The Taqwacores (7 page)

“Kashmir and Jammu,” Umar replied. “Just got it mail order.”

“Cool.”

“Islam enjoins solidarity with our oppressed and persecuted brothers. But I’m not a nationalist; that’s why I got that one up—” He gestured to the Islamic Conference flag. “We’re one community, brother; that’s the umma, the only legitimate political entity on this earth.”

“Mash’Allah,” I said, just to aid the flow of conversation.

“Islam is actually against nationalism of all kids—not only political nationalism but cultural nationalism too. There are many people who say, ‘we have to adapt Islam to American culture’ or ‘we have to adapt Islam to such-and-such’ or whatever. But brother, we do not want ’American Muslims’ here and then Arab Muslims’ over there, you know? That’s division. Islam is universal. It transcends all our petty race-and-nation questions.”

“True.”

“It’s not even a religion, brother. Religion is games and superstition. Islam is a PERFECT SYSTEM OF LIFE.”

“Right.”

“Everything has a purpose and meaning.”

“Totally.”

“Did you know that salat is even medically beneficial to us?”

“No,” I replied with tone of semi-enthusiasm.

“Brother, if you study traditional yoga—not this watered-down Bally’s aerobics yoga, but the real-deal stuff in India—you can see the different movements and positions in Muslim prayer. If you breathe a certain way in each position, four-rakat prayer utilizes every muscle in your body.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Allah is the Planner,” said Umar. “He planned it all out for us.”

 

 

In the early evening I found Jehangir still out in front of the house. He had taken the boom box out of his car and popped in a Billy Bragg CD, skipping it ahead to “California Stars” and lying stomach-up on the sidewalk with his hands cradling the back of his skull. I stood out there holding the screen door open loving the
way the world felt at that time of day at that time of year, not too cold or hot or bright or dark, with a little breeze sometimes but not too much, everything perfect in every way. And there was my hero on the ground. The song met its end and then began again. He must have had it on repeat.

“You ever hear of a band called Burning Books for Cat Stevens?” he asked.

“No,” I replied.

“They’re out West,” said Jehangir, eyes up to the sky.

“Are they any good?”

“They’ll be huge in six months. All over MTV, just you wait and see.”

“Really?” I asked, sitting at the edge of the porch.

“No, not really.”

“Oh. Haha.”

“They are a pretty good band, though. I might have one of their records upstairs, but I need to buy a new needle for my player.”

“I still don’t get the whole vinyl thing,” I said. “It makes no sense.”

“Technology versus Ideology,” Jehangir replied. “It’s a punk thing.”

“Is punk an ideology?” I asked.

“Who knows anymore. Maybe it’s just wearing a wallet-chain.”

“To some people, I guess.”

“Some people would say punk is all about disseminating your own culture, shunning mass media conglomerates and never selling out; but the bands we look to as spiritual forbears—the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Ramones and so forth—were all on major labels. And some people would say punk is only about loud, aggressive music; but death metal’s loud and aggressive. Is that punk? What about loud, aggressive rap? Or is punk supposed to be
destroying social mores and manners and taboos? If so, where are the bands doing that today?”

“So what do you think it is?” I asked.

“I think it’s just about being ugly.” I laughed and then realized he wasn’t joking. “That’s why you can’t be punk,” he continued. “You look good and you dress good and you’ll make a great engineer someday.” I thought Jehangir Tabari was an inherently handsome young man, though he deliberately rendered himself ugly with the mohawk and gear. He had the face if he wanted to sing in emo pop Newfound Glory bands but he snarled too much and never had his teeth fixed—to spot the real punks, he used to say, examine their teeth. “But yeah, man... I think that’s where it’s at...
ugly...”

“What’s taqwacore then? Ugly Muslims?”

“Kind of.”

I stayed plopped on the porch, Jehangir stayed stretched out on the sidewalk and we went awhile without speaking. In the silence I lost myself daydreaming of an Ugly Muslim Parade marching single-file down our street with every Ugly Muslim included: the women who traveled without their walis, the painters who painted people, beardless qazis, the dog owners in their angel-free houses, hashishiyyuns like Fasiq Abasa, liwats and sihaqs, Ahmadiyyas, believers who stopped reading in Arabic because they didn’t know what it said, the left-handers, the beer swillers, the Kuwaiti sentenced to death for singing Qur’an, the guys who snuck off with girls to make out and undo generations of cerebral clitorectomy, the girls who stopped blaming themselves every time a man had dirty thoughts, the mumins who stopped their clock-punching, the kids who had pepperoni on their pizzas, on and on down the line.

