With almost a month left to my winter break I drove home. I brought almost everything I owned, not completely sure I’d come back for spring semester. Left Mustafa’s books where they had always been.
At home my religion stayed soft and calm like there was nothing to fight. Without a speck of disrespect to Jehangir and the taqwacores, it was the best feeling in the world.
Jehangir’s distorted melodic solo did not represent the majority of American Muslims, but neither did the shaykhs of al-Azar. Most of us fall somewhere in that big gray void between.
I remember the yellow-covered pulp novel Jehangir left in the Rochester masjid.
The Punk,
by Gideon Sams. I wonder who found it and if they gave Gideon a chance. I remember the Imam of Manassas, immortalized at least to Ayyub though Jehangir’s traveler tales. I wonder if he actually existed, or if there was even really a masjid in Manassas.
Since New Year’s I’ve only heard the word ‘taqwacore’ once or twice. It stays out West, living its own life. Bands come and go without my awareness. It’s like they’re all a universe away. The notion of Muslim Punk feels like an ex-girlfriend to me, or at least how I’d imagine an ex-girlfriend would feel if I had one. I’m glad it’s still out there and I hope it’s doing well, but to check up on it
would just hurt me all over again.
Somehow my email address had circulated its way to the hands of a zine writer in Campbell, California wanting to ask me about Jehangir and 12/21. Apparently Jehangir had become the Kurt Cobain for a whole mess of people. His face had turned into a t-shirt, his name a cliché lyric.
The zine writer interviewed me like I were a Sahaba. Did Jehangir pray, how did he pray, did he do it at the right times or just whenever, did he make wudhu, whose fiqh did he follow, what bands did he like, did he support liwaticore, was he politically active in any way, did he ever sing or put out an album, so on and on. I gave the guy what he wanted and now it’s somebody’s sunna.
Everything in the body regenerates. You get new skin, new organs, new cells. Quite literally, the person you were seven years ago no longer exists.
If I lived fourteen centuries I would be, give or take, sixty different people.
I’m sure they found someone to take my room. Jehangir’s too, for that matter. It’s been long enough. Neither of us are going back. Soon the weather will be nice again and Fasiq will climb out that bathroom window with his weed and Qur’an and maybe two new recruits. He’ll fill their heads with tales of Jehangir and a mysterious nation of Muslim Punks somewhere out there, toward the far ocean—
And maybe, insha‘Allah, Fasiq’ll have a story or two about me. I don’t know what; maybe just that I was
there
for all of it. I was-n’
t a crazy punk or holy blasphemer but at least I was
there.
If Lynn’s still around he can say that I hooked up with her in what used to be my room. Whatever.
We’re gone to the archives: Jehangir, Rude Dawud, prehistoric Mustafa and me. When Umar, Rabeya, Fasiq and Ayyub move out so too goes our memory. It’s like we move out twice. It’s like that Cordoba cathedral with ayats on the wall and no Moors in sight.
For some reason, to me they were all on the same side of some impassable boundary as Jehangir. The other day I noticed a child’s handprint in the sidewalk and immediately envisioned Amazing Ayyub saying that the five outstretched fingers represented the
ahlul-bayt
of Muhammad, Fatima, Ali, Hasan and Husain. I smiled thinking of Ayyub and even laughed; but it never struck me that I could call the house and talk to him, that he remained a full flesh-and-blood human life no matter where I went.
I think of Buffalo whenever my hands get so cold that my fingers hurt. Imagine the desert, Jehangir used to say. He’d close his eyes and tell me that as far as he was concerned he had fled to Karbala.
“Hey there’s Andrew Jackson,” he’d say with eyes closed. “Andrew Jackson out in Karbala, wow, cool. Riding his white horse, makin’ it stand up on its hind legs.”
Mark Twain lived in Buffalo. He’s buried in Elmira. Jehangir hajj’d there and poured Zamzam water on his grave, but I think this has already been mentioned.
...Jehangir Tabari who passed through the world like a stranger, Jehangir Tabari in Buffalo like Imam Burroughs in Tangiers, Jehangir Tabari the new Hassan bin Sabbah and Jehangir Tabari the only Jehangir Tabari there ever was, Jehangir Tabari Leader of the Youths of Paradise, Jehangir Tabari who’ll someday have people whipping themselves for his innocence. Jehangir Tabari, the Sealed Nectar.
