Blasting the US with punk Islam

Punks from the left and right reject us, we're slammed for using Islamic ideas – but we don't care, this tour's a labour of love
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Basim Usmani of the Kominas
Basim Usmani plays with the Kominas. Photograph: Kim Badawi/Redux

After playing a gig in Toronto, we were stopped at the Canadian border on our way back Stateside, and questioned like this:

"What's your band called?"

"The Kominas."

"Never heard of you."

And I smiled from ear to ear. He just waved us through, which he certainly wouldn't have done had he known about us. But we won't be so snug under the radar forever.

We've travelled a lot. In America, where we're currently touring, the only way to make a lasting impact is to repeatedly gig across the length of the US and back again. Our health, and our instruments' welfare, can fall by the wayside when we're trying to make five dollar bills stretch across states. It's interesting when your love can momentarily be a way of life. We spend most of our time in transit, or lugging gear around towns. I have to carry the case of my bass guitar under my arm, otherwise it would just break in half.

Music here is a hustle the way it isn't anywhere else. There are thousands and thousands of bands on every street, and everyone has a shtick. There are Rastafarian Hasidic Jews, crust-punk Arabs, Afro-punks and Cambodian surf rockers. Considering that, it amazes me how so many people react so strangely to Taqwacore, the style of music we're playing. Outside the bars where we play there are always gaggles of smokers who want to grill me about what we do, and how legitimate we are.

The profile of such people is always the same. They have read somewhere in a news article what we're about. They haven't heard any of our music, but have a lot of opinions about it anyway. So much for giving it away for free.

Some object to the Kominas' engagement with spiritual or Islamic ideas, others object to us playing punk music while living in our parents' homes. Others object to how we may blaspheme or how most of us aren't Muslim. Rightwing punks think we're fake, self-aggrandising and unpatriotic; leftwing punks think we're un-hip, self hating, and secretly sectarian or sexist. Some even went as far as to say I was a race traitor for working with a white convert. The only thing that hasn't been considered about us is how broke we are. It's not doing us any great financial favours to be musicians, it's a labour of love in the truest sense.

Music can now be downloaded and deleted faster than spyware – and it certainly seems like it's the idea behind the music that has taken precedence over the music itself. Concerts make everything very real, and we've seen so many changes since we first started, when we would practise in empty classrooms and sleep in parking lots. The media in the US will continue repeating the same 500-word story of Mike Knight's novel, the Taqwacores, and how it inspired all the "Muslim punks" (a term we would be delighted to disown).

Of course, this rehashed news story is different from the truth. The Kominas, as a group, were formed with much bigger plans in mind. At our most recent gig at Toronto, we played with Humble the Poet, an MC affiliated with the Sikh Activist Network who rhymes about growing up working class and Sikh in Canada and has a poignant song about the 1984 Golden Temple massacre. One of our first gigs ever in New York City was a benefit we organised for a vandalised Hindu temple in Minnesota.

The first shot in the trailer of Omar Majeed's documentary Taqwacore takes place in a Chicano punk house where Latino punks, first- and second-generation immigrants from Mexico, took us on as brothers in arms.

And still, people think we're writing for Muslims. The blogosphere is an interesting thing to be working against. But we have a great advantage: for more gigs, and more touring, we're not afraid of our instruments getting nicked. Maybe we'll dent some of these naysaying mindsets as well.

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