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Authors: Michael Knight

Tags: #Fiction, #Coming of Age

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BOOK: The Taqwacores
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“As-salaamu alaikum,” I called, frozen in the recliner as Umar walked up the steps.
“Brother Yusef Ali! Wa-alaikum as-salaam. Kay fallahukum,
y’akhi?”
“Ana bikail,” I replied, heaving myself up to shake his hand. The little I knew of Arabic beyond what served a religious purpose, I learned from him. To make it fair, he got some Urdu. “Key ali?” I asked.
“Teek hai, achha.” He reached into his khaki pocket and pulled out two thin siwaks, offering one to me. As I took it I noticed the broken skin on his knuckles but chose not to bring up the previous night. If Umar were in a bad mood I failed to see it. Perhaps he felt a special bond between us, being the only two in the house who had no idea what beer tasted like. I jerked the siwak between my teeth while Umar’s hung from his lips like a cigarette. He always stood as though anxiously prepared for some assailant to jump out at him from behind a tree. Kept trying not to but still stared at the 2:219 and cringed at the idea of a needle driving ink into my neck, but that summed up Umar. He wore his struggles like a badge. Our eyes met and I looked away quick.
“Did that hurt?” I asked, though we had talked about it before, most likely on other occasions that he caught me gawking.
“Al-hamdulilah,” he replied, holding the siwak between his index and middle fingers with the same cocky coolness of a cigarette.
Then we were both startled by a shrill whine whose source was unknowable because its sudden volume consumed the whole world, sounding like some outer-space animal as the pitch climbed until our ears hurt and kept going, kept going, reaching higher still until finally descending in a familiar melody.
It was an electric-guitar adhan.
With the second
Allahu Akbar
I realized it came from the roof.
I went inside and upstairs on a mission, straight to the bathroom past barefooted Amazing Ayyub making his wudhu in the sink. Following a coiled black cord that must have began at the amp down the hall, I climbed out the window onto the roof where
Jehangir Tabari stood statuesque with foot-high yellow mohawk thick and bristly like the brush on an old Roman soldier’s helmet, guitar hanging off his lean but urgently powerful frame. The house’s other mohawk, molded into four or five long orange points, belonged to an Indonesian called Fasiq Abasa who sat close to the roof’s edge with a blunt in hand and the Qur‘an in his lap. Neither of them saw me. Jehangir kept to his role as muezzin with utmost seriousness. Fasiq inhaled again and lowered his head, though I couldn’t tell if he was reading Qur’an or just silently mouthing the adhan. I felt the chill in my spine as calls to prayer have often provided, but there came with Jehangir Tabari’s a sensation entirely new: a surging resonance of hope, a vibrant six-stringed promise that Islam’s glory days were not the sole property of Abbasids and Fatimids but could be our days here, now, if we had the spirit to claim them.
His fingers lingered on the final
la ilaha illa Allah,
hitting every note of a man in Badshahi’s minaret. Like the adhan as traditionally performed, that last line hit me as vaguely sorrowful in its tone, almost a little death. Jehangir stood staring out over the roofs across the street, past them, past those, forward on to
something,
I don’t know what and I would have looked that way to see but my eyes were frozen on
him.
There’s no word for me but
taqwa
to call what beamed from his empyreal profile: the hair reaching for heaven, black leather vest crowded with spikes reflecting the sun, guitar dangling freely on its strap as he let go. I just looked at him, my body charged with a kind of holy nervousness until he turned and saw me.
“Fuck,” he said smiling, returning us to Earth with that raspy, scratchy voice like he had spent all night chain-smoking in the freezing rain—imagine Tim Armstrong with a Punjabi accent. “As-salaams, man, what’s up.”
That made Fasiq turn around.
“Shit! Yusef Ali, what’s the good word?”
“Wa-alaikum as-salaam,” I replied to Jehangir, shaking his hand and embracing delicately with the hanging guitar between us. Then I leaned just enough towards the roof edge to reach Fasiq’s offered hand.
“Yusef, you—?” asked Fasiq, gesturing to me with the blunt.
“I’m straight.” How long had that psychotic hashishiyyun known me and how many times had he offered? If I had been as harsh in my declines as Umar, the kid would have learned by now.
“Mash‘Allah,” Fasiq replied. With a big suck on the blunt he looked back down at his Qur’an.
