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strained to keep your forehead from brushing against someone else’s feet. Our jamaat smelled of oils from at least twenty countries combined with those spilled-beer, body-odor and stale-hashish scents that never completely left the house. Fasiq stood by the hole in the wall in his Operation Ivy hoodie, mohawk tucked away under black Yankee ski hat. His khutbah, only a few minutes long, revolved around ayats 19 and 20 from Suratul-Hijr about how Allah sent ’suitable things’ to grow on the earth and with Him were the treasures of everything in the world and He only sent them down in a known measure. To Fasiq Abasa this meant that all things from nature were a blessing from Allah and He only gave us what we could handle. While Fasiq’s talk gave no specific mention of marijuana, I knew that would be Umar’s angry interpretation. It often seemed as though Umar thought about drugs more than anyone in the house.
    The jamaat was an almost silly mish-mash of people: Rude Dawud’s pork-pie hat poking up here, a jalab-and-turban type there, Jehangir’s big mohawk rising from a sea of kufis, Amazing Ayyub still with no shirt, girls scattered throughout—some in hejab, some not and Rabeya in punk-patched burqa doing her thing. But in its randomness it was gorgeous, reflecting an Islam I
felt could not happen anywhere else despite Jehangir’s traveler’stales of California taqwacore. With every Friday hearing khutbahs and standing alongside brothers and sisters together yelling AAAAAMEEEEEEEEN after Fatiha with enough force to knock you down flanked at every wall by dumb band posters and stains and peeling paint, I grew more and more amazed at that house and this incredible thing we had pulled off, though I cannot take much credit. I was one of the quiet ones, the boring ones, the future engineers for Xerox and Kodak. If Islam was to be saved, it would be saved by the crazy ones: Jehangir and Rabeya and Fasiq and Dawud and Ayyub and even Umar.
     
     
    If Friday afternoons meant jumaa, Friday nights meant my home would play host to stupid wasted kids from all walks of life. Everyone in the house would unload their CDs by the stereo and fight for turns at DJ. Besides his beloved taqwacore bands that varied in style and sound, Jehangir Tabari liked the ’77 working-class heroic drinking-buddy songs. Rude Dawud played his Desmond Dekker and Specials and Skatalites. Umar put on the expected Minor Threat and Youth of Today though he never got into the straightedge taqwacore bands that Jehangir talked about, as though he were unsure whether someone could really be Muslim and Punk simultaneously. In that way he reminded me of my father, who when I was growing up would buy nearly every animated Disney video but then say that for me to draw living things was haram. Fasiq Abasa liked it loud and fast in the vein of NOFX or the Descendents and even had a CD containing one hundred songs that were each approximately thirty seconds long. Amazing Ayyub went mainly for Sham 69. Rabeya would put in political bands like
Propagandhi or riot-grrrl fare like the Lunachicks. I knew enough of everyone’s tastes to play along and make requests.
    The diversity often led to arguments. A Jamaican-fundamentalist, Rude Dawud hated any corrupted second-wave American punk-ska. Ayyub called Fasiq’s notion of punk misguided because there was no longer any such thing as punk, to him it died in 1980. Umar huffed and pouted when Jehangir played a Business song like “Guinness Boys” for a variety of objections. Rabeya in turn denounced punk-rock misogyny and patriarchy in maybe half the songs they played.
    Sometimes the music disputes inspired theological debates. While arguing punk, Amazing Ayyub demanded that someone put on Iggy Pop and the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and Fasiq said the song blew his mind in a whole big Sufi way because he had been reading about the dog being a symbol for the nafs and had a book by Javad Nurbaksh of the