When Michael Muhammad Knight wrote his book The Taqwacores, he thought it was a fantasy.

'We're not going to be spoon-fed our Islam. We're going to decide what it means to us.'— Michael Muhammad Knight

The book, about a group of Muslim punk wannabes living a rock 'n' roll lifestyle in Buffalo, N.Y., has since come to life in a number of ways.

There was the book itself, which Knight first sold as a photocopied, spiral-bound zine out of the trunk of his car in mosque parking lots.

In 2005, it was picked up and published by Alternative Tentacles, Jello Biafra's record label, and in December 2008, it was re-released in softcover by Soft Skull Press.

Then there was the impact the book had on its readers — many of them young Muslims trying to negotiate their spirituality and identity in North American society.

"I had this fantasy and I started putting it out there and kids started writing back. 'I'm Muslim and I'm punk. I thought I was the only Muslim punk on the planet,' and this kid would be writing from Texas," Knight said in an interview with CBC's Q cultural affairs show.

The book brought out so many Muslim punks, it created an opening for bands like The Kominas, out of Boston, or Vancouver's all-girl punk outfit, Secret Trial Five. In fact, the Muslim punk scene has become known as Taqwacore.

The Taqwacores has also inspired two films — a dramatic feature film based on the book and a documentary by Montreal-based filmmaker Omar Majeed.

Majeed told Q he was attracted to the book because of the confusion he felt after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"I was looking for a project that would speak to young Muslims like myself, who felt confused about their identity. There was tons of coverage about the al-Qaeda types, but I wanted to find the alternative Muslim voice," he said.

"Mike's book is a great resource if you are young and Muslim, trying to reconcile things that might seem opposed. Growing up in Western culture, we just don't know how to make sense of things like loving rock music and wanting to be young and impetuous — not wanting to conform to your parent's Islam, but … wanting to defend it."

Majeed's film, which he expects to release this fall, is about a Taqwacore tour of North America with a side trip to Pakistan.

He and Knight pulled together "kindred spirits from Boston to Chicago" on a bus to crash an Islamic Society of North America convention in Chicago.

Organizers call police

Their plan was to sneak the Secret Trial Five and The Kominas into the open mike entertainment night at the conference.

"We let the Secret Trial Five on stage first, the all-girl band from Vancouver. The audience was mostly girls in hijab at this point — they were eating it up, it had been such a dull show up until this point," Majeed said. "But the organizers were flipping out.… They called the cops on us."

While the U.S. tour unearthed a legion of young Muslims, from burka-wearing riot girls to Indonesian skater boys, who want to negotiate their own spiritual journey, the trip to Pakistan helped provide some context.

There they found twirling Sufis who seemed every bit as much out of mainstream Islam as any North American Muslim punk, Majeed said.

"What we realized is that Taqwacore is not really a new thing. Islam is a vast tradition and the way it is presented today is a Saudi-inspired export and, so if you look hard enough, you can find things that go against the grain of what you usually see," he said.

Showing that broad spectrum of belief was one of the things Knight hoped to do when he wrote the original book, he said. Irish born, Knight is a convert to Islam and controversial in his views on what it means to be Muslim.

"We're not going to be spoon-fed our Islam. We're going to decide what it means to us. And that was my fantasy with the book," he said.

"My fantasy was to create this environment in which once you walk in the door of that house, it's like a mosque with no imam. All these different characters have their own different concepts of Islam and, ultimately, you have to choose what to do with it."

Knight, a U.S.-based journalist, has also written a book on American Muslim culture.

Majeed's movie is in post-production.

The Taqwacores, a feature film by Eyad Zahra, is to be released later this year.