The Taqwacores (5 page)

“Mash’Allah,” replied the kid. “You know, I am not trying to cause trouble—”

“Mash’Allah,” said Jehangir.

“But you know, it is just a good thing, a good practice to, you know, respect the Name of Allah.”

“Of course,” Jehangir replied.

The living and family rooms—which had no door or wall dividing them so only a difference in carpeting distinguished them as separate—were packed to the point of physical discomfort where sujdahs jammed your elbows into your ribs and you strained to keep your forehead from brushing against someone else’s feet. Our jamaat smelled of oils from at least twenty countries combined with those spilled-beer, body-odor and stale-hashish scents that never completely left the house. Fasiq stood by the hole in the wall in his Operation Ivy hoodie, mohawk tucked away under black Yankee ski hat. His khutbah, only a few minutes long, revolved around ayats 19 and 20 from
Suratul-Hijr
about how Allah sent ’suitable things’ to grow on the earth and with Him were the treasures of everything in the world and He only sent them down in a known measure. To Fasiq Abasa this meant that all things from nature were a blessing from Allah and He only gave us what we could handle. While Fasiq’s talk gave no specific mention of marijuana, I knew that would be Umar’s angry interpretation. It often seemed as though Umar thought about drugs more than anyone in the house.

The jamaat was an almost silly mish-mash of people: Rude Dawud’s pork-pie hat poking up here, a jalab-and-turban type there, Jehangir’s big mohawk rising from a sea of kufis, Amazing Ayyub still with no shirt, girls scattered throughout—some in hejab, some not and Rabeya in punk-patched burqa doing her thing. But in its randomness it was gorgeous, reflecting an Islam I
felt could not happen anywhere else despite Jehangir’s traveler’stales of California taqwacore. With every Friday hearing khutbahs and standing alongside brothers and sisters together yelling AAAAAMEEEEEEEEN after
Fatiha
with enough force to knock you down flanked at every wall by dumb band posters and stains and peeling paint, I grew more and more amazed at that house and this incredible thing we had pulled off, though I cannot take much credit. I was one of the quiet ones, the boring ones, the future engineers for Xerox and Kodak. If Islam was to be saved, it would be saved by the crazy ones: Jehangir and Rabeya and Fasiq and Dawud and Ayyub and even Umar.

 

 

If Friday afternoons meant jumaa, Friday nights meant my home would play host to stupid wasted kids from all walks of life. Everyone in the house would unload their CDs by the stereo and fight for turns at DJ. Besides his beloved taqwacore bands that varied in style and sound, Jehangir Tabari liked the ’77 working-class heroic drinking-buddy songs. Rude Dawud played his Desmond Dekker and Specials and Skatalites. Umar put on the expected Minor Threat and Youth of Today though he never got into the straightedge taqwacore bands that Jehangir talked about, as though he were unsure whether someone could really be Muslim and Punk simultaneously. In that way he reminded me of my father, who when I was growing up would buy nearly every animated Disney video but then say that for
me
to draw living things was haram. Fasiq Abasa liked it loud and fast in the vein of NOFX or the Descendents and even had a CD containing one hundred songs that were each approximately thirty seconds long. Amazing Ayyub went mainly for Sham 69. Rabeya would put in political bands like
Propagandhi or riot-grrrl fare like the Lunachicks. I knew enough of everyone’s tastes to play along and make requests.

The diversity often led to arguments. A Jamaican-fundamentalist, Rude Dawud hated any corrupted second-wave American
punk-ska.
Ayyub called Fasiq’s notion of punk misguided because there was no longer any such thing as punk, to him it died in 1980. Umar huffed and pouted when Jehangir played a Business song like “Guinness Boys” for a variety of objections. Rabeya in turn denounced punk-rock misogyny and patriarchy in maybe half the songs they played.

Sometimes the music disputes inspired theological debates. While arguing punk, Amazing Ayyub demanded that someone put on Iggy Pop and the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and Fasiq said the song blew his mind in a whole big Sufi way because he had been reading about the dog being a symbol for the
nafs
and had a book by Javad Nurbaksh of the Khaniqahi Nimatullahi explaining it all.

“It’s like Iggy’s du‘a,” Fasiq exclaimed. “He’s fuckin’ talking to Allah, you know? He wants to be Allah’s dog. It’s like punk Rumi.”

