“So tell me about your new Porter Hall girl,” I said.
“Her name was Khadija, I think—we were talking and you know what got to me, bro? There’s a lot of Americans who don’t know that they have holy names. Khadija. Ayesha. Raheem. Malik. Umar. Ali. I once knew a Christian guy named Hasan. Isn’t that some shit?”
“Yeah,” I replied.
“And I was talking with Khadija about music, and mentioned taqwacore and she didn’t know what it was. So I’m like, ‘ever see that movie,
The Naked Gun?’
And she says yes, she’s seen it. So I ask her, ‘remember the part where Ayatullah Khumayni’s black turban comes off and he’s got a big orange mohawk underneath?’ And she remembers it. So I tell her that’s taqwacore.”
Fasiq Abasa and Rude Dawud stayed silent, presumably passed out or at least fallen asleep. By the time we got home, they were all out. I left the three unholies in Jehangir’s car and went to bed.
Two weeks later Fasiq Abasa came into some money and bought a video game console for the house. He hooked it up in the living room, which technically was his bedroom, the same living room where mumins piled in on Friday afternoons and drunks passed out on Friday nights. Jehangir Tabari bought a game for it, a baseball game where you could create characters, giving them all the necessary details, the right face, build, skin tone, even gender, put
names on their backs and have them fill entire rosters. The first team Jehangir made was the All-Time Oakland A’s, with Mark McGwire at first base, Nap Lajoie at second, Carney Lansford at shortstop and “Home Run” Baker over at third. At left field he put stolen-base king Rickey Henderson, at center “Mr. October” Reggie Jackson.
“I know he belongs at right,” Jehangir explained, eyes locked on the television as he clicked away on his paddle, “but it was between him and Canseco. I thought Reggie a better fielder so I gave him center.” Catching, Terry Steinbach. The starting pitchers: Lefty Grove and Catfish Hunter. Reliefs: Rollie Fingers with the big handlebar moustache like an Old West villain tying beautiful girls to railroad tracks, and Dennis Eckersley.
“Who would you put as manager?” I asked, though I had no frame of reference for his response to hold meaning.
“I was torn,” Jehangir replied, “between an undeniable legend and my childhood. Connie Mack from the old Philly A’s is still the heart and soul, blood and guts and patron saint of the team. But Tony LaRussa skippered during the late 80s Bash-Brothers Earthquake-Series dynasty, my all-time peak of baseball enthusiasm. Look at all the guys I got from those days: McGwire, Lansford, Henderson, Canseco, Steinbach, Eckersley. You can’t beat that.”
“Yeah,” I replied, with no idea about any of it.
“I think if I could, I’d have Tony run the show and just keep Connie around as a diamond sage telling stories.”
“That’d be cool.”
The second team he made was us. Rude Dawud the first base-man, Lynn with dirty-blonde dreadlocks at second, Fasiq Abasa at short, Fatima on third. The outfield: Jehangir at left, me at center and Umar out in right with all his tattoos. Amazing Ayyub for catcher. Starting pitchers: Rabeya and a mystery guy named “Bloody.” Reliefs: Sayyed and the newest addition, Fatima’s friend
Muzammil who we had only met a few days before.
“Your guy is pretty good,” said Jehangir.
“Really?”
“He’s a solid hitter. My guy steals a lot. Umar’s a slugger. You should see him swing those big inked-up arms, it’s nuts. Like he’s putting another mihrab in the wall.” I laughed.
“Who’s Bloody?” I asked.
“He’s a kid I knew out in Pasadena, craziest fuckin’ kid you’d ever meet. Big, tall goofy bitch with a frizzy mohawk half-brown and half-black, at least when I knew him. Safety-pin in his nose, the whole nine. He was originally from New Jersey but faked an English accent—that’s a punk thing, what can I say. He could pull it off, though. But he pronounced ‘Hackettstown’ as ‘Haketstan’ or ‘Hackistan.’ Kind of a nut but I love that kid to death.”
“Wow.”
“I don’t even remember half the stories I could tell about him. Going into diners drunk off our asses, getting food all over ourselves, shouting curses to anyone who came in, spitting in people’s faces, running mankind from our little third-world dictatorship booth in the smoking section.”
“Oh my God.”
“That’s Punk Rawk,” he said proudly. “Not this harmless mall bullshit. Punks all clean-cut and cute with skateboards and wallet chains, baggy khakis and Airwalks.”
