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Khaniqahi Nimatullahi explaining it all.
    “It’s like Iggy’s du‘a,” Fasiq exclaimed. “He’s fuckin’ talking to Allah, you know? He wants to be Allah’s dog. It’s like punk Rumi.”
    “You’re fucked up right now,” Amazing Ayyub replied. I agreed and the discussion ended at that. Fasiq asked to borrow the CD, then found his headphones and disappeared for the night.
    Jehangir threw his arms around everybody and raised a brown-glass bottle in the air. Umar stood tough in the corner, arms folded. He could have easily sulked in his room or gone somewhere else, but I suspect he enjoyed being The Straightedge Guy. It became almost his thing with his intimidating glare, white wifebeater shirt and tattoos. People expected him to be there standing at angry attention.
    It seemed as though Jehangir and Umar were opposing poles, each hoping to pull the collective psyche in his direction with his own method. While Umar pulled with his unending stance, a
drunken Jehangir Tabari fell in love with everyone in the world. Every guy was his best friend, every girl his little sister and he would fight to his dying breath for each of us. It was an insatiable but charismatic sentimentality that moved him. Sometimes he pulled back to stand on the fringes of the scene and observe circles forming accidentally throughout the house: conversations, introductions, debates and story-tellings, all these characters stumbling in from their respective movies which somehow took them to Buffalo or maybe had been set in Buffalo the whole time but at any rate took them to his house and his party. There they were together in a massive grab bag of lives and cultures and perspectives, an exact combination of people that would never happen again on this Earth and maybe somebody would get something out of these random interactions and maybe nobody would but al-hamdulilah for all of it either way, and during such a retreat I would briefly look over and he’d nod to me as if to suggest that I were the only one who understood that moment exactly as he did.
    Well enough into the night for him to be completely out of his mind, Jehangir came over and put his arm around me.
    “Where’s Imam Fasiq?” he asked.
    “He’s out there,” I replied with a nod toward the door, “somewhere with his headphones and CD player and ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ stuck on repeat.”
    “Oh really.”
    “He’s taking it as the expression of some Sufi concept about the nafs.”
    “Yeah! Shit!” Jehangir shouted with a slap on my back.” Make the heart a polished mirror, was that it... I know my stuff, right? I was just gonna congratulate the imam on his packed house today, there wasn’t even room to piss in there—”
    “Seems like every week we have more.”
    “Did you see all those kids here today?”

    “Um, yeah.” With a brief scan of the faces before us, I appreciated how far removed the afternoon’s activities were from this sloshing mess.
    “Bro, listen,” said Jehangir. “They were Muslims, man, but not your uncles. They need a deen that’s not your uncle’s deen. Iman, think about it like that, iman! It’s supposed to be all about having no fear of death, right? And we got that part down, we’ve done that and we have plenty of Muslims who aren’t afraid to die. Mash‘Allah—but now Muslims are afraid to fuckin’ live! They fear life, y‘akhi, more than they fear shaytans or shirk or fitna or bid’a or kafr or qiyamah or the torments in the grave, they fear Life, they fear this—” He raised his bare arm, grabbed and slapped the skin to indicate this . “You got all these poor kids who think they’re inferior because they don’t get their two Fajr in, their four Zuhr, four Asr, three Maghrib, four Isha, their fuckin’ Sunna, their Witr, their Nafl, they don’t wear leather socks and they don’t brush their teeth with twigs, they don’t have beards, they don’t wear hejab, maybe they went to their fuckin’ high school proms and