“You’re fucked up right now,” Amazing Ayyub replied. I agreed and the discussion ended at that. Fasiq asked to borrow the CD, then found his headphones and disappeared for the night.

Jehangir threw his arms around everybody and raised a brown-glass bottle in the air. Umar stood tough in the corner, arms folded. He could have easily sulked in his room or gone somewhere else, but I suspect he enjoyed being The Straightedge Guy. It became almost his
thing
with his intimidating glare, white wifebeater shirt and tattoos. People expected him to be there standing at angry attention.

It seemed as though Jehangir and Umar were opposing poles, each hoping to pull the collective psyche in his direction with his own method. While Umar pulled with his unending stance, a
drunken Jehangir Tabari fell in love with everyone in the world. Every guy was his best friend, every girl his little sister and he would fight to his dying breath for each of us. It was an insatiable but charismatic sentimentality that moved him. Sometimes he pulled back to stand on the fringes of the scene and observe circles forming accidentally throughout the house: conversations, introductions, debates and story-tellings, all these characters stumbling in from their respective movies which somehow took them to Buffalo or maybe had been set in Buffalo the whole time but at any rate took them to his house and his party. There they were together in a massive grab bag of lives and cultures and perspectives, an exact combination of people that would never happen again on this Earth and maybe somebody would get something out of these random interactions and maybe nobody would but
al-hamdulilah
for all of it either way, and during such a retreat I would briefly look over and he’d nod to me as if to suggest that I were the only one who understood that moment exactly as he did.

Well enough into the night for him to be completely out of his mind, Jehangir came over and put his arm around me.

“Where’s Imam Fasiq?” he asked.

“He’s out there,” I replied with a nod toward the door, “somewhere with his headphones and CD player and ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ stuck on repeat.”

“Oh really.”

“He’s taking it as the expression of some Sufi concept about the nafs.”

“Yeah! Shit!” Jehangir shouted with a slap on my back.” Make the heart a polished mirror, was that it... I know my stuff, right? I was just gonna congratulate the imam on his packed house today, there wasn’t even room to piss in there—”

“Seems like every week we have more.”

“Did you see all those kids here today?”

“Um, yeah.” With a brief scan of the faces before us, I appreciated how far removed the afternoon’s activities were from this sloshing mess.

“Bro, listen,” said Jehangir. “They were Muslims, man, but not your uncles. They need a deen that’s not your uncle’s deen. Iman, think about it like that,
iman!
It’s supposed to be all about having no fear of death, right? And we got that part down, we’ve done that and we have plenty of Muslims who aren’t afraid to die. Mash‘Allah—but now Muslims are afraid to
fuckin’ live!
They fear life, y‘akhi, more than they fear shaytans or shirk or fitna or bid’a or kafr or qiyamah or the torments in the grave, they fear Life, they fear
this—”
He raised his bare arm, grabbed and slapped the skin to indicate
this
. “You got all these poor kids who think they’re inferior because they don’t get their two Fajr in, their four Zuhr, four Asr, three Maghrib, four Isha, their fuckin’ Sunna, their Witr, their Nafl, they don’t wear leather socks and they don’t brush their teeth with twigs, they don’t have beards, they don’t wear hejab, maybe they went to their fuckin’ high school proms and the only masjid around was regular horseshit-horseshit-takbir-masjid and they had to pretend like they were doing everything right, wiping their asses the way Bukhari tells you to and making the proper du‘a—well I say fuck that and this whole house says fuck that—even Umar, you think Umar can go in a regular masjid with all his stupid tattoos and dumb straightedge bands? Even Umar, bro, as much as he tries to Wahabbi-hard-ass his way around here, he’s still one of us. He’s still fuckin’ taqwacore—”

That was the first time I heard Jehangir Tabari use that word in reference to anything
Buffalo
. I looked at his glazed eyes, figuring I had just been privy to the pointless ramblings of yet another dumb kid who in one plastered moment briefly imagined that he had it all figured out. He kept going. “You can run after Life,” he said with a lazy look out to some distance beyond me. “You can
live and fuckin’ love it and still have taqwa bursting out your guts. That’s all it is, bro.”

