“How can you—”
“Because
la ilaha illa Allah,
that’s how. I’m so Muslim, fuck Islam.” He did not speak in a mean or cynical way—to the contrary,
fuck Islam
danced out his lips with the same romanticism as
his deep drunken spiels. “I’m so Muslim, fiqh is worthless. No madrassa of imperfect human beings can claim ownership of my deen. Allah’s not entrusting the alims with shit. Let them give their jerk-off fatwas about how long a man’s beard should be, fuck all of ’em.”
“So what are you,” I asked, “an agnostic?”
“No, I’m a Muslim. But if anything, agnosticism is the real Islam; because you’re waiting for answers from Allah Herself, not Imam Siraj Dickhead.”
“What the hell are you doing with Islam right now?”
“I don’t know. Insha‘Allah subhanahu wa ta’Ala, I think I’ll put on a punk show.”
Fasiq spent a week at his friend’s place. I tagged along when Umar went over to apologize. My only observation of the kid’s house was that its wall-poster rhetoric sent out a surprising hippie vibe—Bob Marley, world peace type stuff, R. Crumb’s “Stoned Agin;” but Fasiq seemed more comfortably fitted toward the place than I would have guessed. I suppose Mathew Arnold was wrong; not literature but
weed
is our cultural cement.
“Part of being a man,” said Umar with back straight and chest out, “is owning up to what you did and admitting when you’re wrong. Brother, I’m sorry for kicking that dog. There are many hadiths forbidding cruelty to animals.”
“Thanks Umar,” Fasiq replied quietly.
“I only got mad because you know the angels won’t enter a house in which there’s a dog.” Fasiq looked at the floor. “And besides, I guess I was already heated because of Ayyub.”
“I understand,” said Fasiq. “I’d be mad if he were humping in my bed; if I
had
a bed, that is.”
Three weeks later, I stood by my car pumping gas when someone yelled at me from across the street; or sang at me, rather.
“HEYYYYY, LITTLE RICH BOY!” I looked up knowing exactly who it’d be, but was surprised to find him in a shirt.
“Ayyub!” I yelled back. His t-shirt bore the Confederate flag. Red field, blue X, seven white stars. “Where have you been, man? We all thought you were dead!” Ayyub waited for a car to pass and then darted to my side of the road. “Where have you been staying?” I asked.
“Here and there. Lately I’ve been at Camp Fun. Yeah bro. The City Mission.”
“Oh my god, Ayyub. How is that?”
“It’s a fuckin’ scene, bro. You have to be in at seven o’clock and you take your dumps in front of everybody. You get no privacy ’cuz they think we’re all on drugs.”
“That’s insane.”
“Free food, though. Only thing is though you have to sit and listen to Bible Study bullshit.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No bro. But all in all it’s not a bad place. Roof over your head and interesting people.”
“What’s with that shirt?”
“This? It means the South. I love the South. I saw Jehangir downtown the other day and he told me all about the Masjid of Manassas.”
“Manassas?”
“Manassas, Virginia. Jehangir didn’t tell you he saw me?”
“No.”
“Good. I kind of asked him not to, I was kind of embarrassed about where I was staying. But Manassas, bro, site of Bull Run. Two Civil War battles—the South won both—and that’s where General Jackson got the name ‘Stonewall.’ Jehangir had gone there
hearing that they had a Shi‘a masjid; he had never seen one before. So he finds the place around ten-thirty on a Friday with his mohawk tucked under a pakul and tells the imam how excited he is to finally see a Shi’a masjid. The imam goes ‘what do you mean, Shi’a?’ Jehangir doesn’t know what to say. The imam tells him there’s no such thing as Sunni or Shi’a. These are the types of things that divide us and that’s what the kafrs want. Do you know what the word ‘Shi’a’ means?”
“No,” I replied.
“It means ‘follower.’ Follower of what? What does a Muslim follow?”
“Allah,” I said without hesitation.
“Right. You see? That’s what the Imam of Manassas tells Jehangir; so Jehangir looks around, checks out the books they have for sale—all shit on the Ahlul-Bayt, Fourteen Infallibles, shit like that. Jehangir gets one on the Tragedy of Karbala and one on his son Zainul-Abidin. And when he goes up to pay, the Imam of Manassas has him recite the Tashahud and stops him at the part about Rasullullah’s descendents. You get it, Yusef? A Muslim just follows Allah. Sunni-Shi‘a? That’s
farga,
the groups—Allah discourages this in the Qur’an, you know, never ever form the groups. But you see in the prayers?
