The Taqwacores (9 page)

“Pregnant hands?”

“Pregnant hands.”

“Yikes,” I said.

“Yeah. Narrated by Attaa,
radiallaho anh.”

Just then I really wanted to ask about her philosophy behind the burqa but felt as though I had missed my window. She got up
and went to the refrigerator. Jehangir Tabari came in, stood behind Rabeya and wrapped his arms around her shoulders, leaning his head against the side of hers. “Yo,” she said nonchalantly as they rocked left to right to left in a weird sibling way.

“What’s the good word?” he asked.

“We were just talking about the sexual issues of Muslim women.”

“Sounds like a party,” he replied.

“Remember that time—it was back before Yusef was here—when you hooked up with that one girl from the MSA, what was her name?”

“Shit, I don’t remember.”

“No, no you remember,” she countered, physically struggling to hold back her laughter long enough to get the words out. “You got all drunk and stumbled down the stairs yelling MUSLIM GIRLS GIVE LOUSY HEAD!”

“Yeah,” said Jehangir sarcastically, “that was great.
Fantastic
. Let’s move on—”

“Yeah, let’s move on to Muslim men.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Yusef,” Rabeya replied, “you ever kiss a girl?”

“What?”

“Do you shower in your underwear?”

“BEH SHARUM!” yelled Jehangir before I could even respond. Rabeya burst out laughing, which I found easier to deal with because I couldn’t see her face.

Woke up the next morning to Johnny Cash booming down the hall.

“Salaams,” said Jehangir as I stood in his doorway. It was almost noon. He sat up in his bed, propped against a pile of pillows, long mohawk laying limp over the right side of his bald head.

“Wasalaams.”

“Johnny Cash,” said Jehangir, pointing to his record player.

“Cool.” I looked at his American flag and Makkah wall-hanging.

“I’m going to tell you a secret,” he said in a whisper loud enough to be heard across the room.

“What’s that?”

“Listen. Come here.” I walked over to his bed. He looked me in the eyes. “Yusef Ali?”

“Yeah?”

He leaned closer to me.

“The United States can save Islam.” He eased himself back after saying the words as though physically strained by their weight.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“We’re going to do it right. All the bullshit’s dying slow, can you see that?”

“Bullshit?”

“Yeah bro. Because Muslims are coming here from like a thousand different countries, all of them with their own ideas about what Islam is supposed to be. Arabs, South Asians, Africans, Persians, Bosnians, Turks, Afghans, Chechens, Kazakhs, Malaysians... every culture touched by Islam has taken it and added their own ingredients. So when you get all these brothers and sisters from different backgrounds together, how can you have a community?” I stayed silent for the answer. “By leaving culture behind and sticking to what we have in common, just our
iman
, you know?”

“True.”

“It’ll be hard at first because you have all these Muslims who have been raised and ingrained with this shit. Out West bro when I was fifteen I volunteered at an Islamic summer camp, and some little Indian kid told me that when you wear a cross into the masjid, Isa’s spirit will come and break it. But you know what? Give him some years, that shit won’t stick. It’ll be weaker on these kids growing up here. And that much weaker on their kids. It’s all gonna wash away.”

“Wow.”

“You think America will accept Islam if it means giving up all the family dogs?”

“No.”

“But that’s a great thing, y‘akhi; they’ll have the freedom to be whatever kind of Muslims they want. And another thing: we’re the minority. We don’t have the numbers to go runnin’ around demanding the implementation of shar’ia or any of that nonsense. Nobody’s getting their hands chopped off and we won’t be stoning fornicators or tossing homosexuals off minarets like Ali said to do.
And sure as shit there’s no marrying nine-year-olds here, bro. And no religious police cruising the streets to make sure you’re praying.”

“Mash’Allah.”

“No killing apostates,” he added.

“That’s a big one too.”

“Yeah, Yusef. We have a chance here to do something great.” The brief conversation rose his energy twenty levels. He earnestly believed it though I knew, with his beer and sex and punk rock, he had corrupted Islam as much as anyone anywhere else. Probably more so, though I guess that is a hard judgment call.

