TAQWACORE WEBZINE

We all struggle with our own personal jihads,
She just chose to wear hers inked into skin as her sleeve,
That brave contradiction is to be admired/aspired.

We are all haramis,
struggling searching for taqwa
and seeking to live judiciously.
But she did it with balls out bravado.

This kind of mythology can only be written by the Almighty himself.
The punk with “I Am Haram” emblazoned in Arabic across her chest.
The sometimes hijab wearing pole dancer who danced to The Kominas music.
The pierced  Arabic language studies student.
The burka-ed bride at an Ashura themed fake blood soaked lesbian wedding.
The Palestinian meets Israeli meets American meets adoptee meets mother.
Crazy how self-created mythology can fold in on itself.

She was more Jehangir than anyone else in Taqwacore could ever be.
She was taqwa to the core before Taqwacore was even a term.
That’s the sign to a true Taqwacore – someone who doesn’t wait for others to define them.
Fists out, they jump into the pit of life to duke it out for themselves. Self-define.

To jannah you go, our young pious rebel,
Our tragic heroine with the untimely death.
May we all carry the light of your legacy in our lives.

If I’ve learned anything from you it is this -
don’t wait till tomorrow for the next tattoo.
Get it now.
Live life. Now.
Love recklessly. Now.

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Our world was rocked yesterday as we found out through the taqwacore grapevine that one of our very own had passed away. Ari Sa’id and her boyfriend Sergio Randel met a tragic end in a car accident Friday night.

I couldn’t say we were friends, in the conventional sense. I’d never been to her home, she’d never met my siblings, nor I her daughter. We’d met once in real life, on a Sundance Taqwacore adventure. Technically we met on the Utah streets, surrounded by snow. In the past few years, we connected over the internet, over words, over twitter. We connected because we had a love and hate relationship with the same boys/music/scensters/Islam/Allah. We may not have been “friends” – but we were cut from the same contradictory cloth with the same blasphemous struggles. We were kin. It’s just her cloth was louder.

Two months ago, she wrote me a late night drunken love letter from her phone. Little did I know then that it’d be a goodbye letter. An excerpt:

Incidentally, you are one of the most meaningful things I took from taqwacore, whatever that’s worth…. I think that probably you and me are going to be the most important ‘brown’ Muslim women of our generation. I’m happy for my daughter that you exist taz. If your work isn’t something she has to read and analyze in high school….we are going fucking Bedouin native.

Allah is huge and open and if he is going to hate me, which I don’t believe, he’d hate us together. I appreciate your commitment to the potential decline of haramis and how our god is so fucking full of love we will be okay. I love you, taz. I thought a lot about women, and Muslim women, and Muslim vs Arab vs Desi women and I’m sick of the divisors…But there are people like you and me that won’t lay down quietly. Feel me?

So, Ari Lauren Souad Said. Gaza Stripper. The only tribute I can think of is with words and to continue to live my life in a way that makes you proud. To be punk and loud and to fight for what’s right. To love Allah by being Muslim despite the contradictions and to love myself with all my contradictions. And to not lay down quietly.

I challenge everyone that reads this piece to the end to do the same.

Up the Taqx & Rest in Power, Ari. You are loved and missed. May your legacy live on.

Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un

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Tanzila “Taz” Ahmed is an activist and writer living in Oakland. She is the founder of South Asian American Voting Youth (SAAVY), an aspiring novelist and a long-time blogger for the popular South Asian blog Sepia Mutiny.