The Taqwacores (23 page)

“The Infibulateds.”

“What’s their deal?”

“They’re this riot grrrl band dealing with sex and gender issues. Most of their songs are along those lines. Like how a female can’t express her sexuality to any extent and still maintain Islamic dignity, a girl who enjoys sex and would freely talk about it must automatically be suffering from low self-esteem, shit like that, they just fuckin’ tear all that apart.”

“Nice.”

“How about Osama bin Laden’s Tunnel Diggers?”

“Yeah, definitely. Have you ever seen those guys? They fuckin’ rock.”

For some reason that pulled me back to the conversation.

I knew the band’s name didn’t mean anything. Punk bands gave themselves dumb names all the time, whether to be funny or for shock value. There were bands called the Child Molesters, the Nipple Erectors, the White SS, the Sniveling Shits, Raped. But still it made me think of the man.

His image popped easy enough in my head. The long beard made his face almost seem narrower. Eyes quietly magnetic. Extended index finger in limp holy point. White turban, camouflaged field jacket over white jalab. He had the right look to be a Che in other hemispheres, portraits unassuming but baronial, with t-shirts and posters and his own action figure.

“How about Bilal’s Boulder?” mused Jehangir.

“Shit no,” said Muzammil. “Those guys are assholes.”

“Yeah, they kind of are. They’re a pretty good band, though.”

“Bilal’s Boulder? They don’t even allow girls at their shows!”

“Yeah, but they’re taqwacore.”

“I don’t know, bro. That might cause some problems.”

“Well we’re telling them it’s an all-gender show right off the bat, and if they don’t like it then they don’t have to come.”

“Some of the other bands are going to piss them off.”

“That’s too bad,” said Jehangir. “I don’t want to exclude anybody.”

“These guys are total cocks.”

“I know, y’akhi. But the whole point of taqwacore is that Islam can take any shape you want it to. If we deny a band their spot because we don’t like their attitudes or their interpretation, then we’re no better then all the Conformist Chickenshit imams out there.”

“Okay,” said Muzammil. “Bilal’s Boulder, cool.”

The three of us drove around Buffalo in Jehangir’s car, hitting the broken-down decayed parts of town. Jehangir had his Rancid tape in, starting at “The War’s End.” Went down Tonawanda Street and the giant porn shop with big yellow billboard-style placards all over it.
Adult Videos
.
Over 75,000 titles
. The wind pushing gusts of snow off closed-down factory roofs. Whole streets of shameful redbrick cubes with plywood windows. Everything seemed to wear a layered-on film of grime and grease that would
take dump trucks of lye to remove. Jehangir’s brown wool pakul gave the drive a third-world hardness look. Third-World Buffalo. Drove by a lot with weeds poking up out of the snow and could still see the concrete outline of where something used to be. Four steps that might have once led to a door. Half-buried shopping carts. Tires. Palettes. Orange cones. Plenty of useful things stacked up in ignored pyramid-piles. Bricks, concrete cylinders, metal pipes. A skeletal car with all four doors open, everything torched so you couldn’t even know what color it used to be, the seats gone and a mass of red wires under what used to be the dashboard. In the surrounding background, more buildings with windows boarded or even bricked.

“Wish Amazing Ayyub was here,” said Jehangir, “to tell us how dead Buffalo is.”

“Yeah,” said Muzammil.

“Remember that dog Fasiq found?” Jehangir asked me.

“Ilm?”

“Yeah, Ilm. Ilm the Dog.”

“Yeah.”

“You think he’s still alive?”

“No, probably not.”

“Insha‘Allah. Lake Erie winter, y’akhi. All these California bands don’t know what they’re getting into. Just the other day Rabeya was complaining that Muslim clothes are so paper-thin... they don’t make shalwar kameezes for Buffalo.”

From there we went to the Galleria Mall, where smiling Jehangir had his picture taken on Santa’s lap. Pulled out of the parking lot to the sounds of Uncool’s “Finale,” Jehangir holding his Polaroid on the edges.

Back at the house I considered another romp with my right hand when Jehangir popped in my room.