As you blessed Ibrahim’s progeny.
It’s all sunna.”
“Makes sense.”
“The... every time you connect to one thing you disconnect with another thing. You can’t help it. You can’t be connected to all things at all times. You, Yusef: you have your studies, your car, your family... you cannot be connected to all of them at once—then you fail at all of it! So as a Muslim, you connect with Allah. He alone is the Connecter. A Muslim submits to Allah. Allah sends you the rain, the sun, the health and sickness... and you must submit. That is all. No Sunni or Shi’a. Abu Bakr was Khalif, Ali was
Imam. Al-hamdulilah. Abu Bark was following Ali, it is right there in Bukhari and all their books. And Ali was both Khalif
and
Imam, right?”
“Right.”
“But shit, the Imam of Manassas gave Jehangir something and Jehangir gave it to me. Now I want to give it to you.” Amazing Ayyub dug in the back pocket of his abused and worn-out jeans, pulled out a tightly folded sheet of paper and presented it to me.
It was a photocopy of the fatwa by Shaykh Mahmud Shaltut, head of Al-Azhar Islamic University, recognizing Shi‘a fiqh as valid and addressing all Muslims to “free themselves toward unrightful prejudice toward specific sects.” Dated 17 Rabi’ al-Awwal, 1378 A.H. I folded it back up and placed it deep in my own pocket. “Leave that around the house sometime for Umar to pick up.”
“I will.”
“Alright bro. Check you later.” We shook hands. Amazing Ayyub crossed the street and went on his way without looking back, down a sidewalk whose end I’d never know. I watched until I couldn’t make out his big Johnny Reb X anymore.
Went home to find Fasiq on the roof with Jehangir Tabari. I leaned out the bathroom window.
“What are you, again?” Jehangir asked him. I knew they were wasted.
“Indonesian, bro,” Fasiq answered. “How long have you known me, again?” They laughed.
“Shit, Fasiq. Did you know out in California there’s a fuckin’ cave off the coast that has the word Allah’ written on its wall?”
“No shit, really?”
“Yeah, and carbon-dating showed it to predate Columbus.”
“So who put it there?” Fasiq asked.
“Indonesians. Or Malaysians. Filipinos, maybe. Some Pacific Rim Muslims. They discovered America. The big sweeping Arab conquests that inspired the whole ‘Islam by the sword’ stereotype never reached the Southeast Asians. They embraced the deen without ever being invaded.”
“Subhana’Allah.”
“Sufi merchants, bro.”
It felt good to see the two mohawks out there. The house was missing something without stoned hashishiyyuns on the roof.
“Salaams,” I called out. They both turned their heads to discover me resting on the bathroom windowsill. “Jehangir, what would you do if they ever built a statue of you?”
“I’d hope there was a Taliban around to blow it up.”
“I saw Amazing Ayyub. He told me about the Imam of Manassas.” Jehangir smiled knowingly.
“Ayyub’s got a good heart,” he said. “You know what really got me about Manassas?”
“What’s that?”
“They had this big black-and-white framed photo of the Ka’ba completely surrounded by water like an island. There’s some guy in the foreground all submerged except his head and one arm and you can’t tell if he’s swimming his circumambulation or drowning. This picture just totally blew my mind; I couldn’t stop staring, trying real hard to let it all soak deep in my marrow. I asked the Imam of Manassas about it, and he said in 1941 the Masjid Haram was flooded by a massive rain.”
Another Friday night, another hosting the usual faces and handfuls of fresh extras and America’s new greatest cowboy standing in some corner flashing me the occasional look to make a moment shared. With his mohawk and ’77 costume and bursting halcyon gusto people rose in their own notions of self-coolness just for standing next to him, exchanging firm handshakes, letting him throw his arms around them for off-key crooning. As always, the party constituted a sexual lottery. Each time a girl spoke to Jehangir, I wondered if she was the one for the night. Midway through flirty dialogue with a contender, he might look over to wherever I stood for my nonverbal assessment. Fasiq Abasa did fairly well in his own right, usually finding himself behind closed doors in a room full of smoke and impaired judgments. Rude Dawud had his own scene autonomous from Jehangir’s punk orchestrations and never had a problem with girls. Umar was Umar, and as for Rabeya I can’t honestly say that I knew anything of her personal life, but she did speak with a been-there crassness that you don’t find in most virgins.
