The Taqwacores Read Online Free PDF Page B

and didn’t give a fuck how I ended up otherwise. Did you ever think of that?”
    “No,” I replied, half-wondering if this had anything to do with my parents instructing me to take engineering for a major. “I never thought of that, y’akhi.”
    “Fuck,” he said, sitting up straight on the bed, eyes off to nowhere, keeping his mouth open long after saying the word. “Me neither.”
    I never approached my eternal sobriety with the same militancy as Umar; nor have I ever identified with his straightedge punk scene, mainly because I don’t care for the music. Straightedge bands are just mad and noisy; I happen to prefer melody and at least somewhat coherent lyrics. There have been times, however, that I conceded to others’ placement of me in the straightedge category, because with the label came a validation of my own coolness;
without it I would simply be a guy who didn’t drink, smoke or have sex. So I may have attended at least one of Jehangir’s parties with black-marker X’s across my hands and requesting Minor Threat from whoever was manning the CD player at the time.
    Strangely, however, for as many punks who replied with “oh, you’re straightedge?” when I turned down weed or beer, almost as many have told me that I’m as far from edge as Fasiq Abasa. As the movement evolved it lent itself to a variety of interpretations and criteria as to what exactly straightedge meant. Some hard-liners have taken the “poison-free” ideology so far as to say that I could not call myself straightedge if I used Tylenol for a headache. Many others have added eating meat to the straightedge fard , some of whom require complete veganism.
    It is also worth noting that the man credited as founding father and patron saint of the culture, former Minor Threat singer Ian MacKaye—while still abstaining from alcohol, drugs and meat—does not call himself straightedge or identify with the movement. It had swelled into something outlandishly removed from anything he intended with that simple song back in 1981.
    Jehangir told me that many taqwacore bands in California were straightedge, forming amongst themselves a unique sub-scene amalgam from the existing straightedge culture and traditional Islamic practice—the local equivalent of which, I imagine, was our own Umar, who had fashioned his own Islamo-Punk identity completely unaware of the taqwacores out West. X’s on his hands, 2:219 on his neck—straightedge offered Umar not only an endorsement of Muslim abstinence but also the heroic stand-tall toughness that he personally craved.

    When he came home I was in the kitchen, waiting for my tea to cool.
    “Don’t blow on it,” he said firmly.
    “What?”
    “Don’t blow on it. It’s not Sunnah.”
    “Oh,” I replied. “I had never heard that before.”
    “Prophet Rasullullah sallallaho alayhe wa salaam said not to blow on hot food or drink. It’s been proven by modern science too, the wisdom in that.”
    “SubhanaAllah,” I said.
    “But you know, y’akhi, it’s not a good idea to be drinking tea anyway.”
    “Why not?”
    “Caffeine’s a stimulant. I wouldn’t go so far as to call tea haram, but it’s at least makrooh.”
    “Tea’s makrooh?” I asked.
    “It’s a plague on the Muslim world, is what it is.”
    Then Rabeya came in from her bedroom adjacent to the kitchen, in full burqa as always. Umar gave salaams and walked out.
    “It’s great,” she said with tone suggesting a sarcastic smile under that cloth; “all you need to get rid of Umar is a vagina.” I laughed cautiously. “So how’s life, Yusef? How’s engineering treating you?”
    “Oh, it’s alright,” I replied. “Finals coming up, and stuff. Can’t wait for this semester to be over.”
    “How do you think you’re doing?”
    “Pretty good, mash’Allah.”
    “That’s good, Yusef. So have you decided yet, Xerox or Kodak?” It was a joke. Rabeya originally hailed from Rochester, maybe an hour away on the I-90 East and