“Hey Jehangir—when you were making us on the game, how did you know what kind of face to give Rabeya?”
“I’ve seen it, bro.”
“What? When?”
“An Indian sweat lodge in Michigan,” he said, still playing the baseball game.
“Indian sweat lodge?”
“Okay, Native American. She knew someone who was going
and we both tagged along. It’s like a domed tent covered with layers and layers of blankets and you cram inside, men on one side and women on the other, all around these stones that have just been pulled from a fire outside. And the elder, he pours water on the hot stones creating this insane sauna-like effect. It gets so hot in there, bro, with the steam and packed in there with so many bodies, you think you’re gonna die. You just sweat all the badness out of you.”
“That sounds cool.”
“Needless to say, you don’t want a lot of clothing. Before entering, the men all stripped down to their boxers and the women were down to shorts and t-shirts. I only saw her for a second and I wasn’t going to gawk at her—it was pretty awkward for both of us—but I did see it, bro.”
“What did she look like?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied without looking away from the television. “Not what you’d expect, but at the same time you don’t really expect anything so, whatever. I guess she looks like a person.”
“What was the sweat lodge like?”
“The most physical discomfort I’ve ever felt in my life, but also some pure fuckin’ joy. First you’re outside standing around the fire that’s heating the stones. The stones represent your ancestors, I think. You take some tobacco and throw it on the fire, and it makes a
pop!
kinda sound—” He turned off the game and we went into the kitchen. “It was mostly women,” he explained, pouring himself some coffee. “Or at least it felt like that because the women were much more comfortable than the men with being cramped together in a little hut and sweating on each other and singing in the dark. Besides me and two guys James and John, the men were all in their mid-thirties. On the females’ side were old women who had been doing it for twenty years, little girls and everyone in
between. There we were—a bunch of sweaty hot bodies in the dark—blessing our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers. And in them... in
Rabeya...
I saw something I had never seen before.
“In Islam, Yusef—if you’re a man—female spirituality is like a distant land you can only read about. Women pray far away, up in balconies or behind dividers and you never hear a woman’s voice in jumaa. This is justified by the idea that men could never be around women without thinking of them indecently.”
“Do you think it’s true?” I asked. “Can men really be innocent around women?”
“Maybe, maybe not, who knows. But if you believe that you can’t, and you live like you can’t, it messes you up inside.”
“What do you mean?”
“The more you accept man’s intrinsic weakness, the easier it is to hate girls. Suddenly all your bad thoughts are their fault since they should have known how weak you are and not take advantage of it. When you’re enslaved to your nuts you can hate all sorts of girls. Girls who laugh loudly, girls who show their knees. Girls who go to bars and dance. Suddenly you can’t handle anything.”
“I see.”
“Shit, Yusef. If the problem is
men’s
wicked thoughts, why aren’t we the ones behind dividers?”
The new guy—Muzammil Sadiq—made his debut when Fatima brought him along to Friday jumaa. Knowing that she had discovered the kid out in San Francisco, Jehangir immediately took to Muzammil like a long-lost brother, pulling him into a world that only the two of them knew: street names and interstates, restaurants and clubs, good neighborhoods and bad, dialectic quirks and
geographic interests. Muzammil even knew about taqwacore, which helped make that scene seem a little more real for the rest of us who had only heard of it through Jehangir’s legends. Muzammil came with tales of his own of a growing genre, the blending of taqwacore (Muslim Punk) with homocore (Gay Punk) into something entirely new: liwaticore, subculture within subcultures of a subculture.
“It’s only a few bands right now,” he explained. “But it’s a start.”
“So who are the big ones out there?” Jehangir asked.
“The Ghilmans, mainly—”
“Those guys are awesome—I’m trying to get them out to my show this winter.”
“That’d be hot,” Muzammil replied. “And there’s the Wilden Mukhalloduns, and Istimna, they’re both pretty good bands. The Guantanamo Bay Packers have some good songs. Gross National’s good, high political content. Their singer’s a Pathan bi-girl. There’ll be more, I’m sure as the gay Muslim population grows into its own coherent community.”
“Insha’Allah,” said Jehangir smiling, a brown glass bottle in hand even at jumaa.
“There was even going to be a gay masjid in Toronto, from what I heard.”
