Michael Muhammad Knight - The Taqwacores

Bismillahir, Rahmanir and so on

He lost his right index finger in a bet.

Are you fuckin kidding? What was the bet?

That he wouldnt chop off his finger.

So he won the bet.

Yeah, but he lost his finger. And he never went to the hospital or anything. Ended up with a massive infection in his handlike a swollen abscess the size of a golfball that would have killed him if he didnt drain it.

Is he okay now?

Yeah but when hes in salat and it comes time for the Tashahud, instead of the index he has to bob his middle finger up and down. Its like he flips himself off every time he prays.

In a few hours they were both unconscious.

It seemed like there was always at least one person awake in that punk house every hour of the day, as though it needed someone on alert at all times. Quietly descending the stairwell after another of Jehangirs parties, I assumed myself the sole bearer of that unofficial role for this shift. But turning into the lightless living room I encountered a scene that I believe, inshaAllah, will be forever subject to reevaluation in my mind. Even now I cannot say if it struck me as tragic, comedic or beautiful in a way that our imams would never fathom.

In the center of the floor, surrounded by wasted corpses of consciousness slumped into couches, passed out over each other and one who had thrown up on himself, flanked by littered armies of brown glass bottles and caved-in cans, an anonymous punk with dozens of hair antennas extending far from his head sat on the white cardboard of a pizza box. It was too dark to identify him but I probably would not have known the kid anyway. But I watched him for a moment; sitting on his feet, hands on his knees, facing the hole Umar had smashed in the cheap plaster with a baseball bat to indicate qiblah.

The kid bent forward in sujdah and came up with his forehead most likely wearing the chalky gray confetti of someones tipped-over ashtray but he went down again, and I could hear the movements of his mouth if not the words he said. Then he stood up for another rakat, hands folded across his stomach. With a glance out the window I surmised that it was probably Fajr timestaghfirAllahand I should have joined him, increasing the rewards of his prayer by twenty-seven times; but instead I leaned at the living room doorway and watched as though this salaat had been executed on all our behalf. When he sat up again, I made sure to dip down the hall before he turned his head my way in salaams.

One thing I have faithfully observed and noted about punks: theyre all legends, each and every last one of them, in one circle or another. Even if you never see them in the elements of their renown, even in a mere courtesy-handshake between friends of friends in a parking lot, you cannot help but feel an immortal vibrancy, a comic-book kind of costumed exuberance like that parking lot is host to a historic summit or a scene in ten thousand movies were living right now. At least thats what I felt; but whats a punk anyway? Im not going to open that can of worms here but I will say that in the story of myself and this house I ran through many conceptions of the word, and grew confident speaking of rude boys, riot grrrls, crust, Oi! and straightedge, and by knowing enough lingo to move comfortably in the culture, well, at one point seemed to make me punk myself; that is, if there are punks who major in engineering because their parents told them to.

Inevitably I reached the understanding that this word punk does not mean anything tangible like tree or car. Rather, punk is like a flag; an open symbol, it only means what people believe it means. There was a time in China when red traffic lights meant go. How would you begin to argue?

I stopped trying to define Punk around the same time I stopped trying to define Islam. They arent so far removed as youd think. Both began in tremendous bursts of truth and vitality but seem to have lost something along the waythe energy, perhaps, that comes with knowing the world has never seen such positive force and fury and never would again. Both have suffered from sell-outs and hypocrites, but also from true believers whose devotion had crippled their creative drive. Both are viewed by outsiders as unified, cohesive communities when nothing can be further from the truth.

I could go on but the most important similarity is that like Punk as mentioned above, Islam is itself a flag, an open symbol representing not things, but ideas. You cannot hold Punk or Islam in your hands. So what could they mean besides what you want them to?

I crept through the darkness until finding the kitchen, lest that praying kid detect my presence. Turned the light on and the place looked like W had bombed the hell out if it looking for evil-doers. I made my way past an obstacle course of tipped-over chairs, empty bottles and miscellaneous garbage around the table to get to the fridge, finding it completely empty except for a carton from the Chinese placeof what or how old, Allahu Alimand a case of beer. There was always beer.

Salaam-alaik, said a girls voice behind me and I turned to find a baggy ninja with various band patches on her flowing burqa. You couldnt even see her eyes behind the fabric grid but I looked to the grungy kitchen floor anyway.

Wa-alaikum as-salaam, I replied, wa Rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. I was just looking for something to drink.

Theres plenty to drink.

I was thinking, something halal.

Ah, halal. You need to be specific in this place. She navigated around the table, grabbed a dirty glass, washed it out at the sink, let it fill and handed it to me.

Jazakullah khair, I said. She picked up the chair I had climbed over, stood it up and sat down.

Have a seat.

Uh, I kind of have to get going, get ready for school in a couple hours.

Oh right, she laughed. Every time a man and woman are alone, Shaytan is the third present.

YeahI mean no, its not that or anything, its, you know, I dont know if Umar would

Umar straightedged himself into a sober stupor, dont worry about it. Hell wake up at noon, get all pissy that he missed Fajr and punch the TV.

If its just the TV, I replied, focusing on the grid where her eyes would be, its an improvement from last night.

I thought he was going to kill that kid. Fuckin macho pricks. There was something about Rabeyas language, or the fact that it came from her, that never ceased to unsettle me. And she knew it.

Uh, did you make Fajr? Because I havent yet, and I dont think the sun is up so if

Sorry yakhi, Im raggin it.

Oh. I looked at my feet. WaAllah, what a filthy floor. Well, I guess Im going to. I went over to the sink, took off my shoes and then my socks while standing on my shoes, rolled up my sleeves and proceeded with wudhu while the water ran over empty green Heinekens in the sink. Rabeya sat content knowing that none of my existing scripts for male-female interaction, mumin or kafr, gave me any frame of reference for dealing with her.

We never saw her face, which I think empowered Rabeya with a certain psychological leverage. However, not everything she did with said benefit would find such easy encouragement from tradition. While Rabeya was as staunch a Muslim as anyone there, it remained her own Islam as she saw fit to live it. This was the girl who jumped in front of the microphone at last nights party decked out in full purdah to cover the Stooges Nazi Girlfriend through her niqab singing slow and spooky like Iggy Pops withered Old Man Mortality voiceI want to fuck her on the floor, among my books of ancient lorethe same girl who stood in front of our baseball-bat-through-the-wall-mihrab on Fridays to give khutbah and circulated handwritten rants on the sexism of both hemispheres in her self-published zine