The Taqwacores (4 page)

“Khalif-
ornia?”

“Yeah, y‘akhi, Khalifornia. There’s a group out there, they’re trying to establish the Khilafah out there. Call themselves fuckin’ Khalifornia.”

We laughed and then Fasiq came out of the cigar store with his big dumb mohawk and rolling papers. “What took you so long?” yelled Jehangir across the parking lot.

“You wouldn’t believe it,” Fasiq yelled back. “Fuckin’ Sayyed was in there.”

“What? What the shit is Sayyed doing in there? Is he hashishiyyun now?”

“Nah, he was going out and his kafr friend asked him to pick up papers so we were just in there shooting the shit.”

“We’ll wait for him, see if he needs a ride.”

Sayyed was a good Muslim—at least less likely than Jehangir and crew to get thrown out of an ISNA convention. I sat in the back seat with him as Jehangir peeled out of the parking lot, Fasiq riding shotgun, Screeching Weasel’s “Anthem for a New Tomorrow” emanating from Jehangir’s cheap old tape player. We all tried coming up with things to talk about with Sayyed—
how are classes, how’s your family
and so forth. It all seemed somehow awkward; but I fear that I might have been in his place once before learning to coolly interact with guys like Fasiq Abasa. We dropped him off at the campus with the usual pleasantries and then swung back to our awful house.

Amazing Ayyub was out on the porch with big KARBALA you could read on his chest a mile away, saw us and ran inside to put on Sham 69’s “Hey Little Rich Boy.” Then he burst back out, flew over the porch steps and leaped onto the roof of Jehangir’s car to dance above my head. When I stepped out he met me with a flying plancha off the car. We rolled around on the front lawn for awhile. I’ve learned from experience not to wear my nicer clothes around these guys.

I’m not sure how Amazing Ayyub got that appellation or even how he ended up a permanent pseudo-resident of our house, but I remember the first time I met him. I was down in the living room trying to troubleshoot my laptop, fairly new to the house myself. Jehangir introduced us. Ayyub was shirtless, bringing my eyes immediately to his tattoo.

“Do you know anything about computers?” I asked. “My sound-chip is giving me a hassle, but it worked fine upstairs—”
Ayyub leaned over me as though he would assess the situation, but then—with no kleenex or even his hand to block it—he blew his nose with such violent energy it sent a long yellow-green projectile right at my screen. We both just looked at it, contemplating the sparkly rainbow-dots its accompanying spray made of my pixels.

Then I looked at the Amazing One. “What are you studying?” I asked. “What’s, uh, what’s your major? Or do you not, uh, do you go to school, or...”

 

 

After examining the grass stains from our impromptu wrestling match, I went inside to see what the guys were up to though I should have figured since Fasiq had just bought rolling papers. They were up in Rude Dawud’s room with the door closed and the Specials’ “Rudy Ska” coming through the walls.

I opened the door to a blast of smoke and Rude Dawud explaining to Fasiq that “whether you say ‘Allah’ or you say ‘Jah,’ brother, what does it matter?” Dawud—Rude, priceless Dawud in an almost-Hawaiian shirt but still with the sunglasses and pork-pie hat—saw me and smiled. “Hey, brother Yusef, how are you doing man?”

“Al-hamdulilah,” I replied, shaking Dawud’s hand and sitting on his bed by Jehangir. He had the weed in his left and passed it to Fasiq. The room smelled rotten. Dawud’s walls were covered with pictures of Haile Selassie and two three-foot by five-foot flags—one for his homeland, the other a fashion statement. He saw me looking at them.

“The Sudan,” he explained, pointing to the one with green triangle against red, white and black stripes. “Jamaica,” he added, pointing to the yellow X dividing green top-bottom from black left-right.

“Mash’Allah,” I replied. Fasiq inhaled and then motioned to me. I raised my hand in silent but polite refusal and he passed the ganja to Jehangir.

“In the Sudan, brother, that is where you see Islam, the way it really is, the way Islam is supposed to be,” he said, struggling to get his words together. “I mean, brother, the government there is very bad, they are very very bad—but the
people,
y’akhi, they are the good people. They are good Muslim people.”

“Al-hamdulilah,” I replied.

“And Jamaica, brother, you know, it is the same way—spiritu—al people, brother, good people. I was just saying to brother Fasiq here, brother, you know? Whether you say ‘Allah’ or if you say ‘Jah’ what does it matter? We are all brothers, right?”

