Gender and Subversive Home Space in Eyad Zahra's Taqwacores

Eyad Zahra's Taqwacores is the narrative film version of a book by M. Knight of the same name. It tells the story of a good Muslim boy who goes to live in a Muslim punk rock house inhabited by a straight edge punk, a Shi'a skinhead, a burqa-wearing riot grrl feminist, a skater, and a late '70's punk, all of whom practice Islam in deeply personal and often seemingly controversial ways.

Home space in the film is specifically gendered. The only woman in the house lives in a room with a private entrance attached to the kitchen. The men live on other floors and use other restrooms. This is a spatial designation left over from an earlier period when the house's inhabitants were more traditional in their religious practices. Rabeya, the punk patch-covered, burqa-wearing feminist, comes and goes through the house freely. While we never see her face, her voice is clear, aggressive, and honest. In one scene, Rabeya leads men prayer while wearing the burqa. In other, we see her room strewn with feminist books that she reads while veiled.

The film's characters debate the purpose of the burqa, a head-to-toe garment judged harshly by Western feminists for making Islamic women invisible. Is Rabeya participating in a patriarchal tradition or subverting it by owning it,? they ask. While an important conversation, simply positioning the garment within oppression or subversion misses its important spatial dimension. The world inside that burqa is Rabeya's and hers alone--not a place of exile but a location in which Rabeya ponders politics and strategy, where she becomes unpredictable and even irreverent. It divides her from the male gaze while putting her in a position of power as an observer who cannot be read or predicted. As such, Rabeya reclaims the burqa from its arguably oppressive or strictly religious use and transforms it into an accessory for her liberation. As one of the film's male characters describes it, Rabeya's burqa is for her what his mohawk is for him--a subversive punk accessory, a way of articulating resistance and possibly even transforming the meaning of a symbol.

In an interview, Noureen Dewulf, who plays Rabeya confirms that she was afraid that the burqa would make her character invisible. What she seems to find, however, is that the space of the burqa provided a canvas for the character's identity that in turn helped negotiate her way through the home space, even going so far as to lead men in prayer. This is what differentiates Rabeya's adoption of the burqa from contexts in which it is defended as a liberatory practice. It is precisely because she can wear it ironically, be a riot grrl, use foul language, criticize sexism in holy scriptures, and perform other acts of agency within that space that she transforms the burqa into a liberatory space.