And there we were, three idiots out on the roof: Jehangir with guitar hanging off him, Fasiq with his weed and kitab and me with my hands in my pockets.
“That’s bid’ah,” said a voice from inside the house. Umar stood leaning on the bathroom windowsill, peeling off some chipped paint in full hero pose. Everything that guy did, he just looked
tough
doing it.
“Okay,” Jehangir replied, “so it’s bid‘ah.” Umar was then distracted by the sight of Fasiq Abasa at the roof’s edge reading the Qur’an as he puffed. Fasiq looked back at Umar. My eyes darted from one to the other as though watching a game of telepathic tennis. Umar with 2:219 carved into his neck, Fasiq with lips pursed holding in the smoke. “You know,” said Jehangir, breaking the silence, “it’s only
Muslims
who use the term ‘innovation’ to mean something bad.”
“Don’t forget that you’re Muslim too,” said Umar, turning from Fasiq. “Aren’t you?”
“La ilaha illa Allah,” Jehangir replied. “Time for Asr.” Fasiq exhaled his smoke and we climbed back in the window.
I made wudhu in the same sink that Amazing Ayyub had just used. When I came downstairs Umar and Jehangir had cleared
most of the living room floor and laid out the prayer rugs, a line of four with one up in front facing the big hole in the wall. While in different colors with a variety of border designs, the rugs looked more or less uniform when laid out one next to the other. Green and gold with al-Aqsa, tan and red with the Prophet’s Masjid, green and gold with the Ka’ba, another green-and-gold al-Aqsa. Some of them had tags revealing where they had come from. Turkey, Egypt, Saudi, Pakistan. The imam rug was blue and gold with al-Aqsa. We had a five-man jamaat: me, Jehangir, Umar, Fasiq and Amazing Ayyub, all standing around with our discarded shoes scattered around the rugs.
“Who’s going to lead?” I asked.
“Fasiq?” asked Jehangir though I knew it was only to get a rise from Umar.
“He’s fuckin’ intoxicated,” Umar snapped. “I’m not praying behind him.”
“Fuck you, Umar,” said Fasiq, turning then to the Amazing One. “Ayyub?” Amazing Ayyub, still shirtless, threw his fists and knees in the air and did a dumb frenzied punk dance almost shaking the house with his stomps.
“Who knows the most Qur’an?” I asked. Fasiq looked at the carpet, its beer stains and cigarette burns partially veiled by our rugs.
“That’d be Umar,” Jehangir conceded, still in his spike-covered jacket.
“It smells like shit in here,” said Amazing Ayyub. “Shit and puke and... fuckin’ beer and shit.”
“Staghfir’Allah,” Umar replied, whipping out a bottle of rose-wood or sandalwood or Egyptian musk or something—you never knew what with him and his sophistication when it came to that stuff—and spilled it around the room. I’m not sure of the effect.
“Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar,” said Jehangir, to which we
assembled behind Umar. “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, ashadu an la ilaha illa Allah, ashadu anna Muhammadu rasullullah, hayyal as-salat, hayyal al-falah, qad iqama tis-salat, qad iqama...”
Umar turned his back on the big hole in the wall, Qur’anic plaques and posters and the Saudi flag with spray-painted anarchy-A and looked at us.
“Straighten out your lines,” he said before turning back around. Umar was annoying at times but remained the right guy to pray behind. He took it seriously and approached the manner with a firm holiness that immediately put me in the proper mode.
Umar made a silent du’a, building up the tense anticipation as I waited for him to finally lift his hands to his ears and begin the prayer. The underlying hostility between Umar and Jehangir or Umar and Fasiq died before our first sujdah. By the time Imam Umar greeted those angels on his left, we were all brothers again.
 
 
I had moved in little over a year before. Telling Ummi and Abu back in Syracuse that it’d be a house full of Muslims, they were more than happy to send the rent every month.
“It’d be better for you than living in the dorms,” Abu told me. “There are the very bad things there.”
“You live with Muslims,” said Ummi, “and stay focused.”
“As-salaamu alaikum,” Umar answered when I called the number on the flier. After a brief rundown on the rent, utilities and such he made sure to check whether I knew it was a
Muslim
house. Said my room’s previous occupant had been gone at least a year. His name was Mustafa and he lived firmly by Islamic principles, Umar explained, at such a level that no other resident attained in his time and none since have even approached. I discovered this upon my first inspection of the room as Mustafa had left some
books behind: all nine volumes of Sahih Bukhari bound in green leather, a copy of
The Spectacle of Death
and a cardboard box filled with gorgeously ornamented Qur’ans. “He used to get them free from the Saudi embassy all the time,” Umar explained. A flap on the box bore Mustafa’s name and the house’s address.