...Jehangir Tabari the staggering Sophoclean bicephalic pitbull on creatine, Jehangir the Gutter Dervish.
If Allah’s the Beloved, Jehangir shaved his initials in Her pubic hair.
If intoxication’s just a Rumi metaphor, Jehangir fucked Allah with a beer bottle.
Buffalo has a mean winter. Even when the snow comes light and fluffy there’s just too much and then it piles on like a massive carpet-bombing. By February it starts to wane here and there only to hit you hard just when you think it’s let up.
I don’t miss that. On weather alone, you can be depressed in Buffalo no matter what you do.
But I miss people.
Muslims, non-Muslims and the sincere tweeners. Damn
al-zariyats,
they tossed me far.
Jehangir’s dead and cremated. I’m glad they didn’t bury him in the cold Buffalo ground. Maybe his cremating will save him from the Torment of the Grave.
Staghfir’Allah.
If the Rab wanted to He could reassemble Jehangir and torment him all the live-long day, really get him good for all the rotten things he had done. Should that be the Allah that you want, knock yourself out.
It’s okay to
watch
cartoons; but if you fear the Fire, limit your drawing to trees and rocks.
I’m talking to a girl on the internet. Her name is Zuhra. She’s a freshman at Binghamton University, a little over an hour south of Syracuse on the I-81. She baby-sits part-time for a devout Christian family in the neighboring town of Vestal. Two boys and a girl; sweet kids, she says.
We’ve never met but I close my eyes and imagine her. An inherent, intangible modesty reads in her eyes. With the Christian kids there’s a graceful mom-love to her hands when she band-aids a scraped knee or washes their hair in the tub and makes sure the shampoo stays out of their eyes. The way I imagine her, she always has her straight black hair up in a bandana but when she lets it
down she just kills you. It’s also rare to see her smile, I mean really really smile when it’s not just her showing her teeth but you see the smile in her eyes too as they light up and open wide, a spiritual smile from deep down inside her. When you finally see one of those you’re
done.
Another item from my daydream file: she has one pair of jeans with a substantial tear in the back, high enough on her right thigh that it reveals just a glimpse of her underwear. She wears the jeans with full knowledge and I can’t think any less of her for it. Any remotely sexual gesture from the girl comes with such awkwardness and uncertainty that you only sanctify her more. God bless her. I see fifteen-year old girls walking around now with things like
Princess
or
Flirt
emblazoned across the asses of their sweatpants and I don’t know what to do with that.
Chances are I’m totally off-base. Like I said, we haven’t actually seen each other. She’s never mentioned whether there’s actually a hole in her jeans. But I do know that Zuhra writes poetry—she told me that much. Nothing she’d show anyone, though. She likes Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. She also plays guitar. I told her that Rasullullah said it was better for your body to be filled with pus than poetry and that Allah turns musicians into monkeys and pigs on the Day of Judgment, but I followed that up with a smiley-face emoticon.
LOL,
she replied.
I also know that Zuhra drinks. She drinks to the point that her kafr friends appoint one from their group to look after her whenever they go out, watch her, keep track of how much she has, cut her off when she’s done and ward off sleazy guys. She’ll drink until she passes out and urinates on herself. Zuhra views her own life in frames of personal tragedy and waning resistance to inevitable self-annihilation as laid out by her heroes. Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton were both suicides. Zelda Fitzgerald died in a burning mental institution.
I stood watching from the screen, draped in the ihram of pilgrims: two white towels, the
izar
and the
rida.
The izar was wrapped around my waist, the rida over my left shoulder leaving the right shoulder and arm naked. That was how they did it in the time of Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him. My bare feet were cold on the spaceship floor. Labbayk Allahumma, Labbayk.
Over the ihram goes a bulky spacesuit required for survival in Earth’s poisonous atmosphere. As I pulled it on I wondered what it might have been like to visit the Holy City when it actually existed—when there was a Ka’ba, Zamzam well, stations of Abraham and Shaytans to pelt with stones; back before Mecca and Tokyo and New York and Paris were all identically matching holes in the dirt. The Holy City is now as it was the day baby Ismail cried of thirst and his mother ran desperately between those two hills.
