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Shah 79
Sellout Islamic pop-punk band from Buffalo, New York in the 2009 novel Osama van Halen by Michael Muhammad Knight.
Formerly The Black Box Khatibs.
Then he picked up the glossy music mag Punk Press, and it drilled him like a Shawn Michaels superkick to the chin: On the front cover were four pretty, clean desi boys with piercings and sleeve tattoos, one wearing a Vote Hezbollah T-shirt for underground cred. Off to the side, it read: “Shah 79: Godfathers of Muslim Punk.”
“Are you fuckin’ kidding?” scoffed Ayyub, loud enough for anyone in the place to hear, but there was still nobody there. “Look at this slick shit,” he mumbled, flipping the pages until he found those douchebags again. They had a whole spread, with more cool poses and a rundown of who in the group got wasted and who didn’t (“Javed has never had a beer in his life, but Omar will party his tits off”), and what a hard time they’d had recording their new album (“I wanted the song to be this intricate Sufi allegory, you know, but Omar thought it was about a girl”). One of the pussies had a line about aiming for the moon because if you missed, you’d land among the stars. Another showed off the bismillah inked around his neck and said, “Like my tattoos, my heart hurts for Allah.” Amazing Ayyub had never heard of them, and they didn’t look like anything that would have cruised around in his terrible van— their magazine faces were too soft and well rested to have ever suffered a real taqwa road war with Ayyub behind the wheel. The taqwacores were Gutter Sufi heroes; these kids were a new breed, weak and grafted from the original.
Could it be?
Taqwacore... pop punk?
Their name is a play on real English punk band Sham 69.
