The Taqwacores (16 page)

Then I saw the Minar-e-Pakistan, marking the spot at which the Muslim League passed its resolution calling for an independent Islamic republic. And right there in the foreground: the same skinny American teenager, hands in denim pockets.

 

 

I went down to the kitchen and heard Propagandhi’s “Fuck Religion” blaring from Rabeya’s adjacent room.

“Salaam alaikum,” I called out, proceeding to prepare myself a glass of orange juice.

“Wa alaikum as-salaam,” from behind the curtained doorway. “Hey Yusef,—”

“Yeah?”

“Come in here a sec.” I left my glass on the counter, walked over to the curtain and gently pushed it aside. For some reason I was nearly startled to see Rabeya’s room behind it. Though of course I knew she had always been there, my rare delves past the curtain boundary had left me with little in the way of a retained image. Her walls were covered with photocollages and fliers from protests, the far wall bearing a souvenir from the 2001 Presidential Inauguration: black marker on white posterboard reading “HEY LAURA—MY BUSH IS BETTER.” She had posters of red-haired Tori Amos in white t-shirt reading “Junkies Baddy Powder” and the famous WWII image of a woman in work-shirt and red bandana flexing her bicep above the words, “WE CAN DO IT!”

She motioned for me to have a seat on one of her fourcolumned monoliths of books. I chose a pile only to notice that
one of the books on top was Pickthall’s translation of the Holy Qur‘an. I picked it up and resituated the others to fill its space. For all the degradation accorded organized religion in that house, at least Allah’s Book would be spared the indignity of lying beneath my ass. Moving only my eyes I looked around the room. Another thing on the walls: poetry written in tiers of light-tan masking tape with black Sharpie sloppy punk-rock font. They crammed in wherever posters, protest placards and photos left space: she even had some on the ceiling. The ones near enough to read I instantly recognized from Rabeya’s coffeehouse recitals and zine. There was “Redemption Center,” in which Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) waits at Kauthar with a big sack of severed body parts to be returned to those believers who had lost for the Law: be it a hand, foot, head, clitoris or whatever. And there was the classic “72 Cocks,” in which Rabeya described her Jenna as being something like the notorious porn film “The Houston 500.”
Big black dicks that never go soft, even after blowing their milk-honey Kauthar... line em up and spread me—oh wait, sorry—that’s not in my nature. I meant, ’cut off my labes and give me 72 sons so I can cook them macaroni with halal cheese.’

“I like your room,” I said, opening the Qur’an and flipping pages.

“It’s a ceiling and some walls,” she replied. I then found in her Qur’an a large block of black marker-strokes censoring an entire ayat, both the original Arabic and Pickthall’s English interpretation.

“What’s this?” I asked, holding it up.

“What?”

“This—you crossed out an ayat?”

“Which one is that?”

“It’s—wait, let me see... 4:34.”

“Oh, right. Okay then.”

“So you just felt like you didn’t need a whole ayat?”

“Well, that ayat advises men to beat their wives. What did I need it for?”

“But there’s a wide variety of interpretations as to what that verse actually means,” I argued. “You know, most translators say it means ‘beat lightly’ and there’s a great deal of legal rulings on the subject. And there’s the story of Job, how he only used a blade of grass to—”

“Yeah Yusef, I know. I went through that ayat up and down. I looked at what all the scholars said, even progressives like Asma Barlas; did you know that in that context, the word
daraba
might not even mean ‘to beat?’ It could also mean ‘to prevent.’ Sure, I did all the gymnastic tap dancing around that verse a desperate Muslima could do. Finally I said, fuck it. If I believe it’s wrong for a man to beat his wife, and the Qur‘an disagrees with me, then fuck that verse. I don’t need to stretch and squeeze it for a weak alternative reading, I don’t need to excuse it with historical context, and I sure as hell don’t need to just accept it and go sign up for a good ol’ fashioned bitch-slapping. So I crossed it out. Now I feel a whole lot better about that Qur’an.”