The way I saw it: like Saudi, Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia, the U.S. would only end up with its own distinct flavor of Islam. But for the time being it was an Islam full of promise and vitality; still young enough to be malleable, still a long ways from growing old and stale and rigid like its cousins. I think the roundabout dream of Jehangir Tabari might have been that American Islam would forever stay that way, freely shapeless like water.

He gently lifted the needle from his Johnny Cash record, put it back in its sleeve—black and white photo of Cash, with words LIVE AT FOLSOM PRISON—and place among dozens of taqwacore bands. The Mutaweens, Bilal’s Boulder, the Bin Qarmats, Osama bin Laden’s Tunnel Diggers, the Zaqqums, Burning Books for Cat Stevens, a mess more. He stood them up straight on his bookshelf like nearly paper-thin volumes of Bukhari.

 

 

Sitting at the kitchen table over a bowl of Apple Jacks I wondered if there was really anything at all to Lynn coming by, asking about me, wanting me to call her and saying she’d see me at jumaa. I had never had any indication of a romantic or physical interest on her part in the whole time I knew her. Rabeya sat at the other end,
smuggling a bagel to her mouth carefully so as not to get jelly on the inside of her niqab.

“Yahooda-food,” said Umar with a cavalier grin. Rabeya replied with a finger.

Amazing Ayyub looked at me strangely.

“Salaam,” I said upon becoming uncomfortable.

“You gonna do Lynn?” he asked. Rabeya almost choked on her bagel.

“What?” I replied. “Why would you even say that?”

“You probably shouldn’t,” he said.

“Thanks for the input, Amazing Ayyub.”

“You know what happens to the fornicators?”

“What,” I answered, not at all in the tone of a question.

“Allah’s gonna hang stones from your balls in Jehennam.”

“I think I heard that one.”

“Save it for Jennah,” said Ayyub, who I knew had seen more than his share of illegal female genitals. “In Jennah you get fuckin’ five hundred houris, four thousand virgins and eight thousand non-virgins, all in little see-through dresses.” Rabeya moved slightly in her seat.

“You know what’s interesting,” she interjected. “Muhammad gave more explicit accounts of the houris and so forth when he was only living with Khadija. After she died and Rasul started piling up all those wives and slave-girls he calmed down a little.”

“Really?” I asked.

“He was in his fifties having sex like, what—eleven times a night? With wives often giving up their turns so he could go again with his favorite, the nine-year-old? I would hope that was enough ass for him.”

“Wow,” I remarked. Umar left the kitchen.

“He didn’t need to think about houris,” Rabeya added, “once he became a rock star.”

“Yo,” said Amazing Ayyub. “You know what? In Jennah, every orgasm lasts six hundred years.”

Neither of us could find an adequate response, so the dialogue just kind of drifted away.

 

 

Rabeya went out. We never knew where she went when she left the house or what she did, or for that matter who she did it with; but that day she came back with her friend Fatima, a Bangladeshi film student. When asked about religion, Fatima specified her Islam as “progressive.”

“What’s ‘progressive Islam?’” I once asked Umar.

“A hill of shit,” he answered.

She was an attractive girl with straight jet-black hair and a little sleeveless top exposing thin brown arms and black bra straps. Juxtaposed with Rabeya the pair looked like mutually exclusive personalities, but they held warmly to a shared notion of Islamic sisterhood.

“You should see her apartment,” Rabeya told me as Fatima smiled from embarrassment. “She’s got stacks of reels from demonstrations all over her apartment, like thousands of hours of footage. Palestine protests, Chechnya, Bosnia, Afghanistan, W’s inauguration, WTO, Iraq—”

“I gotta go through all it someday,” said Fatima. “Sort out the good stuff, make a kind of video autobiography. It’ll take forever.

“I’m so excited,” she added on an unrelated note. “One of my good friends is going to UB in the fall, so he’ll be around all the time.”

“Is that Muzammil?” asked Rabeya.

“Yeah,” Fatima replied. “He’s the best.”

“What’s his story?” I asked.

“I met him out in San Francisco at the Gay Muslim Conference,” she explained. “He’s just graduating high school this year.”

“Wow,” said Rabeya. “How was the conference, by the way?”

“Pretty interesting—I went to make a documentary thinking it was going to be quite the scene—but you’d be surprised how
fundy
some of those guys are.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, like they’re totally strict about the prayers and everything, and a lot of them straight-up tell you that gay sex is a sin—but they’re openly queer and it’s like, how do you guys juggle that? I don’t think I could entertain beliefs that condemned my way of life.”

