Escape by Robert K. Tanenbaum Page B

hour instead of in the evening. He explained that these particular classes were for especially dedicated students; Jabbar did not want to make anyone who had not been selected jealous.
    Then she'd apparently started asking around about the late-night classes at the mosque, and she did not like what she learned. In particular, Miriam did not like who his classmates were. "These 'chosen' few are not spiritual men," she said. "They are extremists and sheep; many of them have been gangsters and criminals."
    "I was a gangster and a criminal," Khalifa reminded her.
    "Yes, my husband," Miriam responded tenderly. "But you've changed. I've seen the peace that worshiping Allah gives you sometimes, and I know that in your heart, you are a good man ... a good father ... and a good husband. But sometimes you don't separate reality from the nonsense that Jabbar spouts."
    The criticism of Jabbar angered Khalifa, partly because it was probably true, but that didn't alter how he felt about the man. "Yes, I have changed through the grace of Allah," he retorted. "And it was the imam who brought me to the true path. What kind of man would I be if I did not honor that and do as he asks, and what I believe Allah commands me to do?"
    "And what is it that Allah commands you to do, Jamal?" her dark eyes sparkled in her pretty round face. "I hope for your eternal soul that you do nothing that brings shame on Islam and do not blame Allah for any sins you commit."
    Khalifa had no response to that except to storm out of the apartment and go for a walk. It seemed that two voices argued in his head for his conscience. "Jabbar saved you from a pointless life, a life as a nobody, " said one voice. "Look in your heart, you know Miriam is telling you the truth," replied the other, which eventually won the debate. He was about to return to the apartment to apologize when a voice from the past interrupted his thoughts.
    "Well, if it ain't our old homeboy, Scratchy!"
     
    Khalifa turned around. Several of his former gang friends approached from behind. The one whose voice he had recognized, a big hulking brute nicknamed Killah with a lazy eye, chortled and said, "Say niggah, where you been?"
    "Praying to Allah, brother," Khalifa responded. Saying it, he felt a moral superiority to his old friends, who, by the look of them, were still gangbanging. Every inch of exposed skin on their bodies—hands and arms, necks, chests—was covered with black prison tattoos.
    "Oh thass right," Killah snarked. "You a Muslim now."
    "Praise Allah for that," he responded. "He saved me from my wicked ways. Ain't you brothers tired of banging? Ain't you getting a little ol' to be committing crimes and chasing loose women? Maybe you should get your black asses over to the mosque."
    Killah laughed, "Ain't never too old for easy money and booty," he said. "I like to see my ho's big backdoor before I get busy with her. What them Muslim women hiding 'neath them gowns anyway? Two pussies? Or, maybe just big ol' hairy legs, like a gorilla."
    Khalifa thought about Miriam's beautiful figure and thanked Allah that her body was his and his alone to view. Again, the feeling of superiority washed over him, and he accepted the ribbing good-naturedly. He'd grown up on the streets with Killah and the others, and there'd been times when they had been his only family. That was why now, he let them talk him into going with them to another part of the park, where they were meeting up with a couple more of Khalifa's old running mates. They found the others sitting on a picnic table, passing brown bags containing 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor.
    In his sinful past, Khalifa had developed quite a taste for malt liquor and the respite it gave him from feeling like a nobody. Alcohol had always been involved when he got into trouble, and he thought he'd now put the desire for it behind him. Ever since converting, he'd done his best to adhere to the teachings of Islam and its principles of self-denial,