The Arabic word Taqwa means God-consciousness. You often hear the word hardcore when people are describing all thinks punk. But now there’s Taqwacore, which is something like “Muslim Punk” or hardcore, God-consciousness, mohawks, screeching music and all.Recently, Hussein Rashid, Kaitlin Foley, Basim Usmani, and Shahjehan Khan at Religion Dispatches did a roundtable on Taqwacore, “On Punks, the Media, and the Meaning of “Muslim”–their interview to discuss the growing group of Muslim youth who are “pot-smoking, praying, Qur’an-reading Muslims, who would edit out sections of the Qur’an because they were “wrong” and no one could explain the text to them.”Both the scene and the interview use the self-published novel “The Taqwacores” by Michael Muhammad Knight as a jumping off point, which inspired this new trend and the many bands associated with it.Check out the Taqwacore band The Kominas. And definitely watch the documentary trailer ‘Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam.’