“Right.”

“We all come from single pair, right?”

“Subhana’Allah,” I said smiling.

“Yes, brother! Subhana
Jah!
It is same, right?”

“We’re all brothers,” said Fasiq. Jehangir leaned back taking it all in.

“Brother,” said Rude Dawud, “we all come from the Earth, you know? We all come from the Earth, and we all go back to the Earth—”

He said ‘Earth’ with a slight discarding of the
h
—almost
ert
, but not quite.

As Fasiq stood up I noticed he had a Qur’an with him, one of the copies I had given him from Mustafa’s legacy. He gave his salaams to everyone and left the room, closing Dawud’s door behind him. I knew he’d climb out the bathroom window to the roof. With Fasiq gone, it suddenly seemed unnatural for me to sit in a room clouded with marijuana smoke, so I gave my salaams and followed him.

Standing by the bathroom sink, I looked out the window at that
mohawked Malaysian hashishiyyun in black zip-up Operation Ivy hoodie, his back to me bearing the faceless image of Ska Man. I looked at the character who was really only an outline, a ragged hat-wearing silhouette against the backdrop of a full moon as he lunged forward in frozen leap from some urban rooftop, perhaps, as he pounced down on muggers and evil-doers. Then I felt self-conscious about studying a cartoon on the back of my friend’s sweatshirt, especially since Fasiq was unaware of my presence. I left him and his Qur‘an, wondering if maybe I should have just stayed there in case he took a chemically-impaired fall off the roof. Staghfir’Allah.

I walked back to Dawud’s room, opened the door and just kind of stood there awkwardly watching them smoke and laugh.

“Al-hamdulilah,” said Jehangir, leaning back, his eyes red. “Al-hamdulilahi rabbil’Alameen, yeah yeah, ar-Rahmanir Raheem, maliki yawmi-deen! Yusef, I’m just an innocent poor heart, that’s all. And maybe I’m just an innocent poor heart because my Abu kicked off when I was seven and left me surrounded by women who only wanted me to be
happy
and didn’t give a fuck how I ended up otherwise. Did you ever think of that?”

“No,” I replied, half-wondering if this had anything to do with my parents instructing me to take engineering for a major. “I never thought of that, y’akhi.”

“Fuck,” he said, sitting up straight on the bed, eyes off to nowhere, keeping his mouth open long after saying the word. “Me neither.”

I never approached my eternal sobriety with the same militancy as Umar; nor have I ever identified with his straightedge punk scene, mainly because I don’t care for the music. Straightedge bands are just mad and noisy; I happen to prefer melody and at least
somewhat
coherent lyrics. There have been times, however, that I conceded to others’ placement of me in the straightedge category, because with the label came a validation of my own coolness;
without it I would simply be a guy who didn’t drink, smoke or have sex. So I may have attended at least one of Jehangir’s parties with black-marker X’s across my hands and requesting Minor Threat from whoever was manning the CD player at the time.

Strangely, however, for as many punks who replied with “oh, you’re straightedge?” when I turned down weed or beer, almost as many have told me that I’m as far from edge as Fasiq Abasa. As the movement evolved it lent itself to a variety of interpretations and criteria as to what exactly
straightedge
meant. Some hard-liners have taken the “poison-free” ideology so far as to say that I could not call myself straightedge if I used Tylenol for a headache. Many others have added eating meat to the straightedge
fard
, some of whom require complete veganism.

It is also worth noting that the man credited as founding father and patron saint of the culture, former Minor Threat singer Ian MacKaye—while still abstaining from alcohol, drugs and meat—does not call himself straightedge or identify with the movement. It had swelled into something outlandishly removed from anything he intended with that simple song back in 1981.

Jehangir told me that many taqwacore bands in California were straightedge, forming amongst themselves a unique sub-scene amalgam from the existing straightedge culture and traditional Islamic practice—the local equivalent of which, I imagine, was our own Umar, who had fashioned his own Islamo-Punk identity completely unaware of the taqwacores out West. X’s on his hands, 2:219 on his neck—straightedge offered Umar not only an endorsement of Muslim abstinence but also the heroic stand-tall toughness that he personally craved.

When he came home I was in the kitchen, waiting for my tea to cool.

“Don’t blow on it,” he said firmly.

“What?”

“Don’t blow on it. It’s not Sunnah.”

“Oh,” I replied. “I had never heard that before.”