“Got something for you,” he said, tossing a book my way. I caught it and examined the cover with cheesy old illustration of some Flash Gordon type villain sneering sinister with his laser gun and the title in big bold obsolete font.
Twenty-Four Septendecillion,
by Abu Afak.

“What’s this?”

“The great Islamic pulp novel,” Jehangir replied. “It’s from the 1940s-the heyday of
Amazing Stories
and all that shit, the shit that guys like Ray Bradbury grew up on. Abu Afak, he was like a fuckin’ philosopher disguising his ideas in cornball outer-space stories. He was like Islam’s Robert Heinlein.”

“So what’s this one about?”

“Muslims landing on Pluto.”

“Ohhhhh-kay...”

“It’s cool, check it out. It’s like, in the future where Pakistan’s the world superpower. The main character grows up in this fictional city called Jinnahabad where his dad’s the muezzin of the largest masjid in the world, and then he ends up being an astronaut on the first-ever expedition to Pluto and after taking the first human steps on its surface he gives the adhan.”

“Interesting.”

“Give it a chance.”

He left and I sat on the bed with Abu Afak. The pages were brownish-yellow and smelled musty.

Buffalo winter.

Snow came so constant it never had a chance to get dirty. Came down light and harmless but added up on the ground. Covered the roads and made your car’s rear tires swing a different direction than the front.

Road salt stained everything. Cars, parking lots, the bottoms of your pantlegs. The sky looked like that too.

President McKinley was assassinated in this town, by an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz.

Jehangir and Fasiq hid their more or less bald skulls in various headwear. Fasiq’s kifaya scarf made from a necktie and old NOFX shirt covered his ears and wrapped around his neck. Jinnah caps and black ski hats, standard. With brown wool pakul and jacket spikes Jehangir resembled a post-apocalyptic mujahideen like the Taliban met
Mad Max.

He kept on pushing toward his show, making phone calls and arrangements and pulling it all together between a date, a venue and however many bands. What really amazed me was that all of Jehangir’s force and ambition could blossom in a town like this: home to industrial decay and four Super Bowl chokes, rotten weather and smells of crack cocaine cooking outside. I had never known the smell before living on that street. It’s like sweet dog food.

Back to Buffalo winter. The bathroom window stayed closed. Skateboards were shelved. Spending all our time inside, each of us had interludes of being sick of everyone else.

I took to chronic masturbation. The routine repeated itself at least twice a day. Obligatory pre-game urination, handful of toilet paper for the wipe-up, locking of the door, unveiling of
Victoria’s Secret,
focus on the same pictures almost every time.

Sometimes I felt bad—usually in the split-second following ejaculation. Right after you spill it, you forget why you had ever
needed to in the first place. Once I swore off self-abuse but made it barely twenty-four hours before striking a deal with myself: jerking was fine, but without the aid of supermodels in lingerie. I threw out the catalog and touched myself to its memory. Within a week I hit the mall and bought another.

I once walked in on the girls when they were talking about it. The clitoris serves no other purpose, Rabeya preached to Fatima. It’s your body. How can you be open to someone else touching you but then can’t touch yourself?

I turned around to dip quick out of the kitchen.

“Wait, Yusef,” Rabeya called. “Sit with us a sec.”

“Ok.”

“I want to ask you something.”

“Sure.”

“Do you jerk off?” Fatima looked down at the table.

“Whoa,” I replied. “I don’t know if—”

“C’mon, we’re big kids. You like girls, right?”

“Of course.”

“But you’re not doing anyone.”

“No.”

“So you’re taking care of your shit, right? You’re not all backed-up I hope. That just leads to nasty attitudes.”

“No. I mean, sure. Yeah, I do.”

“You masturbate.”

“Yeah.”

“I think masturbation’s different for guys than for girls,” Fatima interjected.

“Maybe,” said Rabeya. “But what does that have to do with you being afraid to touch your own freakin’ anatomy?”

“Has anyone made Asr?” I asked. “I think it’s time, I’m not sure though.”

“No,” they both answered at once.