The Dropkick Murphys’ “Boys on the Docks” came on and a big Irish kafr put his arm around Jehangir, ripped him away from me and they sang together like stupid drunks do. I just watched, trying to see something behind Jehangir’s face that really explained it all. He almost had me sold on the idea that some advanced Sufi wisdom stood as the thesis upon which these orgies were founded—that if only I’d run upstairs and dive into Mustafa’s Bukharis, I might find the arcane secret to Jehangir dancing with sloppy wasted punks.

Jehangir did not
sing
songs when drunk, he
yelled
them. His new friend seemed to have been cut from the same cloth so I went out on the porch.

Lynn was in the recliner, sporting a little spaghetti-strap top and full head of dreadlocks.

“As-salaamu alaikum,” she said as though trying to be cute.

“Wa alaikum as-salaam,” I replied. “I don’t know if sitting in that chair’s a good idea, it’s been through a lot.”

“You here to carry out the fatwa?” she asked.

“What?”

“You know—I’m an apostate, technically you can kill me.”

“Really,” I replied with a half-laugh.

“Give me the Salman Rushdie Special,” she said with arms outstretched and eyes closed.

“I think that’s only applicable in Muslim countries.”

“Oh. Phew.” She ran the back of her hand along her forehead to gesture facetious relief.

“So you really consider yourself an apostate?”

“Well, when enough people tell you you’re not Muslim,” she replied, “eventually you start to believe it.”

“Oh.”

“But until you reach the point when you don’t even care anymore, it’s pretty painful.”

“You still believe in Allah, right?”

“I believe we were created, or
came from,
Something... and that Something has a compassion for us that we are nowhere near comprehending.”

“That sounds like Islam to me.”

“Yeah?” she asked with raised eyebrows.

“The hadiths say, you know, Allah’s Mercy overwhelms His Wrath.”

“If you eat with your left hand, you’re imitating the devil.”

“Yeah, there’s that.” I nervously tried to laugh again.

“It’s hard,” she said. “It’s like there’s some things in Islam that sound so beautiful and make you just... feel it and love Allah so much... and then, then there’s the stupid shit, you know?”

“Yeah,” I replied, wondering if my confession of Islam having
stupid shit
made me an apostate as well. “But it sounds like you have tawhid down, that’s the important thing.”

“I guess.”

“What about Muhammad, do you believe in Muhammad?”

“That’s the thing,” she said with a sudden alertness. “What’s the deal with Muhammad? If they don’t make him out to be the Muslim Christ, then why is belief in him so vital?”

“Well, it’s not so much belief
in
Muhammad, as—”

“Besides even that, what am I supposed to believe about a guy who married a six-year-old?”

“Yes, but—”

“He did marry a six-year-old,” she said.

“But he did not consummate until she was—”

“Nine, I know. That makes it all okay. It’s okay Rasullullah, she’s nine, she had her period so throw it in’er. What am I supposed to do with that, Yusef?”

“I don’t know, Lynn.”

“I’m a spiritual person,” she said. “I believe in Allah, you know, though I don’t always call It ‘Allah’ and I pray the way I want to pray. Sometimes I just look out at the stars and this love-fear thing comes over me, you know? And sometimes I might sit in a Christian church listening to them talk about Isa with a book of Hafiz in my hands instead of the hymnal. And you know what, Yusef? Sometimes, every once in a while, I get out my old rug and I pray like Muhammad prayed. I never learned the shit in Arabic and my knees are uncovered, but if Allah has a problem with that then what kind of Allah do we believe in?”

“I don’t know.” Her ride pulled up by the curb, just behind Umar’s truck.

“I’m sorry,” she said, rising out of the recliner. “I don’t mean to come across like that, it’s just hard sometimes.”

“Oh no, no, that’s okay.”

“I
wanted
to be Muslim, do you know that?”

“Yes.” She had her face half-turned to me as she descended the steps of our porch.

“They just had to give me so much shit about it,” she said.

“I know they did.”

“I’ll talk to you later, Yusef.”

Once the car drove out of sight I went off the porch myself and walked. Had no idea where I was going or even what time of night it was. Walked up the street and turned the corner. Looked at all the houses, the lights out in every one, wondering what it would have been like to be Umar and walk through neighborhoods in moral opposition to everything, and then wondering whether he had something beautiful that I had lost; had I really reasoned above so much of my religion, or merely sold out for the path of least resistance? It would have been a hassle to pray faithfully five times daily, but Umar did it. I could excuse myself from class for
five minutes, make wudhu in the men’s room sink and find somewhere quiet. I was sure that other guys did.