Children of Hindu, Muslim immigrants drawn to hard rock

Artwork from the Punjab state of India decorates the Ray family home. A Johann Sebastian Bach statue sits on a piano. But in the basement -- cluttered with wires, old concert fliers and drawings -- Arjun Ray, 25, is fighting distortion from his electric guitar.

For this son of Indian immigrants, trained in classical violin and raised on traditional Punjab music, getting his three Pakistani American bandmates in sync is the goal on this cold New England evening. Their band, the Kominas, is trying to record a punk rock version of the classic Bollywood song, "Choli Ke Peeche" ("Behind the Blouse").

"Yeah," said Shahjehan Khan, 26, one of the band's guitarists, "there are a lot of contradictions going on here."

Deep in the woods of this colonial town boils a kind of revolutionary movement. From the basement of this middle-class home tucked in the woods west of Boston, the Kominas have helped launched a small but growing South Asian and Middle Eastern punk rock movement that is attracting children of Muslim and Hindu immigrants. It also is drawing scorn from some traditional Muslims who say their political, hard-edged music is "haraam," or forbidden. The movement, an anti-establishment subculture born of religiously conservative communities, is the subject of two new films and is a hot topic on social-networking sites.

The artists say they are trying to reconcile issues such as life in America, women's rights and homosexuality with Islam and old East vs. West cultural clashes.

"This is one way to deal with my identity as an Arab American," said Marwan Kamel, 24, lead guitarist in Chicago-based Al-Thawra. "With this music, I can express this confusion."

The movement's birth often is credited to the novel "The Taqwacore," by Michael Muhammad Knight, a Rochester, N.Y.-raised writer who converted to Islam. Knight coined the book's title from the Arabic word "taqwá," which means piety or God-fearing, and the term hard core. The 2003 book portrayed an imagined world of living-on-the-edge Muslim punk rockers and influenced real-life South Asians to form their own bands.

South Asian and Middle Eastern punk bands soon were popping up across the United States and communicating with one another on MySpace.

At the time of the book's release, Khan and Basim Usmani were experimenting with punk and building the foundation for the Kominas, which loosely means "scoundrels" in various South Asian languages. When Usmani, 26, came across the book, he was writing songs and sporting a mohawk -- just like the punk rocker on the novel's cover.

Usmani contacted Knight, who agreed to buy a bus on eBay for $2,000 to help launch the nation's first "Muslim punk rock tour" in 2007. Kamel bought a one-way ticket to Boston to join the tour, and Canadian drag-queen singer Sena Hussain met up with them along the way.

The musicians performed at several venues but were kicked off stage during an open-mike performance at the Islamic Society of North America convention in Chicago. Traditional Muslims at the convention decried the electric guitar-based music as un-Islamic, and others were upset that a woman dared sing on stage. The episode was documented by Pakistani Canadian filmmaker Omar Majeed in his documentary "Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam."

"These guys are not prophetizing or preaching anything specific about Islam," said Majeed, whose film is scheduled for release this year in the United States. "They just happen to be young and Muslim, and they write songs and do art that expresses that idea."