(photo credit: Mia Donovan)We spoke with director Omar Majeed about his controversial film, Taqwacore.
MH: Could I ask you a little bit about your background?
OM: I was born in Canada. My parents are Pakistani. I wasn't raised Muslim in a very strict way. My parents identified as Muslim and that was always something in the back of my mind, but we weren't an extremely observant family. I did live for about four or five years in Pakistan as a teenager. My family moved back there for a couple of years so I got to experience that culture and by extensions, a little bit more engagement with Islam because it's a very big part of that culture. I have a particular attachment to being Pakistani as well as Canadian.
MH: Could you tell us a little bit about your film background?
OM: All my life I wanted to be a filmmaker. From a really early age.
Out of film school I went into television. I lived in Toronto for a long period of my life and worked for CityTV. I started off as an editor, eventually producing, in particular, short form half hour documentaries, but I really wanted to make something a bit more narrative and cinematic.
So four years ago I moved to Montreal with my wife, and decided that it was time to pursue different job in television and I would just try to kick around an idea I had in my head about making a film about what it was like to be Muslim in the post 911 world.
That was all I had at the time. That sort of notion that I knew I wanted to do something about that because I had certain feelings about it and wanted to get something out.
After doing some research, I connected with this idea about Taqwacore. I found out about what was going on and just decided to go for it.
I really tried to do a film in the way that I envisioned it, and take a more narrative approach to it, and here we are.
MH: Could you tell us about your film Taqwacore, the whole idea and how that formed.
Yes, well, as I was mentioning, I was doing this research just trying to find out what kind of interesting Muslim voices there were because my feeling was that we weren't hearing from those kind of people. We were hearing from very, very mainstream Muslim organizations that would apologize a lot for the fundamentalists or we were hearing from the fundamentalists themselves. We weren't hearing from anyone in the middle, in the gray zone. People who lived lives in between.
That was really important to me, so I was talking to all sorts of Muslim academics, Muslim artists, people like that, and time and time again they would ask me “have you read this book, Taqwacore?
It's really interesting considering what you're taking about. It's this novel by a man who converted to Islam, became a fundamentalist for a while, pulled back from all of that, and now, has written this very rebellious and challenging novel imagining what it would be like if there was such a thing as punk Islam.”
So I was like, that sounds a bit wacky (laughs) but you know, I'm going to give it a try. I got the book off Amazon and I read it and it blew my mind. On a personal level as a Muslim I was like, wow!
First of all, the kind of references that he was making, the language was so exact both in terms of his Islamic language and his punk language. I mean he really got the right references in there and the characters were really rich, full of contradiction and complexity, and a lot of the characters and the situations in the book really spoke to me.
So based on that I decided I had to meet this guy. So I made it happen. I emailed him and asked him to meet. He agreed, he's very amiable, so we met and from that point on I was hooked because he basically told me his life story which I found very fascinating.
The ideas in the book had already gripped me and then on top of that he was telling me, in our very first meetings, that he was starting to meet people who had read his book and were telling him they were Muslim and punk. I thought to myself, wow, this guy's written this fiction, this fantasy, and now life is imitating art. And that's just fascinating to be here on the cusp of that happening. I just jumped in and was sold.
MH: What was the most challenging thing about making this film.
OM: (laughs) Working with punks. The most challenging thing? The very origins of it date back to about three and a half years. By the time I actually got Michael and all the other guys, I'm assuming you've seen the movie...
MH: oh, yes.
OM: ... by the time I got Michael and all those guys involved in the thing, it had been about three years. And I think the most challenging thing with a film like this is you have very small, very astute, very media savvy subjects, people who understand the media. They're artists themselves so it's not as if we could script a lot of stuff or stage it.
As a filmmaker sometimes you kind of push and you prod to try to edge the story along in certain ways and sometimes you do that with people who are not as comfortable on camera as these guys are. Because they're performers, it took a long time to break through their distrust they have of the media and what the media could possibly do with their image and the message of what they're trying to convey. And like it or not, for a while I was considered part of that media.
First it took a long time to build trust, and even when we did that it was very hard to find very vulnerable, very real moments. The only thing you could do was to stand around. You just had to basically spend a lot of time with these guys, all of them, and be attentive and observant to capture moments that were very raw and personal. There was a lot of hanging around, waiting around, going with the flow, (laughs) a kind of Zen concentration in the end.
Sometimes I wasn't up for it, and neither was my crew, but I think that over that couple of years we got what we needed.
MH: How is your film being received so far?
OM: Last night was our world premier here at VIFF. It was surreal. This is my first feature length film. First of all, VIFF is awesome. I'm happy to go on any record and talk about how amazing VIFF is. They fly you out here, they feed you. I don't know any festival that feeds their filmmakers (laughs), so that's amazing. Everyone's really friendly and very helpful. It's incredible and I really get the vibe that the audience here is really in to going out and seeing interesting offbeat films. It doesn't seem to be about stars or industry. We're over indulgent in the industry side of things.
It was a well attended screening, which I was pleased about, but more important to me than that, was it was a screening of really thoughtful people. We had an excellent Q & A afterwards where the usual cliché questions weren't asked. I got really in depth questions from some of the Muslims in the audience, challenging me at some points, and some of the non-Muslims talked about things they found difficult or challenging as well.
You know at times I kind of felt that I really wasn't representing the punk side of things well because I was kind of pontificating. The Q & A ended up a discussion at the end, which was really nice. And it really made me feel like the film was working in terms of engaging people in ideas, which was my intent all along.
MH: What would you like people to take away from this film?
OM: That's interesting. Some people kind of challenged me yesterday asking if I was trying to make a definitive statement about Islam, was I trying to make some heavy handed point, and I totally don't think I am. I don't think that's what these guys who I portray in my film are trying to do either .
I think really in the end what Taqwacore (the book) is about, and what the film is endorsing as well, is this idea of being Muslim on your own terms, finding your own path, and that being ok. It's ok to be a complex human being. It's ok to have contradiction, we all do, let's just be up front about it and don't hide away from that.
If you don't feel like you can conform to your parents' Islam, if you don't feel comfortable with everything that's going on in the western world and the way you're getting stereotyped, don't be comfortable with it. Speak out against it where you can, express it in healthy ways like through music and through art, and through satire.
The ultimate thing for me is that Taqwacore is about a new space. It's not a movement, it's not an ideology, it's not trying to sell you something. Let's create a space here for all of us who feel like the labels don't work. I think the film is just asking for the right of that to exist.
MH: Where do you go from here? Is Michael writing another book? Are you going to make another film?
OM: Michael is one of the most prolific men I know. He's one of those people, as far as artists go, that just constantly inspires my jealousy, deep jealousy. He's younger than me, fitter than me, and has already published five or six books, and he's going to Harvard right now to study Islamic studies.
So the guy is just one of those guys that's got that kind of mind. The book, Taqwacore, is truly an incredible piece of writing. I urge people to read it. Michael's writing in general is quite vivid, and quite an amazing insight into Islam and the North American experience. And of course the bands and their music, all of whom people want to find out more about, you can find on the web site we just put up. (ww.taqwacore.com) We're trying to make that into a one stop resource.
There is one final screening of Taqwacore at the Granville 7 theatres this
Mon, Oct, 5th, at 1:15pm
moot or hooey?
there is a Taqwacore movement in Vancouver, BC
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