Shahjehan Khan rounded a corner at the Grammy Museum in downtown L.A. and let out a laugh.
Before him was a piece of memorabilia -- a destroyed school bus stop sign -- from Khan's punk rock band the Kominas, showcased in the museum's yearlong exhibit "Songs of Conscience, Sounds of Freedom."
How did it get there, he was asked. Backup vocalist Nyle Usmani, his arm slung over Khan's shoulder, jumped in, giving some sociopolitical context to the Boston-based band's moderate success: "I'd like to thank 9/11. I wouldn't be here without you."
"Yeah, basically we wouldn't be here without," Khan agreed.
Khan, 25, guitarist and vocalist for the Kominas, which is Urdu for scoundrel, was visiting the museum while on a cross-country, 15-city tour that saw the band play several concerts in the Los Angeles area last week. They were joined on tour by another punk band, Sarmust, and free-stylist Propaganda Anonymous, making their way from New York City to Los Angeles and back to the Boston area, all crammed into a Honda and a Volvo.
Since forming in 2004, the mostly Muslim punk rock band (one of the four members is Hindu) -- along with a handful of similar groups that started around that time under the banner of Taqwacore -- has been an irresistible combination for the media. The groups' satirical and brash lyrics and song titles criticize both fundamentalist Islam and post-Sept. 11 ethnic and religious profiling.
Taqwacore is a melding of the term "hard core" with the Arabic word "taqwa," which means piety. It has inspired headlines of juxtaposition and alliteration: "Piety and Punk," "Allah and Amps."
The recognition that the Taqwacore bands have gotten -- and it certainly is more recognition than they would have gotten if they'd been punk without the Muslim twist -- is a Catch-22 for them: While they welcome the attention from both the mainstream media and the blogosphere, they resent that the focus has been more on the Muslim angle than on their music.
"We're not unaware of the fact that, because of the shock value of what we're trying to say, it's easy to get press coverage," said Khan, who, bespectacled and simply dressed, looks more accountant than punk.
The bands have been covered by Rolling Stone, Newsweek, the New York Times and the BBC. The unusual religious-musical genre combination also has attracted attention from News of the Weird, which wrote a brief about their first tour in 2007. The item was listed under "Latest Religious Messages," between news of a Baptist pastor who had urged his congregation to pray for his critics' deaths and Israeli radio stations that had banned a vocalist from their airwaves because he sang in falsetto.