“Wow. I see, I guess.”

“Problem solved—and you won’t find anything in there about a woman’s testimony equaling half a man’s.” She switched CDs on her multi-disc player. I did not recognize the band or its female singer, but they were covering the classic “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.”

“Who’s this?” I asked.

“The Slits.”

“Oh.”

“But Yusef Ali... I have something for you.”

“For me?”

“Yep. I was thinking about it when you asked if it was difficult
reading through the burqa, so...”

She whipped out her surprise and presented it to me with the pride of an Olympic gold medalist, saying “here”: a vaguely complicated armful of solid black clothing. Upon closer examination, I discovered the eye-grid.

“A burqa?”

“That’s right.”

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

“I don’t know...
wear
it?”

“You want me to wear a burqa?”

“Just for a day. See what it’s like in there.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, promise me you’ll hold onto it. Just in case you change your mind.”

“Does it at least have any cool band patches on it like that one?”

“No, it’s plain.”

“I’ll keep it. But don’t expect to see me sporting this thing around town.”

“That’s fair. Just so you have it.”

“Well, thanks then, kind of.” I glanced at each of her walls. “That’s funny...”

“What?”

“You’re the only one in this house who doesn’t have a flag in their room.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah. Some even have two. I just have a little one, but still—”

“Yusef, what flag am I going to hold up?”

“I don’t know.” I then remembered that I had no idea of her ethnic heritage.

“There’s no flag for me,” she said. I examined the black fabric in my hands and thought of black flags waved by aspiring
mujahideens in the hazy cheap desert-mountain footage you saw on CNN from time to time that always looked like it was shot in the 1970s: sinister-looking mystery men hop-stepping tires like a high school football squad, except that they carried Kalashnikovs.

I then noticed that she had a mirror on her wall, right by the closet. It struck me as kind of humorous; why would Rabeya need a mirror when she never had to do her hair or makeup and she just threw the same old hood on herself before leaving the room. By the mirror hung a poster of a hejabi carcass lying in a pool of its own blood, only the feet exposed. On the body was written, “Muslim Woman.” Eleven daggers hovered above as though claiming credit for the murder. Next to each blade was a word in Arabic, with English translation offered at the bottom of the poster.

According to the translation, each dagger constituted a “Danger Threatening Muslim Women.” They were:

“Where did you get that?” I asked, my eyes still on it.

“Came with some books I ordered.”

“Oh.”

“I like how ‘porno magazine’ and ‘porno film’ were two separate threats,” she remarked with a laugh. “I guess porn is an especially grave danger.”

“Looks that way.”

“Maybe just as dangerous as the telephone!”

“Wow,” I said. I had nothing else to offer. I then found words among the masking-tape strips that were not hers, covering five rips of tape and a sixth for the author’s name.

“You ever hear the hadith about the prostitute lost in the desert?”

“No,” I replied.

“Well, there was this prostitute lost in the desert—starving, dying of thirst and heat, et cetera, the whole deal—and when she finally comes to a well, she notices this dog lying there in the sand and dust and sun totally about to die. So what does the prostitute do?”

“I think I heard this one before,” I said.

“You probably have.”

“She takes her hejab off, lowers it into the water and then puts it in the dog’s mouth. And for giving the dog water before quenching her own thirst, Rasullullah said all her sins were forgiven.”

“It’s a good one to remember,” she said pointing to the
Dangers
Threatening Muslim Women
poster, “when you find yourself thinking that this is our religion.”

“Makes sense.”

“There is a Cool Islam out there, Yusef. You just have to find it. You have to sift through all the other stuff, but it’s there.”

With the end of August came a new school year. Jehangir led Fasiq Abasa, Rude Dawud and I on a mission to the campus of Buffalo State College.