So many failed believers, I nearly suspected they were the majority.

“Taqwacore,” I said for no reason.

“The irresistible force against the immovable object,” Jehangir replied.

“What?”

“The irresistible force against the immovable object. That’s what they always used to say on the Saturday-morning wrestling shows.”

“Oh.”

“So who wins it, Captain Physics?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s like a NASCAR driver going three hundred miles an hour and just crashing head-on into the Ka’ba.”

“Okay.”

“Irresistible force against immovable object.”

“Well, in that case,” I replied, “before the NASCAR driver hit the Bayt, birds would come and drop clay on him.” We both laughed.

 

 

A week later we were driving around Buffalo yelling things at pedestrians, just stupid nonsense stuff that seemed somehow funny to us.

“HELP ME!” yelled Jehangir in his goofiest voice while stopped at a red light. The couple walking nearby looked at him without stopping. “HELP ME!” he repeated. “HELP ME! I HAVE LOST MY BANANA!” They looked away and kept going. The light turned green and I saw an old man on my side of the street.

“GIVE ME BACK MY SHIRT!” I screamed. Jehangir laughed so hard I thought he’d die.

“What’d the guy do?” he asked.

“I don’t think he understood me.”

“HEY!” shouted Jehangir with his head lunged out the window. I looked to see the mother of two on his side. “YOU ARE FRIGHTENING ME!” And just as soon as he said it we were half a mile down the street, all those characters gone and forgotten, new ones on the way.

“ROWWWWWWWRRRRRRRR!” I yelled at some trench-coat wearing winner. “I’M A LION, ROWWWWRRRRRR!” He just looked at me.

“Look in the back seat,” Jehangir commanded. “Behind me.”

“All I see is an old Subway sub.”

“Give it to me.” As I brought it to the front seat the smell hit us hard. Jehangir took the sandwich still in its wrapper and held it at a distance, waiting for the
moment
—which turned out to be a red light with us in the straight/right-turn lane and an SUV in the left-turn-only Jehangir quickly unwrapped his sandwich. As the light turned green he launched it at the side of the SUV and peeled out with a right turn down Forest Ave, both of us howling with ecstatic immaturity.

Eventually we hit the 1-90 and went to a massive mall-sized flea market, Jehangir looking more than slightly out of place among the flea culture but it was easy to keep track of him by his high hair. Many vendors peddled artifacts from our childhoods: Star Wars figures, heavy rubber wrestling dolls, He-Man, G.I. Joe, baseball cards of guys like Jose Canseco who had their prime when I was ten years old. Jehangir Tabari spotted an old Iron Sheik figure with most of the paint worn off his pants. “Look at his pointy boots,” Jehangir said with a big smile. “I need some boots like that, wouldn’t that shit be hot?”

While most vendors offered miscellaneous grab bags of second-hand merchandise, some were specialized in their field. One sold only bright orange hunting clothes. Another just old music
tapes. One guy’s whole inventory consisted of big three-by-five flags, an example of each hanging around his booth. He had the black downtrodden silhouette POW/MIA flag, an American flag with giant Native American chief in the middle, an American flag with Harley Davidson in the middle, a regular American flag, a Don’t Tread On Me, a Confederate X. “I think this is where Umar bought his Kashmiri flag,” mused Jehangir sarcastically.

You can walk around a big flea market like that for what seems like hours, completely lose your concept of time, get a little dizzy and grow accustomed to an entirely new sort of air: the flea-market aromas of an enclosed environment filled with goods that had aged in thousands of households.

“Look here,” I said, calling Jehangir from the stack of used VCRs he had been admiring. I pointed to a wall of Osama bin Laden t-shirts. One had him in the cross-hairs. Another had him in a toilet. Another had the top of his head resembling a penis.

“Ever hear of a band in California called Osama bin Laden’s Tunnel Diggers?” Jehangir asked.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Real funny guys, buncha wise asses. They’re Islam’s NOFX, you can say.”

“Cool.”

While pulling out of the flea market’s parking lot Jehangir arrived at the idea to visit Amazing Ayyub at his new job.

