Jum'a with the Punks: An Excerpt from The Taqwacores

By Mike Muhammad Knight

[Editor's Note: Since we first excerpted The Taqwacores, the novel has now become available through legendary punk label Alternative Tentacles.]

I had moved in little over a year before. Telling Ummi and Abu back in Syracuse that it’d be a house full of Muslims, they were more than happy to send the rent every month.

“It’d be better for you than living in the dorms,” Abu told me. “There are the very bad things there.”

“You live with Muslims,” said Ummi, “and stay focused.”

“As-salaamu alaikum,” Umar answered when I called the number on the flier.

After a brief rundown on the rent, utilities and such he made sure to check whether I knew it was a Muslim house. Said my room’s previous occupant had been gone at least a year. His name was Mustafa and he lived firmly by Islamic principles, Umar explained, at such a level that no other resident attained in his time and none since have even approached. I discovered this upon my first inspection of the room as Mustafa had left some books behind: all nine volumes of Sahih Bukhari bound in leather green, a copy of The Spectacle of Death and a cardboard box filled with gorgeously ornamented Qurans. “He used to get them free from the Saudi embassy all the time,” Umar explained. A flap on the box bore Mustafa’s name and the house address.

Along with unofficial tenant Fasiq Abasa, who crashed on one of our couches and occasionally put in for groceries, I constituted the third generation in the house’s Islamic history. The previous wave had seen the appearances of Jehangir Tabari and Amazing Ayyub. Originally, in what Umar would impress upon me as a primordial golden age, it was Mustafa, Umar, Rabeya and Rude Dawud (who back then was only Dawud).

“That was when we really had it,” Umar once told me in his truck. It, I assumed, meant Islam. “That’s why Rabeya’s room is downstairs,” he explained. “Back then we didn’t even want to live with a female, you know, but Mustafa said we could give her the room downstairs that went right to the back door so she could go in through the back. No males were allowed to use the downstairs bathroom, that was just for her. And we had curtains hanging over the doorway to the kitchen, you had to knock if you needed something. If she wasn’t in there you could go in but you had to announce yourself in case she was on her way to the kitchen, and if she was in there already she would slide you what you needed under the curtain.”

“Mash’Allah,” I replied. “So she wore full purdah even back then?”

“Al-hamdulilah, of course she did and back then she didn’t have patches on it or anything. Back then we prayed together, and we did it right. Right times, right ways. That was before Rabeya started demanding to lead salat, and before all these haram influences came in--khamr, zina, before all these parties.” More or less, Umar was saying before Jehangir Tabari. “Even me,” he said to my surprise. “Even me, brother.”

“What?”

“I had something back then I might not have now. You know…” He looked at his truck’s tape player running Youth of Today’s “Disengage.” “You know, yakee, they say the stringed instruments are not actually halal, they count as ma'aazif--”

“Insha’Allah,” I replied.

“Yeah,” said Umar. “Insha’Allah, that‘s what the scholars say. Back when Mustafa had your room, we didn’t listen to haram things. We didn’t talk about haram things. We weren’t consuming haram things and we didn’t have kufrs in our house mixing males and females together, singing, swearing, doing such-and-such.”

I knew it was not Umar’s intention but somehow I felt as though it were all my fault--or at least that my presence symbolized the declining state of affairs. Back when Mustafa had your room. If Mustafa were still there Umar would have felt better about himself.

I confess that in the time I had that room, I barely cracked any of Mustafa’s books. The Bukharis gathered dust on his old bookshelf--if I needed anything of the good Imam it was easier to just look through hadith databases online. I took one of the Saudi Embassy’s Qurans and put it by my bed, where it stayed more or less untouched besides the occasional bedtime reading of Ya Sin. Fasiq Abasa wanted the rest and I gladly parted with the obtrusive box. As for The Spectacle of Death, that went to Amazing Ayyub and gave him a steady supply of conversation-starters. Hey yakee, you know what happens in Jehennam to women who wear perfume? Thus-and-so.

