The Taqwacores Read Online Free PDF Page A

“But yeah, mash’Allah, I went up to Seattle for a show, had my car all packed, left the next morning. Did you know the I-90’s the longest interstate in the country?”
    “No.”
    “It is. In fuckin’ Montana there’s spots where it’s not even a divided highway, it’s just a regular road.”
    “Really?”
    “We should go out West sometime, Yusef Ali. Get a van, make like an interstate jam‘aat. Fuck, if we did it this summer we could stop at the ISNA convention in Chicago.” I laughed at that knowing how taqwacores felt about ISNA scenes, or how such scenes felt about them. “Fuckin’ A, Yusef. We should do that. Hit ‘em all, make a tour of it. ISNA, ICNA, CAIR, AMC, MPAC, shit, what else do they have now? We’ll get thrown out of all of ’em. And along the way we’d round up all the queer alims, drunk imams, punk ayatollahs, masochistic muftis, junkie shaykhs, retarded mullahs and gutter-mouthed maulanas we can find, just load up a van ‘til we can’t fit no more and then have guys hangin’ off the side like in Rawal-fuckin’ pindi! Shit, man, down the I-90. And it all ends in Khalifornia.”
    “Khalif- ornia?”
    “Yeah, y‘akhi, Khalifornia. There’s a group out there, they’re trying to establish the Khilafah out there. Call themselves fuckin’ Khalifornia.”
    We laughed and then Fasiq came out of the cigar store with his big dumb mohawk and rolling papers. “What took you so long?” yelled Jehangir across the parking lot.
    “You wouldn’t believe it,” Fasiq yelled back. “Fuckin’ Sayyed was in there.”

    “What? What the shit is Sayyed doing in there? Is he hashishiyyun now?”
    “Nah, he was going out and his kafr friend asked him to pick up papers so we were just in there shooting the shit.”
    “We’ll wait for him, see if he needs a ride.”
    Sayyed was a good Muslim—at least less likely than Jehangir and crew to get thrown out of an ISNA convention. I sat in the back seat with him as Jehangir peeled out of the parking lot, Fasiq riding shotgun, Screeching Weasel’s “Anthem for a New Tomorrow” emanating from Jehangir’s cheap old tape player. We all tried coming up with things to talk about with Sayyed— how are classes, how’s your family and so forth. It all seemed somehow awkward; but I fear that I might have been in his place once before learning to coolly interact with guys like Fasiq Abasa. We dropped him off at the campus with the usual pleasantries and then swung back to our awful house.
    Amazing Ayyub was out on the porch with big KARBALA you could read on his chest a mile away, saw us and ran inside to put on Sham 69’s “Hey Little Rich Boy.” Then he burst back out, flew over the porch steps and leaped onto the roof of Jehangir’s car to dance above my head. When I stepped out he met me with a flying plancha off the car. We rolled around on the front lawn for awhile. I’ve learned from experience not to wear my nicer clothes around these guys.
    I’m not sure how Amazing Ayyub got that appellation or even how he ended up a permanent pseudo-resident of our house, but I remember the first time I met him. I was down in the living room trying to troubleshoot my laptop, fairly new to the house myself. Jehangir introduced us. Ayyub was shirtless, bringing my eyes immediately to his tattoo.
    “Do you know anything about computers?” I asked. “My sound-chip is giving me a hassle, but it worked fine upstairs—”
Ayyub leaned over me as though he would assess the situation, but then—with no kleenex or even his hand to block it—he blew his nose with such violent energy it sent a long yellow-green projectile right at my screen. We both just looked at it, contemplating the sparkly rainbow-dots its accompanying spray made of my pixels.
    Then I looked at the Amazing One. “What are you studying?” I asked. “What’s, uh, what’s your major? Or do you not, uh, do you go to school, or...”
     
     
    After examining the grass stains from our