Along with unofficial tenant Fasiq Abasa, who crashed on one of our couches and occasionally put in for groceries, I constituted the third generation in the house’s Islamic history. The previous wave had seen the appearances of Jehangir Tabari and Amazing Ayyub. Originally, in what Umar would impress upon me as a primordial golden age, it was Mustafa, Umar, Rabeya and Rude Dawud (who back then was only Dawud).
“That was when we really had it,” Umar once told me in his truck. It, I assumed, meant
Islam
. “That’s why Rabeya’s room is downstairs,” he explained. “Back then we didn’t even want to live with a female, you know, but Mustafa said we could give her the room downstairs that went right to the back door so she could go in through the back. No males were allowed to use the downstairs bathroom, that was just for her. And we had curtains hanging over the doorway to the kitchen, you had to knock if you needed something. If she wasn’t in there you could go in but you had to announce yourself in case she was on her way to the kitchen, and if she was in there already she would slide you what you needed under the curtain.”
“Mash’Allah,” I replied. “So she wore full purdah even back then?”
“Al-hamdulilah, of course she did and back then she didn’t have patches on it or anything. Back then we prayed together, and we did it
right
. Right times, right ways. That was before Rabeya started demanding to lead salat, and before all these haram influences came in—khamr, zina, before all these parties.” More or less, Umar was saying
before Jehangir Tabari.
“Even me,” he said to my
surprise. “Even me, brother.”
“What?”
“I had something back then I might not have now. You know...” He looked at his truck’s tape player running Youth of Today’s “Disengage.” “You know, y‘akhi, they say the stringed instruments are not actually halal, they count as
ma’aazif
—”
“Insha’Allah,” I replied.
“Yeah,” said Umar. “Insha’Allah, that’s what the scholars say. Back when Mustafa had your room, we didn’t listen to haram things. We didn’t talk about haram things. We weren’t consuming haram things and we didn’t have kafrs in our house mixing males and females together, singing, swearing, doing such-and-such.”
I knew it was not Umar’s intention but somehow I felt as though it were all my fault—or at least that my presence symbolized the declining state of affairs.
Back when Mustafa had your room.
If Mustafa were still there Umar would have felt better about himself.
I confess that in the time I had that room, I barely cracked any of Mustafa’s books. The Bukharis gathered dust on his old bookshelf—if I needed anything of the good Imam it was easier to just look through hadith databases online. I took one of the Saudi Embassy’s Qur‘ans and put it by my bed, where it stayed more or less untouched besides the occasional bedtime reading of
Ya Sin.
Fasiq Abasa wanted the rest and I gladly parted with the obtrusive box. As for
The Spectacle of Death,
that went to Amazing Ayyub, and gave him a steady supply of conversation starters.
Hey y’akhi, you know what happens in Jehennam to women who wear perfume?
Thus-and-so.
 
 
On Fridays the living room doubled as a masjid, mostly for kids from the campus who couldn’t identify with the MSA. They were
nowhere near being ersatz mumins of Fasiq’s level, but you still had girls who didn’t cover their hair, guys who went to clubs down on Chippewa and so forth. Our house with its punk posters and vandalized Saudi flag was the closest thing they had to a comfortable Islamic experience in which they could pray and embrace their culture without having to feel inadequate. It took awhile for some to really adjust to that atmosphere in which it was okay to admit you did not pray five times daily, or that you once had an ice-cream dessert containing rum, or you dated and went to
kafr
parties.
Umar had been the original impetus behind holding jumaa in our house, but the feeling of the place easily surrendered itself to Jehangir. He’d stand up there by the hole in our wall with brilliant high stripe of hair down the middle of his head, the sides often dark with stubble and whip up something about the life of Rasullullah,
sallallaho alayhe wa salaam,
that would send us charging out the door feeling like we could be all the secret heroes who lurked as fantasies in our chests, the Super Mumins, MegaMujahids and Laser-Eyed Shaheeds. And Jehangir did it, Jehangir in his brown qurtab with gold trim and big yellow mohawk, Jehangir did it.
BOOK: The Taqwacores
7.14Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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