THE CALIPH ROCKS THE HUB:

The clash: Punk meets Islam in a local band that shreds stereotypes (Omar Sacirbey, April 18, 2006, Boston Globe)

Meet the Kominas, a musical threesome from the Boston area ready to take on conservative clergy and Homeland Security.

Their music has attracted fans of all stripes but speaks to young South Asian Muslims who identify with both their faith and American culture, and yet feel welcomed by neither. They're fed up with racist classmates, judgmental relatives, suspicious neighbors, and the extremists -- Islamic and Islamophobic -- who have made it a burden to be Muslim in the United States. But thanks to online communities and sites like MySpace, where they post songs and have attracted a substantial following, they now have a pulpit, too.

The band's next shows are Saturday at the Chandni Raat -- Night of the Moon -- Festival at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and May 7 at Club Hell in Providence.

The Kominas, whose name means ''bastards" in Punjabi, say they hate labels but offer ''Bollywood Muslim punk" to describe their sound, a blend of punk, metal, and Bhangra folk music. The lyrics, written mainly by Usmani, are clever, sometimes risque commentaries on racial profiling, foreign policy, and religion.

The Kominas are among the first American Muslim musicians to emerge from a nascent punk culture its adherents call Taqwacore, the name taken from a novel by a white convert to Islam named Michael Muhammad Knight. If it develops -- and channel MTV Desi has already done a spot on the Kominas -- the band will likely be remembered as Taqwacore's pioneers.

Knight was 15, listening to Public Enemy and reading ''The Autobiography of Malcolm X," when he converted. As a teenager, he was rapt with faith and went to Pakistan to study Islam, and even considered joining Pakistani mujahideen bound for Chechnya before a teacher counseled him against it.

But this almost-John Walker Lindh also saw corruption, poverty, and racism in Pakistan and returned home to upstate New York dogged by doubts about his faith. After bouncing in and out of college, Knight, now 28, began writing ''The Taqwacores," a novel about a group of Muslim punk rockers who smoked dope, read scripture, slam-danced, prayed, had sex, and embodied the tolerance and compassion that Islam encouraged but that, in Knight's view, were being neglected in favor of rules and rigidity.

He made copies and drove to Chicago, where the Islamic Society of North America, arguably the country's biggest Muslim organization, was hosting close to 40,000 people at its 2003 annual convention. There, he peddled the novel from his backpack to young Muslims who looked like they might relate.

''The Taqwacores" was ultimately picked up for distribution by Alternative Tentacles, the publisher and music label owned by former Dead Kennedys vocalist Jello Biafra. By early last year it had developed a small following of young South Asians, or Desis, and Muslims, including Usmani and Khan.

Around the same time, Usmani was beginning to hear from disgruntled Desi peers who responded to his online ruminations about music, identity, and community pressures.

MORE:
Basim Usmani, frontman for Muslim punk band The Kominas (Michael Muhammad Knight , Muslim WakeUp! Inc.:The World's Most Popular Muslim Online Magazine)