Fear and Islam in the UK: The Taqwacores Censored

The Taqwacore movement (badly and shortly described a Muslim punk) has been getting some attention lately (across the web anyway) thanks to a profile of the culture in the The Guardian. What is less known is that the seminal novel of the movement – The Taqwacores– has been censored in its UK version due to fears brought on by the Muhammed cartoon controversy.

Mike gets bloodied by CAIR. Link.

I speak with the author – Michael Muhammad Knight – about what the fuck is going on across the pond. After da jump.

Jason Lubyk: For the people out there who may not be familiar with you and your work, let’s start off with your relationship to Islam. Are you currently still practicing, and if so, what sort of path?

Michael Muhammad Knight: I converted at 16 and then ran off to Pakistan, and ever since it’s just been one confusion after another. I’ve been a hardcore fundamentalist, an apostate, a pseudo-Sufi, a quasi-Shi’a, a white Five Percenter and supposedly a Muslim punk rocker. I’m starting to develop a more stable relationship to Islam, in which I practice what I can and still call myself a Muslim without having resolved all the issues.

The way I see it, having faith in Allah isn’t the same as having faith in these 14 centuries of Islamic tradition that we’ve developed. I’m as much a Muslim as I can be while recognizing that none of us really know anything. My guess is that Islam, as far as it has been presented to me, is at least 35-40% true, and sometimes I even feel that it’s more than half true. Which is pretty good for an organized religion, I think.

JL: So, what’s story on your book being censored?

MMK: I sold the UK rights for the novel to Telegram, a literary press in London. Everything seemed to be going well, but just before their edition of The Taqwacores was set to go to print I received an email from the publisher — not the editors, who loved the book, but the publisher himself—saying that he had just read the novel for the first time and could not release it due to certain blasphemous passages. His reasons were mainly rooted in the cartoon thing in Denmark.

He wanted me to remove the offensive content. At first I refused, but then it hit me that censorship itself can be a performance, that I’m making a point just by putting out this book with black lines crossing out half the text. And ultimately, the censored version of anything only promotes the uncensored version. I told them that if they believed in their censorship enough to take full responsibility for it — i.e., censor it in such a way that clearly acknowledges that they have censored it, then I would be OK. They accepted. It’s not black lines, but throughout the book you now have these little asterisks marking where they’ve removed something.

They sent me a long list of items they wanted removed. Some of it I understood, the really outrageous stuff, but they went too far with the cutting. Sure, the excerpt where someone talks about Muhammad eating a fat dick is gone, but also cut were passages in which characters questioned the Prophet in more sophisticated ways. That was where the censorship took on its theatrical value, almost as an absurd caricature of censorship.

Some things I fought for, because without them the book would just be about Muslims who drink beer and have funny haircuts. Telegram had wanted to remove the story of the Necklace, in which the Prophet’s wife Ayesha very defiantly stands up to him, despite the fact that this event is an accepted piece of Islamic history that you’ll find acknowledged by all kinds of Muslim scholars. That had to stay, it was too important.

JL: Did you or the publisher receive any threats about the alleged “blasphemous” passages?

MMK: No, but that was their concern. They feared for their physical safety. They are very public and very accessible in London, connected to a little Arab-run bookstore that already had a brick thrown through its window for carrying The Satanic Verses. I’m willing to take whatever comes to me for what I’ve said, but I suppose I can’t ask that of others.

JL: Why does the publisher continue to publish the book even though it has been heavily cut? Why not just drop it? Do you want them to keep publishing it?

MMK: Everyone that I spoke to at Telegram has been supportive of the book, and they didn’t want to see this happen. So I think they just did the best they could with the pressures they were under. They continue to promote the uncensored version in other languages, we’ve recently signed for French and Italian editions and are negotiating elsewhere.

Telegram has also signed to do a UK edition of my new road book, Blue-Eyed Devil, and before this censorship thing happened I sold them my next novel, Osama Van Halen. Blue-Eyed Devil is already out with its US publisher, Autonomedia, and uncensored. It tells the story of my searching for the American Islam by riding 20,000 miles by Greyhound bus in 60 days, squatting in mosques and crashing Islamic Society of North America conventions. Osama Van Halen is a novel in which two characters from The Taqwacores, Rabeya the burqa-wearing riot grrl and Amazing Ayyub the Shi’a skinhead, decide to kidnap Matt Damon. We’ll see what happens with these books, but so far there haven’t been any problems.

JL: Do they plan to re-release an uncensored version once things have cooled down?

MMK: In the words of A. Whitney Griswold, “Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost.” As long as the original version of The Taqwacores is still out there, the fight isn’t over. The people at Telegram respect my work, and I believe that they already know that censorship of this kind is fundamentally wrong, so I try to have faith that someday they will undo this and release the full text.

JL: Any support from the Islamic community over this?

MMK: Over the last few years, I’ve said some inflammatory things and for many Muslims, the knee-jerk response was to just disown me and not deal with it. But others looked at it like, “if our brother is saying this, he must have really gone through some things, or he must really be hurting.” They engaged me as a member of the Muslim family. And maybe in that family I’m still the pissed-off stepson, but they at least brought me back into the house. No matter how immature I might have been in the way that I said things, they wouldn’t push me away. They showed me what it really means to emulate the Prophet, and also that being a conservative orthodox Muslim doesn’t have to make you an asshole, which defies even what some Progressive Muslims say.

JL: What’s your take on the Muhammad cartoons controversy, anyway?

MMK: To be perfectly honest, this exchange here is the most energy I’ve spent on it. Someone drew cartoons with no real value other than to offend religious people, and so the religious people became offended, and some of them went insane. I don’t know what else to say about that, but it does have me considering the cultural climate and how my work will read in Europe. In the U.S. I’ve seen neoconservatives praise The Taqwacores for all the wrong reasons. In Europe it could be much worse. I don’t want Islamophobic racists in France cheering because I said punky things about the Prophet. I don’t have anything to say to those people.

JL: Is this going to affect your output in any way? Less or more strident? The same?

MMK: I don’t think it will change how I write, because censorship is validating in a way. If someone treats you like your ideas are dangerous, it doesn’t make you want to be less dangerous.