“Find the new characters,” he said, drunk before we even got there. We ended up at Porter Hall, where packs of eager freshmen still clustered out in front. Jehangir put his mohawk under a black ski hat and looked more like a worker on construction sites or loading docks than a punk. Fasiq spiked his up and donned the Op Ivy hoodie. Rude Dawud wore his trademark pork-pie hat. My clothes were kind of generic. I don’t know what to say about them; they were just clothes. I bought them at the mall. Didn’t really say anything about me, I thought.

Standing in front of Porter Hall, I relaxed my eyes as with those 3-D hidden pictures and glazed over on the thirty-two slabs of fluorescent light in eight floors of lounge windows; and at the same time, relaxing my ears to blend all the conversations around me into one light rumble with no actual words. College life, an assembly line of fresh faces that dropped off and disappeared just as they became worn-out and tired. Campuses never lost their
vitality and youth, but this truth came across as almost depressing. We were surrounded by kids just out of high school. I found it sad that I viewed them as
kids
.

Somebody was walking inside and Jehangir yelled for him to hold the door. Jehangir’s drunkenness was still at the stage that it only made him more charming. Just like that, we were in. Ran up the stairs to the second floor. Whatever songs the music industry was shoving down kids’ throats at the time were blaring from open doors decorated with stupid college decorations: corny name tags made by the RAs, clipped headlines and sexy photos from magazines. At the end of the hallway was another stairwell and we hit the third floor. Same thing.

On the fourth floor we chilled in the lounge on ratty dorm furniture. A white kid in thick black-rimmed glasses and a Less than Jake shirt came up and tapped me on the shoulder.

“It’s 4:20,” he said.

“What?” I had no idea what he meant.

“It’s 4:20, you got a minute?”

“What do you mean?” Then Fasiq observed and called the kid over. The kid said he wanted “trees.” Fasiq and Rude Dawud got up and followed him to his room, leaving just me and Jehangir in the fourth-floor lounge.

“You gotta love the first week of school,” said Jehangir, arms spread out on the fire-resistant couch. “Shit like that only happens in the first week.”

“What do you mean?”

“All these new kids, they desperately want to be cool but they don’t know anyone. That’s why all these doors are open and people are just starting conversations with perfect strangers. There’s no cliques yet. It’s a level playing field. Give it just a week, all this dies and people are resigned to their own circles. Kind of sad.” I looked at Jehangir and wondered how he knew so much about
college society.

“S’up guys,” said a scruffy young man coming down the hall. Young but not too young, not young enough to make me feel old. He had a cynical old jerk’s wisdom that made it obvious he had been there awhile. He shook both our hands and plopped down on the lounge couch that once hosted Fasiq and Dawud. “Yo, I just sucked on a fresh pair of eighteen-year-old tits.” I knew then that he was older. Jehangir had once worked in a gas station and explained to me that the porn magazines with titles like
Just 18
and
Barely Legal
aren’t bought up by eighteen-year-old guys.

“That’s hot,” Jehangir replied. He had the gift, especially when drunk, of reaching anyone on their level; even a wretch like this guy. “What she look like?”

“She was cute, man. Had some nice ol’ titties.”

“Awesome.”

“Her room’s fuckin’... shit, what was her room... fuckin’ 610, man.”

“Nice.”

“You should go check her out.”

“Might do that,” said Jehangir.

“Just like they treat snakebites with snake venom,” said the guy, “I need those eighteen-year old tits. They’re my disease and the cure. I suck on ’em like they lactate self-respect.”

“What’s your name, man?”

“Billy Plunger.”

“I’m Jehangir.”

“Wha—”

“It’s just like John-geer.”

“Oh. Cool. And you?” He looked at me.

“Yusef.”

“Yusef?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh. What’s up man.” Jehangir pulled out his flask and took a swig. “That is the shit,” said Billy Plunger. “I fuckin’ love college.”

“Hell yeah,” said Jehangir, who as far as I knew had never seen a classroom after high school.

“You got a girlfriend?” Billy asked.

“Nah. You?”