“I don’t really feel like it,” said Rabeya. She knew what I was thinking. “And no, it’s not my period.”

 

 

One of the diners off Elmwood Avenue had a promotion offering free ice cream whenever it snowed. Jehangir, Fasiq, Ayyub and I went when the snow was still manageable.

“It’s not snowing,” argued the manager.

“What are you talking about?” scoffed Jehangir. “Look outside!”

“That’s freezing rain.”

“Bullshit MAN!” freaked Ayyub.

We walked out and the manager saved himself four free ice creams. Amazing Ayyub ran around the parking lot throwing his arms up and shrieking like a nut. “THAT’S FUCKING BULLSHIT!” he yelled at a passing car. “DON’T EAT HERE THEY’RE FUCKIN’ CHEAP ASSHOLES.” Fasiq went to a small hill of snow that had been shoved into a corner by the plow, grabbing himself a dirty handful. He then went back in the diner, only to emerge with the same snow now in a cup with cherry-flavored syrup on it.

“Look, Ayyub,” said Fasiq, getting him to stop his crazy-man dance. “They gave me a free sno-cone.”

“No shit! I’m getting one too.”

“Don’t worry about it, man. Take mine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Rock it out, bro.”

“Thanks Fasiq.” Ayyub took the cup and spoon and went to town.

“How is it?” asked Jehangir, lips posed unnaturally to hold in the laugh.

“It’s good man. Fuckin’ cherry with chocolate bits.”

The three of us simultaneously howled. “What’s so funny, guys?”

Then we went to Target so Jehangir could buy Christmas lights for his room.

 

 

I spent Thanksgiving break in Syracuse. The two-hour drive from Jehangir to my parents was essentially a straight line down 1-90 East. It was cold at home and we had
some
snow but no Lake Erie effect.

That Friday I went to our regular masjid less than a mile from the Carrier Dome. It had lost all its religiousness, but not in a bad way. I felt towards the place the way you might look at your old elementary school: a museum of my more innocent years, a comfortable naiveté that you could wrap all around yourself and hide in for an hour or two. Back when that mosque was my world, it was a nicer world. Abi sat by me for jumaa. Ummi was off somewhere, wherever they put the women.

At first glance nothing had changed. The carpeting, walls, mihrab, calligraphy, place for your shoes, fliers on the bulletin board for protests and Islamic clothing. It threw me off a little to see unfamiliar faces. Couldn’t help but feel that a new generation was creeping in on my turf. Just by their newness they were improper and inappropriate.

At least we had the same imam. I have heard very few khutbahs in my life that were delivered with any sort of enthusiasm. That day’s was not one of them. Came out dry and flat but even this fueled my warm spot for the place.

Then the imam addressed the room’s large number of college students. There are many dangers facing us, he said. Alcohol,
drugs, mixing of men and women. If you cared about your deen, he explained, you would have no kafr friends. The word came to me like a slur.
Kafr.
It’s an ugly word. I think it’s meant to sound ugly. Maybe it’s just ugly because we use it in ugly ways. There are varying pronunciations, but they’re all ugly.
Kafr. Kafeer. Kafirun.
It’s our us-and-them word to push
them
away. Don’t listen to that, that’s
kaft
thinking. President so-and-so has sold us out to the
kafrs.
It’s so difficult raising your children Muslim in
KAFR
society. The
kafrs
and their alcohol. The
kafrs
and their teen pregnancy. That’s a
kafr
problem. Good thing we’re Muslims.

I thought about Rabeya not praying because she didn’t feel like it, and Jehangir the womanizing boozehound, and Muzammil the liwatiyyun, Fasiq Abasa the hashishiyyun calling himself with a bad name like Fasiq Abasa, Fatima fearing for her hymen with Jehangir’s hand at the threshold, Amazing Ayyub spitting at football players; what would the imam call them? Did they count as kafr friends? I knew I was Muslim, though still not a good one. But these guys, they took it to a whole new level. Lynn was a kafr, I knew that. Reading Sufi poets doesn’t make you Muslim. Rumi wasn’t the Prophet, as Umar would say.