At one point Jehangir was talking to Fatima with background noise of neighboring conversations and Duane Peters and the Hunns’ “Blood on the Sun,” and he plainly had no intention of another run at her pants, but that’s exactly why each party was a lottery: you never really knew. She listened with rapt enthusiasm as he told his tale of rolling in to DC off the I-95. “Wait, no,” he added, having caught his error. “That time it wasn’t the 95, it was the 81... I took the 81 to the 270 to the 70, I think... or the 70 to the 270.” I picked up a great deal concerning the Eisenhower Interstate System from Jehangir: 90 from Boston to Seattle, 5 from Seattle down through California, 81 from the Thousand Islands region of New York’s “North Country” to Tennessee where it becomes the 40. To go from Buffalo to Dallas you’d take the 90 to 71 to 65 to 40 to 30 to 20.
In DC Jehangir stumbled into the Islamic Center: “looks real
authentic, old-school in a Hollywood way,” he explained. It was right by the embassy of a Gulf state but he couldn’t remember which. From there he went to the campus of Saudi-funded American University and met up with three members of a Progressive Muslim group. “One guy and two girls,” he related. “Neither girl in hejab. They kept saying they were going to be the vanguard of a new Islamic Renaissance. One of the girls led our Asr prayer, too.”
“That’s awesome,” Fatima replied. “I thought Rabeya was the only girl in the world who led men in prayer.”
“The girl was cute; short with sweet eyes and a smile that makes you want to say funny things all the time and her face was framed by straight black Indian hair almost shimmery-shiny...” I wondered if he embellished only to impress on Fatima his capacity for such sentiments. “If it weren’t for my clear pilgrim’s head, she was pretty enough to have made me nervous in a dumb innocent sixth-grader way and nullify my prayer.”
“Awww,” she answered. “That’s so cute.” I would have hated Jehangir at that moment were it not for his irresistible sincerity. “So wait... you had a ‘pilgrim’s head?’ What was that all about?”
“I felt like it was a pilgrimage.”
“Really?”
“Sure. Just a few days before that I was down in Elmira, pouring out a bottle of Zamzam on Mark Twain’s grave.”
“Oh wow.” I left my vantage point to let that go on wherever it was meant to go, choosing then to eavesdrop from just outside a circle of South Asians—only one of whom looked like she’d mesh in Jehangir’s element. Some guy who seemed to have appointed himself the circle’s leadership was chiding a girl for being Indian.
“What,” he scoffed, “your parents forgot to emigrate in 1947?”
“Why do you speak Urdu with a Punjabi accent?” she countered.
“And why do you play off like you’re all revolutionary when you let your mom push you into medical school?”
“If you look into history,” he replied, “you’d find that the core leaders of most revolutions are doctors and other... kind of,
bourgeois
people.” Then he embarked on a tangent about Junoon, “the greatest rock group in Asia hands-down.” As I walked away from them I floated again by Jehangir, though Fatima was nowhere to be seen. With glazed eyes he told me that from DC I could take 495 to 66 and end up in Manassas—site of two Civil War battles, Stonewall Jackson’s heroics and a Shi’a masjid.
“That girl back in DC was cool,” he said as though he had been telling that story to me and not Fatima. “But it’s weird; even though the girl was progressive enough to serve as imam, before praying she made sure to put on hejab. But that’s cool; you do what you can, take what you can get, right?”
“Right.”
“American Taqwa, bro, we’re not the umma’s only fuck-ups.”
“Exactly.”
“Pretty girls write ayats, Yusef Ali; did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t.” He put his hand on the top of my head and just left it there. “I can see that DC girl with fancy Arabic calligraphy swirling around her bare sundressed legs like tangles of string in the breeze and fuckin’ wonder what the qurtab-club would think of that, of that girl lifting me up to the heights of a new Islamic character... the Romantic Muslim! Yusef Ali, have you ever heard of such a creature?”
“I might have.”
“Only submitting to dumb-crush kitabs deep in his gut like a damned fool. Insha’Allah, I might get the mercy of old age and a chance to make up for these shirks...” With his hand on my head he pulled me toward him, knocking foreheads with our eyes too close for proper focus. “Because Yusef Ali, that girl’s my qiblah.”
He was drunk. And stupid. And in ten minutes he wouldn’t remember saying any of that, but I loved him.
“Al-hamdulilah,” I said, this time not as generic dialogue-filler but with real joy for the iman in Jehangir’s drunken heart.