The Taqwacores by Michael Knight Page A

hand as proof. I offered to drive but he replied only by starting the car.

    As Fasiq and I fawned like a pair of twelve-year-old TRL groupies Jehangir kept his eyes to the road, answering praise with half-smiles and almost-whispered mash’Allahs. If you ever doubt his Islam, please remember that.
    Jehangir Tabari was a drunk and a punk and never cared what Hanafi or Hanbali or Maliki or Shafi told him to do, but he was sincere and Allah kept him humble.
    Amazing Ayyub was waiting on the porch when we got back. He had no shirt on. Instead of running inside to play Sham 69’s “Hey Little Rich Boy” he just sat there with a weird expression.
    “Yo!” I called out to him, climbing out with the camcorder. “You have to see what Jehangir did—”
    “I got a job,” said Ayyub.
    “No shit,” Jehangir replied. “Where?”
    “The gas station.”
    “Doing what?”
    “Pumping gas.”
    “That’s awesome,” Fasiq interjected.
    “Yeah,” said Amazing Ayyub. “I’m gonna fuckin’ contribute to society an’ shit.”
    “You gonna move off our couch, then?” asked Jehangir with a warm smile.
    “FUCK!” yelled Ayyub, darting a finger in Fasiq’s direction. “What about that fuckin’ guy?”
    “I put in for groceries,” Fasiq countered.
    “Yeah, by selling fuckin’ kief,” Ayyub replied.
    “Yeah, by selling it to you.”
    “Shit, see then? I give Fasiq the money he puts in for groceries!” He then looked at me. “Right, preppy?”
    “Makes sense to me,” I said smiling.
    “What’s Umar think of that?” asked Jehangir. “Does he know that his halal meat’s paid for with weed?”

    “I think so,” answered Ayyub with his eyes to the floor. “So what you got today?” he asked, turning to Fasiq.
    “I don’t know if I should let you,” Fasiq replied. “I mean, you’re a working man now—”
    “Fuck that, I don’t start ’til next week.” So the two of them went in and upstairs, most likely to climb out the bathroom window and smoke on the roof.
    I sat on the porch steps where Amazing Ayyub had been just moments ago, camcorder in my lap. I watched Jehangir’s immortal boardslide again and then looked up to see the real Jehangir pacing the sidewalk before me, relaxed but still unsure of what to do with himself at that moment. He almost looked to have a story that he couldn’t commit to tell—maybe about some taqwacore kid out West who taught him the boardslide, a punked-out mumin cheered as a legend in the circles he traveled. The story, if it was a story, stayed bottled up in him. It could have been one of his little trademarked maxims that would usually spill out spontaneously with naïve third-grader innocence like “things’ll sure be different twenty years from now, y’akhi—” et cetera. Or it could have been a self-praise over the boardslide that in taqwa he kept from passing his lips.
    Whatever the thought might have been, he looked like he’d handle it best alone. I stood up and went inside. First went to the living room, hung out with myself and got bored of it. Trodded upstairs, heard Amazing Ayyub and Fasiq out on the roof laughing and high.
    “You know what happens to artists after they die?” Ayyub asked him.
    “What?” Fasiq replied.
    “If you paint or draw living things, then after you die Allah says ‘give life to your creations if you can’ and of course you can’t, so then Allah brings them to life and they fuckin’ torture you forever.”
    “That’s bullshit,” said Fasiq.
    “Think about it,” said Ayyub. “It’s crazy, man. Those guys who fuckin’ made the Looney Tunes are going to be fuckin’ burned and stabbed and whipped by like, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck an’ shit.”
    “There’s nothing about that in the Qur’an,” Fasiq retorted.
    “It’s in the hadiths,” said Ayyub.
    “Fuckin’ everything’s in the hadiths!” yelled Fasiq. “You can find hadiths saying Muhammad used pinecones for dildos.”
    “There weren’t pine trees in