“That’d be really hard,” said Rabeya. “But I guess you do what you have to do.”

“Yeah, well, anyway Muzammil’s a really cool guy. I think you’ll all like him.”

Rabeya went out to the kitchen and poured some chocolate soy milk she kept just for when Fatima came over. “Aww Rabby, you’re the sweetest!” beamed Fatima when Rabeya returned with the glass. I then heard Amazing Ayyub rummaging through the kitchen.

“I HEARD THIS STUFF MAKES YOU SHIT YOUR BRAINS OUT!” he yelled.

“Ayyub,” Fatima yelled back, “come out here.” Ayyub complied, again shirtless. She asked, “have you ever tried silk?”

“Silk? Silk’s for homos.” I imagined Rabeya rolling her eyes under the grid. “Silk’s for fuckin’ fags,” Ayyub continued. “You know what happens to Jehennam to men who wear silk?”

“No, no,
soy milk,”
Fatima replied, completely breezing past Ayyub’s offense. She offered him a sip. He took the glass and tasted cautiously.

“It’s different,” he said.

“It’s good for you.”

“So Ayyub,” said Rabeya, “do you think homosexuality’s haram?”

“I don’t know,” Ayyub replied with his eyes downcast. “But fuckin’ shit, if I felt a piercing in my ass I’d fuckin’ even the odds.”

“What?” we all answered at different times, Fatima’s eyebrows raised in polite disbelief.

“Like if some dude tried to put it in my ass, you know, I’d have to balance the see-saw.” He smiled at us like a first-grader who had just farted, eventually feeling the impulse to leave.

For a moment we sat silently trying to process Amazing Ayyub in our heads.

“So,” said Rabeya, “tell me what’s up with you and Lynn.” Inexplicably I sensed that under the burqa she smiled. At the time I was too naïve to take the question as meaning anything more than simple honest curiosity. I had no idea how people functioned in arenas of sexual courtship, how they sent out feelers through mutual friends and innocent conversation.

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“You like her?”

“Sure, she’s cool. A cool person. Real smart.” I did not know what else to say. In actuality, I was not sure if I even had interest in Lynn beyond the thrill of imagining someone with romantic or sexual feelings for me.

“Yep, she
is
cool... but do you
like
her?”

“Yeah, yeah you can say that, sure. I guess I just—I don’t know, I just don’t really...”

“What?” asked Fatima.

“I don’t really know how to date.”

“What do you mean?” asked Rabeya.

“I mean, like ‘hey do you want to go to the movies with me?’ type stuff. I don’t have a clue how any of that works.”

“People don’t really do that anymore,” said Rabeya.

“They don’t?”

“Nobody
dates,
Yusef. Basically you just hang out with a bunch of friends and sooner or later you hook up with one of them and maybe you hook up twice... and maybe you decide just to do each other to the exclusion of all others, and bam! You’re in a relationship.”

“Oh.”

“That’s especially how it was when I lived in the dorms,” added Fatima. “Everyone hangs out in each other’s rooms watching movies or whatever... eventually someone’s just going to get done.”

“I see.”

“Don’t worry about it, Yusef,” said Rabeya, the cloth of her niqab moving as she spoke. “Just hang out and see what happens.”

“Cool.”

“Oh!” snapped Fatima with an urgent turn of her head to Rabeya. “I forgot to tell you what my mom said!”

“What happened?” Rabeya asked.

“She was all weird and kept saying how she hoped I could talk to her about anything and wanted us to have this close, comfortable mother-daughter relationship... and I had no idea what she was getting at but then she just spelled it out—‘like if you ever meet a boy up at school, I want you to feel like you can tell me—’”

“Shit!” yelled Rabeya. “What’d you say to that?”

“I was like ‘well, what would happen then?’ And she said ‘then we’d meet his parents and talk about the wedding.’”

“Ohhhhhhhh maaaan,” groaned Rabeya.

“Yeah... yeah.”

“Jesus,” said Rabeya.

“I didn’t even know how to begin to react. I have like the best mom in the world but sometimes she doesn’t exactly get it—”