Goodnight, Islam. Don’t let the bed bugs bite.
—Abu Afak,
Ten Million Miles Home
Not a bad book. It gets cornball but charmingly so. I ordered it online.
Sometimes I think of Jehangir as an Islamic Rob Van Dam with all these amazing moves that nobody’s ever seen before, flip-flying his way to the big wow finish Five Star Frog after which he always holds his ribs like it killed him. Then I reconsider. Maybe Jehangir was only an apostate, a bum, a lazy slob alcoholic with the maturity of an ejaculating eleven-year-old. Maybe it doesn’t matter either way.
If he left me with anything, it’s this simple idea:
I can answer my own question.
Fuck the local imam, fuck the PhDs at al-Madina al-Munawwara, fuck Siraj Wahhaj, fuck Cat Stevens. Fuck the traditionalists and fuck the apostates too—fuck Ibn Warraq, fuck Anwar Sheikh, fuck Ali Sina, fuck them all, let me puke out every book I’ve consumed, give me the Islam of starry-night cornfields with wind rustling through my shirt and reckless
fisabilillah
make-out sprees that won’t lead to anything but hurt. Knee-deep in a creek is where I’ll find my kitab. If Allah wants to say anything to me He’ll do so on the faces of my brothers and sisters. If there’s any Law that I need to follow, I’ll find it out there in the world.
Jehangir had said he came to Buffalo for his brother. I didn’t know what that meant because he had no brother. He always used to talk about how, with the exception of his uncle, his whole upbringing had been overrun with women.
Now I know what he meant.
Jehangir’s uncle was a truck driver and one summer took him up and down and left and right across this continent, seeing it all—all people, all ways. Texas, Mississippi, New York, D.C., Montana, the Dakotas, Oregon. Mexico and Canada. It’s hard for me to imagine Jehangir Tabari as a child, figuring he didn’t have the mohawk, but it felt right to picture him adventuring and tasting life and living in a tractor-trailer cab. Anyway when he was out in California with the taqwacores, Jehangir remembered us out here and figured he had found something that we, his
brothers
, could use. So he brought it like missionaries from across the ocean or Muhammad coming down Hira. Brought it East to cold Buffalo, preached his new Sufism and left us.
Umar used to have one of those Torso Bob things. It was basically a punching bag designed to look like an armless guy from the waist up. Umar’s Torso Bob looked pretty mean. If he was a real guy, and had arms, I wouldn’t have messed with him.
One day Jehangir convicted Torso Bob of apostasy—“I heard him sing the Qur‘an!”—and sawed his head off. It was pretty funny. Jehangir made a big show of it, all ceremonial Protection of Virtue style. Umar still used the headless torso. The head was used in a game of ‘flaming dodgeball.’ Fasiq dabbed rubber cement all over the head, then lit it. We had fun tossing fireballs at each other until Ayyub burned his leg.
When I left Buffalo I took the head with me. I didn’t think anyone would mind. It’s just a piece of that era, a relic from previous chapters reminding me that it all actually happened.
I have a mess of artifacts from the house, keep them all in a cardboard box in my closet. Dog-eared Abu Afak paperbacks, some CDs, a t-shirt for some band I had never heard of, an empty beer bottle. And the burqa, which I wore once. Just in my bedroom with the door closed but I wore it. I sat on my bed unable to see right or left, only directly ahead. Felt like a horse with those shields on its eyes. For no particular reason I was completely naked underneath. My cock grew and poked up the cloth. Looking at it I finally understood the term “pitch a tent.” That’s what it looked like. I grabbed it. The fabric made my hand almost feel like someone else. I slid off the bed and rested on my knees, still stroking. With my left hand I lifted the niqab, exposing my mouth for Fasiq’s imaginary dick.
I don’t know why this happened. I don’t know what it means that I spunked in the burqa. Insha‘Allah, it doesn’t mean anything. When you think about sex all the time and exhaust your possibilities, eventually—given the proper circumstances—you’ll entertain a different perspective. Just because I thought about that doesn’t
mean I wanted to do it. I was probably turned on by the concept of the blowjob. It’d be nice getting one, as far as I can imagine. Maybe I’ll find out if this thing with Zuhra picks up (insha’Allah).