The Taqwacores (25 page)

Every room downstairs was crowded with taqwacores. There were maybe forty new characters, all of them presumably sleeping over for the next two nights. Jehangir had no idea where they’d all go, but they weren’t the type to complain about sleeping on a crowded floor.

I viewed each face only in terms of what band he or she came with. It was like the United Nations. “The bass player for the Mutaweens now has the floor...”

One guy stood out: a big barnhouse African in GBH t-shirt, DogPile pants and Doc Martens. He could have been three hundred pounds but it was solid and strong. I felt like a child shaking his hand. He hit a room hard with the kind of awesome imposition that Umar wished he could pull off. I could have pictured him as a third-world dictator with gold epaulets on each shoulder and a wide red sash across his chest. His name was Mahdi and he played the drums for Osama bin Laden’s Tunnel Diggers. He came
from Chad, which I think left an impression on me because you rarely hear about Chad. All I knew about the place was that Qadhafi had once invaded it.

As I walked through my house feeling more like an anthropologist than actual member of this strange society, I could not help but note one detail setting these taqwacores apart from your average punk—one article figuring prominently in almost every costume—one symbol jumping out at me from t-shirt iron-ons, necklaces, patches and even tattooed forearms, calling my attention away from eyes and faces and names so all I saw was it—usually in blue and white—with all its years of meaning: good meaning, bad meaning, burning-flag protest meaning, evil occupiers shooting AK-47s at boys with rocks meaning, the meaning my imams gave it, the meaning my parents gave it, the meaning it carried every time I ever saw it in an Islamic magazine.

The symbol was this:

“I don’t understand,” I said to Jehangir, pointing to a huge one on the back of some guy’s leather jacket.

“Pretty punk rawk, huh?”

“The Star of David?”

“Bro, it’s like back in ‘77. The old-school punks like Iggy Pop and Sid Vicious, they used to wear the swastika and all this Nazi bullshit. Doesn’t mean they were racists or anything like that—they were just trying to piss people off, make passersby on the street uncomfortable. So if this is Muslim Punk, and our community and audience is all fuckin’ Muslim, what symbol’s more unsettling than the Star of fuckin’ David? Doesn’t mean any of these guys are Zionists or anti-Palestinian fuckin’ whatever, it’s just to get a reaction.”

“But what’s the point?” I challenged. “With Sid wearing the swastika or these guys wearing the Star—beyond offending people, what’s it all for?”

“What do you mean?” he replied as though amazed I had not yet grasped the concept.

“Why the need to rile everyone up?”

“Because it’s fun.”

 

 

Punk rock means deliberately bad music, deliberately bad clothing, deliberately bad language and deliberately bad behavior. Means shooting yourself in the foot when it comes to every expectation society will ever have for you but still standing tall about it, loving who you are and somehow forging a shared community with all the other fuck-ups.

Taqwacore is the application of this virtue to Islam. I was surrounded by deliberately bad Muslims but they loved Allah with a gonzo kind of passion that escaped sleepy brainless ritualism and the dumb fantasy-camp Islams claiming that our deen had some inherent moral superiority making the world rightfully ours.

I think it’s a good thing.

There’s no room in taqwacore for half-assed Muslims playing off as though they never miss a prayer. The ones who live pseudo-cool and then come to the masjid wearing masks. They’re weak and have no real personality and taqwacores would eat them alive. If you don’t pray, don’t pretend. Don’t build a complex thinking you’re beneath all the Super Mumins of the world because you went to the prom and think you have to hide it from everyone. Be Muslim on your own terms. Tell the world to eat a dick.

Look at me, saying this. I stand for almost everything that taqwacore is not. But I fake it reasonably well.

Riding in the back seat of Fatima’s car—Fasiq took shotgun—to the liquor store on Grant Street, Fasiq reading Sufi-ness into Fatima’s Saves the Day (“In ‘At Your Funeral’ he says
the food
that
celebrates your end
is a fuckin’ pig, you know? It’s like Muhammad’s dying, it’s the end of Shari’ a”) and Islam’s plight in Moxy Fruvous (“D’you hear that?
I’m telling you I was the King of Spain... now I eat humble pie...
”). I was beginning to accept that Allah spoke to Fasiq through weed and song lyrics. Why not?

