The Taqwacores (6 page)

But if there was something beautiful in Umar, why did it block him from seeing the beauty in Lynn? She had so much love and faith that she didn’t even
need
religion anymore. Or she was just lazy.

Somewhere on those streets, I imagined, Fasiq Abasa was bugging out to Shaikh Iggy Pop; while somewhere in the house Jehangir Tabari was probably passed out, the golden-drunk majesty that Allah had sprinkled on him long gone. Umar was most likely still mad and strong, refueled for the night by but one look at unconscious Jehangir. Amazing Ayyub would have decorated the bathroom floor with his stomach-lining. Rabeya had undoubtedly drawn two or three people into a heated discussion; she was almost like Umar in that way, but with more people-skills. Rude Dawud would have been floating through the party, making the rounds, shaking hands and then finally heading upstairs with his victim for the night.

It was so easy to imagine them, each in their standard costumes: spikes, mohawks, burqas, patches, tattoos, sunglasses, pork-pie hats, hoodies. And then there was me. What the hell was my place in that zoo?

The next morning, my place would be
recorder.
I awoke to Jehangir Tabari tapping on my skull with an index finger while holding my digital video camera in his other hand.

“Yusef, bro, wake up,” he said gently, leaning over me. “We’re gonna go shred.”

“Don’t you get hangovers?” I asked with one eye open.

“Al-hamdulilah,” he replied, handing me the camera. Jehangir commonly recruited me on skateboarding expeditions just to have someone capture his stunts and bumps on film.

“I’m sure my parents only bought me this so I could tape you breaking your neck every weekend.” It had been an Eid present.

“Tell them I said
jazakullah khair.
C’mon man, get up.” He slapped my blanketed leg.

“Give me a minute,” I whined.

“Alright, I’ll go get Fasiq.” Jehangir got off the bed, almost knocking the three-inch by five-inch Pakistani flag from its stand on my headboard. I looked at the green field and white crescent, thought about Rawalpindi and adhans waking you for Fajr from neighborhood minarets. Jehangir rumbled down the stairs and
yelled something. From the sounds of Fasiq’s reaction I could tell that Jehangir had jumped on him.

“C‘mon, man,” groaned Fasiq. “Get off me, it’s not even fuckin’ eleven yet—”

“Get off my couch, asshole! We’re shredding today!”

“Fuck,” said Fasiq.

Fasiq threw some shoes on and grabbed his board from under the mess of clothes and Qur’ans that had accumulated by the couch he called a bed. We went in Jehangir’s car, me in the back seat. Jehangir brought along his boom box and a handful of his skillfully arranged mix-tapes.

“Got a little something for everyone on here,” he bragged, holding the tapes. “It’s the philosophy of the three-ring circus. If you don’t like the clowns, you’ll like the elephants. If you don’t like the elephants, you’ll like the acrobats.” There was only one component lacking.

“Why don’t you have any taqwacore bands?” I asked.

“Because the fuckers put all their shit out on vinyl.”

“What? Why?”

“They just do,” he answered shrugging.

“But who even has a record player anymore?”

“I do,” said Jehangir. “But just so I can listen to those guys. And it fuckin’ sucks because it can’t record from vinyl to a cassette, the shit’s so old.”

“I don’t get the vinyl thing,” I said. “Is there some kind of ideological point behind that?”

“Maybe. A lot of punks turn out to be sentimental suckers.”

“Like Amazing Ayyub last night,” Fasiq interjected, “when he said that there hasn’t been any real punk since 1980.”

“What does that have to do with vinyl?” I asked. “Do they think that they’re closer to the Lost Golden Age by rejecting CDs? What does that have to do with anything?”

“Allahu Alim,” Fasiq replied. Jehangir popped one of his mix-tapes in the deck. “Nice,” remarked Fasiq as it came on halfway through the Descendents’ “Suburban Home.” They both slouched to accommodate their high hair. Riding in the backseat behind two brightly dyed mohawks with my digital camcorder in a grocery bag, hearing noisy music through lousy speakers, windows down, the weather pleasant but not uncomfortably summer just yet, I realized that there were a million forms of coolness floating through the world and one of them—the zeitgeist of three guys en route to juvenile stunts on public property—had been captured successfully that day. Both Jehangir and Fasiq wore exactly the same clothes as the previous day. but I had known them too long by this point to think anything of it.