“No shit?”
“Yeah, but they didn’t do it for fear of violence or something. I would have loved to see that.”
“I’m sure it’s on its way, somewhere. With al-Fatiha and Queer Jihad and all these groups and conferences popping up, all the new Sulayman X’s out there... it’ll definitely happen.”
“Insha’Allah.”
“Islam used to be a lot more enlightened about that shit,” said Jehangir with a swig off his bottle. “Back in the day, you know,
with Bin Quzman and Abu Nuwas of Baghdad, and Sarmad who studied with the religious scholars and then dropped all of it to walk naked through Delhi singing his love for a gorgeous Hindu boy—”
“They killed Sarmad,” Muzammil replied.
“Huh?”
“They killed Sarmad. Aurangzeb had him executed.”
“Oh, shit. I forgot about that.”
“He still has followers in India, though. They see him as a Sufi saint.”
“That’s cool,” said Jehangir.
“He was yahooda,” interrupted Umar, who had been lurking on the conversation’s periphery unnoticed. “His parents were Iranian Jews.”
“And,” said Muzammil, “your point is...”
“He was a yahooda rabbi, he even said it himself. Another outside force coming to Islam just to destroy it from the inside. Refusing to cover his private parts, rejecting all the laws of Islam, glorifying his sodomy. What would happen if instead of killing Sarmad, we lifted up and exalted him?”
“I don’t know,” Muzammil sighed. With sarcastic woe he resigned, “I guess he’d convert everyone to Zionist Faggotism. In fact, that was our plan all along.”
“What do you mean?” asked Umar.
“You see,” Muzammil whispered so as to keep it top secret, his eyes wide open like he was going nuts, “Sarmad lived when—the sixteenth, seventeenth century? That was when it all started: our global conspiracy between Jews and homosexuals to cripple the Muslim Umma! The wheels have been rolling ever since. We’ve overtaken every major government. From behind the curtain, we manipulate world events to our liking. See how the Muslims have been weakened? We’re responsible for everything, Umar: Mughal
India’s fall to the British, the collapse of the Khilafah, Kemal Ataturk, East Pakistan breaking away to become Bangladesh, the creation of modern Israel, the rise of television, birth control, the phony Moon landing, subliminal brain-washing radio waves,
riba
banking, AIDS, abortion, Benazir Bhutto, the Gulf War, Bosnia, Chechnya, Somalia, the Bush-Taliban oil connection, child porn, Ebola virus and the disintegration of Michael Jackson’s face... we caused all of it, Umar. Even though they got Sarmad, they could-n’ t stop all of us. When we put our wicked heads together, there’s just no stopping yahoodas and queers.”
Twenty minutes later I overheard Umar continuing his argument to an entirely new audience of passive listeners.
“It’s like Yazid and Husain. Yazid flouted Islam, he was a drunkard and corrupt. What if Husain gave Yazid his pledge of allegiance? Just imagine Muhammad’s beloved grandson endorsing that behavior; what would that have done to Islam? But no—Husain fought Yazid, fought him with every step and every breath until his last, even when he knew that victory was completely beyond his reach. And in so doing, by opposing the unlawful, he saved Islam.”
“Mash’Allah,” said one of the brothers.
“Rasullullah sallallaho alayhe wa salaam,” added Umar, “said he would rather fall from the heavens to the earth than lay eyes on another man’s
awrah.
You know, back when Mustafa lived here, the
ahlul-Lut
would never have come through that door.”
I had no idea where Muzammil and Jehangir had gone until I went to use the upstairs bathroom and found them out on the roof with Fasiq, Fatima and Rabeya.
“Come on out!” Rabeya called. I climbed through the window.
“We only have two months of this left,” added Jehangir, “if we’re lucky.”
“Hey Yusef,” said Fasiq with a puff off his kief, “did you know that William S. Burroughs called weed the official drug of Islam?”
“Where’d you hear that?” I asked.
“Muzammil was just saying,” he replied.
“He had fled the United States on obscenity charges,” Muzammil explained. “And he went to Tangiers, got caught up in the whole scene there. Jack Kerouac went too to help him work on
Naked Lunch
. But anyway Burroughs said that culturally hashish was Islam’s drug, whereas alcohol was Christianity’s.”
“That’s interesting,” I noted. “It kind of makes sense, in a way.”