” Punk Rock

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Abstract

This article contributes to new scholarship in the sociological study of religion, which looks at how people define and communicate religion in secular spheres. I show how U.S. Christian Hardcore and Muslim “Taqwacore” (taqwa means “god consciousness” in Arabic) punks draw on the tools of a punk rock culture that is already encoded with its own set of symbols, rituals and styles to: 1) understand themselves as religious/punk and 2) express religion in punk rock environments. I find that both cases draw on a punk rock motif of antagonism—oppositional attitudes and violent rituals and symbols—to see themselves as religious/punk and express religion in punk in different ways. Christian punks use this motif to condemn other Christians for denouncing punk and create space for Protestant evangelical Christianity in punk. Taqwacores use this motif to criticize Islam for its conservatism as well as non-Muslims for stereotyping Muslims as religious fanatics. In the process, Taqwacores build a space for alienated brown youth who exist on the margins of mainstream American culture and traditional Islam.

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Notes

  1. Evangelicals generally value proselytizing to nonbelievers and believe in the “born again” experience which rests on the individual decision to accept Jesus Christ as one’s personal savior (Balmer 1989). Many of the Christian youth I study were raised in Protestant evangelical churches and believe in spirit baptism, faith healing, and End Times theology. Yet they call themselves “Christian” not “evangelical” because they think “evangelical” unnecessarily divides Christians (Putnam and Campbell 2010), pointing out that some Catholics are also involved.

  2. In December 2008, former U.S. President George W. Bush appeared in a press conference with the Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki in Baghdad, Iraq. By this point it had been five years since the U.S. invaded Iraq and Bush was visiting Baghdad to make a security agreement between the U.S. and Iraq public. At the event, one Iraqi reporter, Muntader al-Zaidi, hurled a pair of shoes at Bush but failed to hit him. When Zaidi threw the first shoe at Bush, he shouted in Arabic, “This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!” and for the second one he shouted, “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!” (Myers, Steve and Alissa Rubin 2008). The story made international headlines as flinging a shoe at someone signals that the recipient of the attack is lower than the dirty ground we walk on.

  3. Moreover, survey research cannot measure the changes in religiosity among minority faith groups such as American Muslims, whose population is so small that separate quantitative analyses are difficult to execute (Putnam and Campbell 2010). These research gaps are being filled by ethnographies which show that American Muslim youth increasingly adhere to Islamic traditions and are creating an American Islam (Abdo 2006; Haddad 2007; Williams 2011).

  4. While I initially set out to study Christian hardcore, I found that this scene intersects with metal and in some cases they completely collapse into one another to form “metalcore,” a new genre of music that Christian youth had a heavy hand in developing. Metalcore mixes hardcore punk with extreme metal, both of which are “based around ideologies of personal empowerment, independence and self-control” (Khan-Harris 2007, 44). Christian metalcore music includes the heavy breakdowns that ground hardcore punk, particularly those found in straight edge hardcore (Haenfler 2006), but it also encompasses the speedy, intricate guitar riffs of extreme metal (Khan-Harris 2007). Even the vocals blend the two genres as they move from crisp hardcore chants to haunting, ear piercing shrieks that bring to mind the bowels of hell.

  5. In order to ensure participant confidentiality, I use pseudonyms to reference the interviewees I spoke with in private. However, I use the real names of individuals when referring to publicly available interviews and materials.

  6. Some non-Muslims’ association of Muslims with fanaticism is so widespread that they become outraged when the media portrays American Muslims as anything but devout Islamists or terrorists. When TLC (The Learning Channel), started its docu-series, “All-American Muslim,” about ordinary, middle-class Muslims in Dearborn, Michigan, the Florida Family Association (a conservative Christian group), asked advertisers to boycott the series because they felt the show “riskily hides the Islamic agenda’s clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values.” After the FFA made its request, Lowes, a home improvement chain, pulled their commercials from the show. After only one season, TLC cancelled “All American Muslim” and cited a steep decline in viewership as its reason (Bauder, David 2011).

  7. Despite the upsurge in Islamophobia in American society, ethnographic studies show that rather than hide their religious identity or assimilate, American Muslims are asserting their religious traditions into the public sphere (Abdo 2006). Haddad (2007, 254) argues that after 9/11, young second-generation American Muslim women started wearing the hijab because they refused to let the Western media define them and wanted to guarantee “freedom of religion and speech”. But Taqwacores are not conforming to and asserting conventional Islamic traditions and styles. Taqwacores use hardcore antagonism to express Muslim identity in punk rock culture.

  8. My research respondents do not claim to know exactly when “the end” will come but believe it is imminent. They make reference to terrorist attacks, crime, and school shootings to substantiate their belief that Jesus plans to return for final judgment (see Boyer 1992).

  9. Violence is so ubiquitous in popular culture that it has opened up a space for dark prophecies to thrive. Monahan (2008) shows that a multi-billion dollar apocalypse industry “feeds the fears” of Christians as it plays on beliefs about the end of the world. In a New York Times article Almond (2013) argues that the apocalypse industry is not secluded to beliefs about how to be a better person in the eyes of God. Rather, “the newest wave of apocalyptic visions, whether they’re intended to make us laugh or shriek, are nearly all driven by acts of sadistic violence.”

  10. Riz M.C. (also known as Riz Ahmed) played the leading role in a comedy that follows four ordinary British Muslims in their journey to become jihadist called Four Lions.

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Acknowledgments

I want to thank the Editor and anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions and comments. Thanks to the Writing Workshop at the University of Pittsburgh for all of your feedback on this paper. I also want to thank Jay Howard for securing me a campsite at Cornerstone and talking to me about my research on Christian punk. Lastly, I am especially grateful to Kathleen Blee for her exceptional support and advice.

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  1. Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Mississippi, Leavell Hall, P.O. Box 1848, University, MS, 38677–1848, USA

    Amy McDowell

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McDowell, A. Warriors and Terrorists: Antagonism as Strategy in Christian Hardcore and Muslim “Taqwacore” Punk Rock. Qual Sociol 37, 255–276 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-014-9279-7

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