Just then I noticed a patch on the left shoulder of Fasiq’s Operation Ivy hoodie. He saw me looking. “Bosnian Muslim unit,” he explained. It was white with green letters reading “ALLAHU EKBER” above a yellow crescent and green star.

We arrived at a museum off Elmwood to find that we had been beaten to it by a gangly gang of kids hopping around on hundred-dollar boards with little toothpick-arms poking out of clownishly oversized outfits, everything splashed with logos: Billabong, Atticus, Quiksilver, Independent.

“We should’ve hit Pac-Sun and gotten the right uniforms,” said Fasiq. “We coulda been friends.”

“Everybody’s got a sunna,” replied Jehangir with his Oi-tranquility. Fasiq in his Op Ivy hoodie and reasonably baggy khakis seemed at least somewhat closer to the code than Jehangir who in spike-covered leather jacket and red plaid bondage-pants was too scary, too old school, too ’77 British-style grog-shop punk. The pop-punk kids picked up their boards and left on foot.

The museum’s Hellenic glory of marble columns and statues stood at the end of maybe forty steps with a long narrow railing
right down the middle. The bottom of the steps met a circular drive, in the middle of which loomed a massive naked and bearded Greek astride a wild stallion, one arm wrapped around its neck and the other wielding a bow. The place supplied a variety of ledges and surfaces for a litany of maneuvers, all to be categorized within a sophisticated jargon of skater-speak that excluded outsiders such as myself. Jehangir’s boom box sat on the roof of his car playing Agnostic Front’s “Skate Rock.” He put one foot on his board and with the other pushed himself forward. Fasiq followed and soon they both sailed passively by the products of their mass and velocity, side by side, a pair of cartoon haircuts backdropped by the museum. I imagined myself the uncool sidekick for just standing around dopey holding a camera instead of flipping and falling and flying with the men of action. But after a while of watching them experiment with physics—especially Jehangir, who could manage to
fall charismatically
if such a thing were possible—I realized that I was just as vital. For every culture-hero living out his myth, there must be a witness willing to pass the story on.

Then Jehangir removed all doubt. He looked romantically to the museum’s columns atop a ziggurat-like eighty or so stone steps, picked up his board, tapped the long narrow railing once for luck and jogged up to the end. He skated around a little to gain momentum. Fasiq stopped to watch. I zoomed in on Abu and Ummi’s Eid camera.

The U.S. Bombs’ “Ballad of Sid” came on Jehangir’s CD player. Though he couldn’t have heard it up there, the song and moment seemed to coincide as though all prearranged by Rabbil-Alameen. With aggressive steps off the marble floor Jehangir gained speed. He ollied up to meet the railing and rode it all the way down—on the board itself, not the wheels, with feet working it like a delicate see-saw and arms extended like a rawk American Christ. He kept going and going, sure to eventually miscalculate
his balance and fall off either right or left or slip off the board and break his neck or testicles on the rail but it never happened, he just kept going, down and down the rail perhaps even to the very bottom of the steps. I zoomed out to show more of the railing. Jehangir accelerated beyond all control and lunged off the railing’s curled end as though driving off a cliff. Looked like it might have scraped a layer of skin off his hands but he was too stunned from what he just did to even care. Called a railslide or boardslide in skater circles, the trick amounts to essentially supernatural degrees of balance. I wished those poser kids had stayed to see it.

Fasiq and I ran over to him as though he had just won the World Series. With a smile of exhausted disbelief Jehangir just sat staring at his wheels-up board as though asking it for confirmation of their shared experience.

“Are you okay?” asked Fasiq with an ecstatic voice-crack, grabbing Jehangir’s wrist to examine his palm.

“Al-hamdulilah,” Jehangir replied.

“That was insane,” I said as we helped him up.

“It was weird,” said Jehangir. “The railing was so long it was like I had time to stop being nervous. I was just like, fuck, I’ve been up here awhile, wonder when I’m going to fall.”

We huddled around my camera rewinding and re-rewinding to watch the little screen.

“I can’t believe you didn’t break your face,” said Fasiq.

“I think I’m calling it a day,” Jehangir replied. “I feel like trying anything else would be asking Allah for paralysis.”

“You should send that shit in,” said Fasiq. “Get in a skateboard video.” We threw the skateboards and boom box and digital camcorder in the back seat. Fasiq gave me shotgun this time. Sitting behind the wheel Jehangir said his whole body was trembling, holding up his right hand as proof. I offered to drive but he replied only by starting the car.