*

On Fridays the living room doubled as a masjid, mostly for kids from the campus who couldn’t identify with the MSA. They were nowhere near being ersatz mumins of Fasiq‘s level, but you still had girls who didn’t cover their hair, guys who went to clubs down on Chippewa and so forth. Our house with its punk posters and vandalized Saudi flag was the closest thing they had to a comfortable Islamic experience in which they could pray and embrace their culture without having to feel inadequate. It took awhile for some to really adjust to that atmosphere in which it was okay to admit you did not pray five times daily, or that you once had an ice-cream dessert containing rum, or you dated and went to kufr parties.

Umar had been the original impetus behind holding jumaa in our house, but the feeling of the place easily surrendered itself to Jehangir. He’d stand up there by the hole in our wall with brilliant high stripe of hair down the middle of his head, the sides often dark with stubble and whip up something about the life of Rasullullah, sallallaho alayhe wa salaam, that would send us charging out the door feeling like we could be all the secret heroes who lurked as fantasies in our chests, the Super Mumins, MegaMujahids and Laser-Eyed Shaheeds. And Jehangir did it, Jehangir in his brown qurtab with gold trim and big yellow mohawk, Jehangir did it.

Rabeya’s khutbahs, though lacking the gleaming punk melodrama promise of Jehangir‘s, hit me with the feeling that we had done a great deal for Islam just by sitting there to hear her. She knew her stuff more than any of us, used books for furniture in her room--guests sitting on stacks of Betty Freidan and Adrienne Rich and Simone de Beauvoir, and Fatima Mernissi and Leila Ahmed and Amina Wadud and what-not--and gave everything she had, every stupid second of her life, to that Islam. But I felt like there was nowhere else in the world that she could give a khutbah to men, and for that maybe we would be the vanguard of something new.

When it came Umar’s turn to play imam, he did it all Sunna. Gave the proper du’as, recited ayats in perfect Arabiyya, told us to make our lines straight. Once while leading, Umar had us do an extra sujdah. I asked him about it after prayer.

“It’s a sujdah-e-sahw,” Umar explained. “I had forgotten to straighten up after the second ruku; you didn’t notice?”

“Oh,” I replied. “Oh yeah, yeah I remember that, I just didn’t know you were doing, you know, a sujdah-e-sahw. That‘s cool, though.”

*

Didn’t even realize Rabeya was in the house until I heard Tori Amos’ “Muhammad My Friend” blaring from her room. I went out to the porch and leaned back in the recliner ready to pass out again. The two mohawks came out and chilled. Jehangir’s eyes stayed glazed to the street in front of our house, as though if he looked at it long enough the road would just reach out, grab his neck and take him somewhere. Fasiq seemed focused on his feet. Nobody said anything for awhile.

Then came a dread-headed white girl jogging around the corner, dreads flopping around with her bounces. Hoped Umar wouldn’t come out and see her gym shorts and sportsbra or he’d complain about it when she was gone. Lynn, the Muslimah-gone-wrong; maybe it was Islam-done-her-wrong. She had converted to Islam, or re-verted to Islam or embraced Islam or however they say, from a Catholic upbringing. Somebody had turned her onto Rumi which led her to read up a little on the deen and she liked the general idea of it--you know, One God who doesn’t beget children, remembering your Creator five times a day, the whole racial-unity Malcolm sense and theoretical lack of a priesthood. So she went to a masjid in the suburb of Amherst and took shahadah. They gave her a hejab but were nice about it. They were nice about everything--those guys could say the meanest, most ignorant things but still use a gentle voice and try to sound rational and loving through it all. Told her she had to break up with her then-boyfriend, get rid of her dog, throw away old kufr clothes and cover it all except the face and hands, take a nice Arabic name, stop listening to her favorite artists, give dawah to her family or else their brains would burn and boil like Abu Talib, the whole nine. Eventually Lynn gave up on it, kept to her Rumi and stopped going there. We constituted the last vestige of her abusive relationship with the umma.

The Taqwacores, is available through legendary punk label Alternative Tentacles.