Deli Boys, Muslim Punk Rock & Mortal Kombat with Shahjehan Khan
New Podcast Episode 25: Deli Boys, Muslim Punk Rock & Mortal Kombat with Shahjehan Khan
In this episode, we’re joined by the multi-talented Pakistani-American Shahjehan Khan, an actor, writer, musician, and host of the acclaimed podcast King of the World. We dive into his roles playing a character in Mortal Kombat, the new Hulu series Deli Boys, and his journey as a founding member of the trailblazing Muslim punk band The Kominas.
Podcast Co-Hosts: Abbas Mohamed & Irfan Rydhan
Edited by Abbas Mohamed
Intro Music by Dawan Muhammad
Audio Clip from Deli Boys courtesy of Hulu
Audio Clip of Disco Uncle by The Kominas, courtesy of Shahjehan Khan
Transcript:
Irfan: How did the Taqwacores influenced you and and how you got into the your
own punk Muslim band
Shah: yeah yeah so I um I think I was uh almost a high school
dropout definitely a college dropout um and one of my attempts at getting back
to school uh I ran into an old friend of mine who uh gave me this book uh by um
Michael Knight Taqwacores and it was you know it was definitely like very influential uh as like a young you know
young adult um you know typical confused various identities and things and um you know it kind of uh it’s a just for anybody who hasn’t read it it’s like a
fictional story about um a group of uh sort of like fringe Muslim misfit kids
uh in um and they kind of like make their own community through forced through punk rock and stuff and uh I had
never really read anything like it it was it’s been described in many different ways as like a catcher in the rye type thing for young Muslims or
whatever um and yeah we kind of like we were already thinking of starting a band
and you know this book definitely like influenced us to also in addition to the other stuff we were writing like think
about uh our various um ident you know music obviously is like a expression of
yourself and stuff and like what’s going on in the world around you and this is like 2003 2004 so very like post 911 um
and yeah we just kind of started this band and um it was also the early days of the internet not the early in the
sense of like social media you know like MySpace is where we put out our first songs and um and that’s kind of like
where we started to connect with other uh other folks around the the country and around the world who you know either
through the book or just through our music um sort of to kind of like make our own little community of misfits and
in a way it kind of became this thing where the book sort of like
it it create it felt like it was sort of a melding of the fiction and the non-fiction like we this movement not
movement even just like community was created um and from there you know we kind of just like met all these people
and yeah it definitely like um was uh influential and I think the early
history of the band um it also became a little bit difficult to be you know No
musician wants to be stuck in a label so it became this very you know it was also
because of the post 911 stuff it was a very like uh white centric media
landscape so the way that we were always described was you know uh Muslim punk band and thats not all that we were
We just celebrated our 20th anniversary as a band.
it’s pretty cool so many years later.
Listen to the Full Interview here:
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