“Prophet Rasullullah
sallallaho alayhe wa salaam
said not to blow on hot food or drink. It’s been proven by modern science too, the wisdom in that.”

“SubhanaAllah,” I said.

“But you know, y’akhi, it’s not a good idea to be drinking tea anyway.”

“Why not?”

“Caffeine’s a stimulant. I wouldn’t go so far as to call tea haram, but it’s at least makrooh.”

“Tea’s makrooh?” I asked.

“It’s a plague on the Muslim world, is what it is.”

Then Rabeya came in from her bedroom adjacent to the kitchen, in full burqa as always. Umar gave salaams and walked out.

“It’s great,” she said with tone suggesting a sarcastic smile under that cloth; “all you need to get rid of Umar is a vagina.” I laughed cautiously. “So how’s life, Yusef? How’s engineering treating you?”

“Oh, it’s alright,” I replied. “Finals coming up, and stuff. Can’t wait for this semester to be over.”

“How do you think you’re doing?”

“Pretty good, mash’Allah.”

“That’s good, Yusef. So have you decided yet, Xerox or Kodak?” It was a joke. Rabeya originally hailed from Rochester, maybe an hour away on the I-90 East and home to the world head-quarters of both.

“Insha’Allah,” I replied smiling, thankful for all the handy Islamic phrases I could draw from when there was nothing else to say.

“Rochester’s Muslim community is overwhelmingly Pakistani,” she added.

“Really?”

“Sure.”

“That’s cool.” Just then I wondered of Rabeya’s heritage. She had no accent, was never heard speaking another language and the ethnically ambiguous shade of her hands did little to help. Somehow, the topic never came up and it made sense not to ask.

“The Islamic Center down on Westfall,” she continued, “that’s like the main masjid in town—the one the local news always goes to during Ramadan or to clear up the whole Islam and Terrorism thing. It’s like eighty percent Pakistani but there’s over thirty groups represented in the leftovers.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, and then there’s also a Turkish mosque and an NOI one, and I think one that used to be NOI but isn‘t—like maybe they’re one of Warith Deen Mohammed’s—”

“Acha,” I replied.

Amazing Ayyub stormed the kitchen looking for a rematch, knocking my tea over and sending me to the floor.

“Oh my gawd!” he shrieked in imitation of a TV wrestling announcer. “Amazing Ayyub has ’em! Oh my gawd folks, we’ve never seen anything like
this
before!

“Yusef Ali’s gonna tap, folks! Yusef Ali cannot withstand this punishment!” The primary punishment, of course, was the smell of a dirty shirtless Amazing Ayyub on top of me. I freed my left arm and wrapped it around his head, clinching my hands together and squeezing. Then Rabeya came over, jumped up and did a mock-elbow in the center of Ayyub’s back. In enough cumbersome
fabric to clothe a family, she grabbed hold of Ayyub’s waist and tried to pull up while my chinlock anchored him to the floor. “AHHHHHH!” he screamed comically. “YOU’RE GONNA PULL OFF MY FUCKIN’ HEAD!” Then Jehangir came in, black suspenders hanging at the sides of his red plaid pants, and of course he jumped on too with an effortless tackle on top of Rabeya, who still had Ayyub by the waist, who was still on top of me, and I still had my hold on Ayyub, and Ayyub pulled at Jehangir’s stray suspenders and there we were, me at the bottom of a crazy pile of goofy laughing mumins and it might not have made sense anywhere but on that dirty kitchen floor.

 

 

It was Fasiq’s turn to give khutbah that week, which I think inspired Umar’s particular gruffness on Friday, as though he were preparing to be offended hours in advance. About two dozen people came in through the front door, causing Umar to remark that in the old days women used the back.

As the worshippers filtered through to make sunna salaats in the crowded living room and neighboring family room, one kid I recognized from my classes asked Jehangir about the spray-painted flag.

“It just means ‘anarchy,’ y’akhi,” Jehangir half-whispered.

“But Saudi is where Islam is practiced the most purely,” the kid replied. “Anywhere in the world you go, they will say look to Saudi for the real Islam.”

“Al-hamdulilah, brother,” said Jehangir, never one to argue such points. “But the Saudi government, you know, they—”

“But it’s still Allah’s Name on that flag,” the kid interrupted. “You spray-painted on the shahadahtain.”

“Staghfir’Allah,” said Jehangir. “I’m sorry bro, I didn’t realize.
It wasn’t meant in that way.”