05/17/2026
In the early 2000s, a Danish-Turkish design student named Tesnim Sayar began attaching a detachable black plastic mohawk to her hijab — and in doing so, became one of the most striking faces of a subculture most people had never heard of.
The style was called taqwacore — a fusion of "taqwa," the Arabic word for God-consciousness, and "hardcore" punk. It was born from a 2003 novel by Michael Muhammad Knight, who imagined a Buffalo punk house full of mohawked Sufis, riot grrrls in band-patched burqas, and skinhead Shi'as. What Knight wrote as fiction quietly became reality, as young Muslims across the West began building the scene he had invented.
Sayar was studying fashion design in Kolding, Denmark, when her look started circulating online. The mohawk zipped on and off. The hijab stayed on. She wore rivet bracelets, a nose ring, safety pins, and plaid — and she was unbothered by the stares. "I have not designed it to provoke," she said. "My message is that you should not assume Muslim girls are boring."
The mohawk hijab became controversial in some Muslim communities, where questions arose about whether it contradicted the modesty principles the hijab is meant to embody. Sayar disagreed. "I am Muslim. I like my religion. I like my scarf. I cannot see why I should not be able to combine being both punk and Muslim."
She was later featured in the book Muslim Women Are Everything alongside SZA and America's first Muslim congresswomen — proof that a zipper, a mohawk, and a headscarf had said something the world was not ready to forget.