As Fasiq and I fawned like a pair of twelve-year-old TRL groupies Jehangir kept his eyes to the road, answering praise with half-smiles and almost-whispered
mash’Allahs.
If you ever doubt his Islam, please remember that.

Jehangir Tabari was a drunk and a punk and never cared what Hanafi or Hanbali or Maliki or Shafi told him to do, but he was sincere and Allah kept him humble.

Amazing Ayyub was waiting on the porch when we got back. He had no shirt on. Instead of running inside to play Sham 69’s “Hey Little Rich Boy” he just sat there with a weird expression.

“Yo!” I called out to him, climbing out with the camcorder. “You have to see what Jehangir did—”

“I got a job,” said Ayyub.

“No shit,” Jehangir replied. “Where?”

“The gas station.”

“Doing what?”

“Pumping gas.”

“That’s awesome,” Fasiq interjected.

“Yeah,” said Amazing Ayyub. “I’m gonna fuckin’ contribute to society an’ shit.”

“You gonna move off our couch, then?” asked Jehangir with a warm smile.

“FUCK!” yelled Ayyub, darting a finger in Fasiq’s direction. “What about that fuckin’ guy?”

“I put in for groceries,” Fasiq countered.

“Yeah, by selling fuckin’ kief,” Ayyub replied.

“Yeah, by selling it to you.”

“Shit, see then? I give Fasiq the money he puts in for groceries!” He then looked at me. “Right, preppy?”

“Makes sense to me,” I said smiling.

“What’s Umar think of that?” asked Jehangir. “Does he know that his halal meat’s paid for with weed?”

“I think so,” answered Ayyub with his eyes to the floor. “So what you got today?” he asked, turning to Fasiq.

“I don’t know if I should let you,” Fasiq replied. “I mean, you’re a working man now—”

“Fuck that, I don’t start ’til next week.” So the two of them went in and upstairs, most likely to climb out the bathroom window and smoke on the roof.

I sat on the porch steps where Amazing Ayyub had been just moments ago, camcorder in my lap. I watched Jehangir’s immortal boardslide again and then looked up to see the real Jehangir pacing the sidewalk before me, relaxed but still unsure of what to do with himself at that moment. He almost looked to have a story that he couldn’t commit to tell—maybe about some taqwacore kid out West who taught him the boardslide, a punked-out mumin cheered as a legend in the circles he traveled. The story, if it was a story, stayed bottled up in him. It could have been one of his little trademarked maxims that would usually spill out spontaneously with naïve third-grader innocence like “things’ll sure be different twenty years from now, y’akhi—” et cetera. Or it could have been a self-praise over the boardslide that in taqwa he kept from passing his lips.

Whatever the thought might have been, he looked like he’d handle it best alone. I stood up and went inside. First went to the living room, hung out with myself and got bored of it. Trodded upstairs, heard Amazing Ayyub and Fasiq out on the roof laughing and high.

“You know what happens to artists after they die?” Ayyub asked him.

“What?” Fasiq replied.

“If you paint or draw living things, then after you die Allah says ‘give life to your creations if you can’ and of course you can’t, so then Allah brings them to life and they fuckin’ torture you forever.”

“That’s bullshit,” said Fasiq.

“Think about it,” said Ayyub. “It’s crazy, man. Those guys who fuckin’ made the Looney Tunes are going to be fuckin’ burned and stabbed and whipped by like, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck an’ shit.”

“There’s nothing about that in the Qur’an,” Fasiq retorted.

“It’s in the hadiths,” said Ayyub.

“Fuckin’ everything’s in the hadiths!” yelled Fasiq. “You can find hadiths saying Muhammad used pinecones for dildos.”

“There weren’t pine trees in Arabia,” said Ayyub.

“Fuck off,” said Fasiq.

Umar’s door was open but I knocked anyway. Sitting on the floor, he looked up from his book and greeted me sunna-style.

“Wa-alaikum as-salaam,” I replied. The room felt anarchomonastic. Shelves lined with books, walls adorned with Islamic calligraphy plaques and fliers for straightedge shows and two three-foot by five-foot flags hanging on separate walls. One was green with a white circle containing red crescent and lazy squiggles of Allah’s Name in some generic holy phrase. It represented the Islamic Conference, an intergovernmental organization counting fifty-six nations in its membership. The second flag looked like our own Stars and Stripes after being sucked through a black hole: the starry blue field now a solid orange, the stripes green and white, and in the upper right-hand corner a big star and crescent, white on green. “Which is that?” I asked, pointing to it.