 

 

Returned home with armfuls of liquor for the guests.

“You’re about to see how it really is,” warned Jehangir as he passed out clear-bottled Coronas to waiting Muslim hands. The taqwacores were all loud. I didn’t hear a damn thing anybody said. Someone turned on the music, beginning with the Germs’ “Fuck You” but it just drowned into everything else. There were a mess of girls. Some covered up completely like Rabeya. Others wore regular hejabs but decorated them with band patches. On one I saw a Bettie Page button.

A skinny, wiry punk with a war-torn forty-year-old face, barbell in his septum and high black mohawk with the rest of his hair growing into a crew-cut turned to me, grabbed me by the neck and I watched his mouth move though I couldn’t hear anything he said. I looked at him with puzzled eyes. He pulled me closer and yelled.

“As-salaamu alaikum!”

“Wa alaikum as-salaam,” I yelled back.

“I’m the fuckin’ proof of everything this whole fuckin’ shit says.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everything Islam tells you to do,” he screamed into my ear
with beer breath, “let me tell you something: you
do
it, or else you end up like me. The Qur‘an forbids alcohol, right? Look at me, bro. I’ve crashed cars, got my nose busted a fuckload of times and once I threw up right on a bitch as I was going knuckle-deep in her dirty little twat. That’s right, I got my fuckin’ puke in her hair and all on her shirt. But Islam tells you to keep your thing dry until you’re married, right? Bro—you know how many haram cunts I’ve had? And now I have green shit coming out of my dick at all hours of the fuckin’ day and I got cauliflowers growin’ on my asshole. And do I have fuckin’ kids out there somewhere? Shit if I know, fuckin’ sad-sack bastards. So there you have it, man. Read your fuckin’ Qur’an.”

“Okay.”

“I’m telling you that because I love you.”

“Thank you, brother.”

“You ever read?”

“Read what?”

“I dunno... books?”

“Yeah, sometimes.”

“Here.” He reached into the back pocket of his tight jeans and pulled out a beaten-up old flimsy paperback. “You ever read this guy?”

The author’s name was Abu Afak. The book was titled
The Rose Gardens of Mars.

“Yeah,” I replied. “I’ve never seen this one, though.”

“He’s a fucked-up dude,” said the punk. “He was like a fuckin’ science-fiction guy, you know what I’m saying? He wrote about the fuckin’ future.”

“So what’s this book about?”

“It’s fuckin’... Christ, it’s about the future and in the future Saudi is the fuckin’, fuckin’ where America is now... you know what I mean? Saudi rules the world. So Saudi leads the colonization
of Mars. And when they’re colonizing Mars they find all these fuckin’ Martians, right? And the Saudis, the first thing that comes to their minds is whether or not these fuckin’ Martians have the free will to choose between Islam and kafr... because if they do, then it’s the Saudis’ responsibility to give the Martians daw’ah and bring them to Islam, inshaAllah.”

“That sounds interesting.”

“So yeah, fuckin’... they have this big conference of scholars and shit in Riyadh, and they debate whether or not the Martians have souls, and this that and the other thing, all that fuckin’ mullah bullshit-”

I saw the door open and four more taqwacores come in. Everything stopped. Each of them wore a headwrap. Full beard, shaved mustache. Heavy winter coats leaving their jalabs visible from the waist down. They didn’t look anything like a punk band except for their mean eyes.

“As-salaaaaaaamu alaikum,” yelled Jehangir, running to them with open arms and a Corona in his left hand, “wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh!” He wrapped himself around one of them in a big brotherly hug that left the guy unsure of what to do.

“Wa alaikum as-salaam wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh,” he replied coolly.

“Hey everybody,” proclaimed Jehangir with his left arm around the poor Muslim, peering from the corners of his eyes at Jehangir’s Corona. “It’s fuckin’ Bilal’s Boulder!” The room gave salaams of varying confidence.