“I bet he doesn’t have a shirt on,” he said over the scratching and popping of his bad speakers as GBH’s “Sick Boy” came on. “I bet you five bucks.”

Sure enough Ayyub had his KARBALA right out there for all to see when we swung up to the pump. Upon recognizing the car he jumped onto the hood and started dancing with loud stomps that would have had Jehangir fuming if Jehangir were the type to car about dents and scratches. Amazing Ayyub hopped off and
Jehangir reached out his window for a handshake.

“What the fuck are you crazy guys doing?” Ayyub asked, leaning on the driver’s side window to peer in on us.

“Just hit the flea market,” Jehangir replied.

“Oh, no shit,” gasped Ayyub. “I wish I’da known that, I woulda went with you guys.”

“But you’re working,” I answered.

“Fuck that,” snapped Ayyub. “Fuck this place, man, pumping gas n’ shit. I’d make more money giving handjobs in Niagara Falls.”

Just then a group of high school guys pulled up to the pump opposite ours in a Jeep Grand Cherokee with obnoxious rap-metal blaring. Ayyub excused himself and walked over. Perfect skin, perfect teeth, Abercrombie shirts. The one riding shotgun inexplicably wore a golden football helmet. Amazing Ayyub pumped their gas and took the money. As they drove out and Ayyub walked back to Jehangir’s car, the kid in football helmet whipped out a huge Super Soaker and blasted Ayyub from maybe twenty feet away. Unfortunately for them, oncoming traffic blocked their exit from the parking lot. Amazing Ayyub ran over as the kids yelled at their driver to hurry up and go. Ayyub came to the passenger side just as the kid began rolling up his window.

It was a beautiful thing—perhaps as skilled as Jehangir Tabari’s boardslide at the art museum. In the split-second of his only chance at justice, Amazing Ayyub used every muscle in his throat to reach back and bring up an awe-inspiring glob of phlegm; then, with precision matched only by his power, he sent it in just before the window rolled up completely. Ayyub took a moment to realize what he had just accomplished, wondered where the goober ended up but it didn’t matter because it had successfully gotten in the jeep. Hearing the sound of a door-latch Ayyub booked, ran past us out of the parking lot on the far side and into the street, stopped
honking traffic and disappeared into someone’s backyard while the gallant high school kid stood with back straight and shoulders out, still wearing his football helmet by the Grand Cherokee with its lousy music even louder because of the open door.

“Every day is Ashura,” said Jehangir Tabari, quoting Imam Ja’far. “Every land is Karbala.”

“From the gold helmet,” I mused, “I think they went to Ken-more East.”

“Yeah?”

“Their colors were blue and gold. They were the Bulldogs.”

“Is that where you went?”

“No,” I replied. “I went to Catholic high school.”

We drove around awhile hoping to find Amazing Ayyub. Jehangir popped out his GBH tape and rummaged under the street while still manning the wheel, finding his Sex Pistols and putting it in. The tape came on at the beginning of “Who Killed Bambi.” Neither of us said anything as we kept our eyes peeled for the Amazing One. The musical accompaniment lent a dark absurdity to everything I saw. People, houses, cars, blue mailboxes that reminded me of R2-D2, trees, porches, telephone poles and wires and little Direct-TV dishes, streets and streetlights... it was all dumb, we were all meant to die and it was just funny if you wanted it to be. I was a Muslim and my parents sent me to Catholic high school, wasn’t that funny? How about Jehangir, a Muslim who drank beer and threw rotting Subway sandwiches at SUVs? Or Amazing Ayyub Shi’a spitting on high school football players? Did any of it matter? Why not laugh?

“Ayyub’s the fucking Man,” said Jehangir Tabari to break the silence.

“Yeah, he definitely is,” I replied.

“I remember one time we were riding around in his car throwing shit at people and we ended up getting pulled over. Before the
cop got out of his car I said to Ayyub ‘man, he wants you to walk over there and talk to him.’ So Ayyub reached to open his door and get out and walk up to the cop; I had to pull him back quick and tell him I was joking.”

“He would have gotten shot,” I marveled.

“Shit yeah,” said Jehangir. “This is fuckin’ Buffalo.” Jehangir took out the Sex Pistols and put in the Swingin’ Utters, rewound it to the beginning of “Next in Line.”