“Brother,” said the one by Jehangir. “We just came to say hello. We’re sleeping in our van.”

“Are you fuckin’ nuts?” shrieked Jehangir. “We have plenty of room here—well, not
plenty
of room but we got a big-ass house, what’s four more guys-”

“Brother, al-hamdulilah. Thank you so much but we are sleeping
in the van, insha’Allah.”

“Yo y‘akhi it’s fuckin’ freezing out there. You guys don’t really know how it gets here in Buffalo, so why don’t you just stay in and—”

“We are okay, brother.” And with that they turned around to go right back out the door.

“What’s with that?” asked somebody.

“I’ve never seen such scary dudes speakin’ so gently,” said Rabeya.

“They’re a different bunch,” replied Jehangir, his eyes stuck on the closed door.

“They’re a buncha cocks,” said Muzammil.

“They’re decent guys,” said Jehangir. “They’ll give you anything. If all they have to give you is a fuckin’ Bic pen, they’ll fork it over. But they’re a little rough to deal with sometimes—”

“Hatemongers, Jehangir. Fuckin’ bigots. If they had their way I’d be tossed from a minaret.” Jehangir paused for a moment.

“Yeah,” he said softly. “Yeah, Muzammil. They hate you. And they hate me too. They hate all of us for something. Me for the beer in my hand, you for the cock in your mouth, Rabeya for having her clitoris intact. We’re all doing something haram. Look at us. We’re the ones that have always been fuckin’ excluded, ostracized, afraid to be ourselves around our fuckin’ brothers. They don’t build masjids for us. We have to get our own. A fuckin’ fag mosque in Toronto, you know I’m all for it. Female imams, God bless ’em. Whatever. You know I don’t give a shit. But let’s not play that bullshit game where once we get our own scene we can push people to the sidelines, to the fuckin’ fringe like they did us. Do you only want a community so you can make someone
else
feel like the Outsider?” His voice gradually raised. “Fuck that,” he said sharply. “Fuck being as small as they are. I say be big. Be bigger. Kill ’em with kindness. How the fuck are they going to hate you
when you love them?”

Then somebody pushed his way through the people. “Brother, man—” was all Jehangir said before Umar opened the door and stepped out.

 

 

Suggested soundtrack: “California Babylon” by the Transplants.

When you have dozens of people in a house and none of them are going anywhere, how does the party end? How does anyone ever sleep? I began wondering that when things were still up and going at four a.m. There was no room to move downstairs. Even the upstairs hallway had turned into an obstacle course with drinkers and small-talkers and sleazy hook-ups of every persuasion. Liwats, sihaqs, Ayyub with a girl whose belly spilled out of her shirt. Umar spent the night in a van with Bilal’s Boulder. I imagined what sermons they gave each other about how rotten all of this was. In the house there were no sermons but thousands of stories, legends and lore about crazy things that happened on the other coast, unforgettable monsters, unbelievable shows, tales that made the tellers more worldly for having been there and the audiences feeling like they had just stumbled into the genuine wealth of their shared culture.

At Fajr time at least half of us were still conscious. Dee Dee Ali made the adhan. Everyone put their bottles down and took their boots off. I looked around. There were a lot more bottles than people. Fasiq turned off the music. My eyes were heavy. Big Mahdi from Osama bin Laden’s Tunnel Diggers led the prayer with a tuba voice that matched his frame. Dee Dee up in front gave the iqama. I have no idea who stood by me on either side. I never even learned half these guys’ names.

Halfway through the short prayer I realized that none of us
had made Isha. Whatever. After Fajr the taqwacores laid down anywhere there was room. Everyone gave up their floor space. Dee Dee Ali and a bunch of others went into Jehangir’s room. Rabeya took three or four riot grrrls in hers. Taqwacores piled in Umar’s room. Two liwats were already asleep in his bed and none of us cared what he’d say about it. I had all four members of Vote Hezbollah plus a few miscellaneous on my bedroom floor. I fell asleep thinking something holy had happened.