The Bad Muslim Discount

by Syed M. Masood

Hesitation from Abu. “Will you keep her safe, bibi? For the sake of days gone by.”

  “I will do what I can.”

  “Shukran.”

  “I hope you find peace in the holy city. Tell me, please, that you will not leave until you have a chance to say goodbye to young Safwa here. You should stay until she is awake.”

  I did not let them know that I was already awake.

  And Abu did not stay.

  * * *

  —

  I wondered if Abu was coming back at all. He was gone for over a year, too long for it to have been just for Hajj. I stayed with Bibi Warda. There was nowhere else to go.

  The village was a difficult place to breathe in, though the air was fine. Bibi Warda told me we were in Pakistan, but in a part of it where boundaries mattered little. Men carried weapons and drove out in beat-up jeeps to use them. If she knew where they went, she did not tell me, and I did not ask. I didn’t want to know why gunfire echoed across the ragged, rocky, broken horizon, or why the sounds of planes passing overhead made the old woman pale.

  None of the girls here went out unless they were fully covered. It was not like back home, where it had been a choice—not a choice Abu let me make, of course, but still a choice. Here it was a requirement.

  I don’t know why that bothered me. I hadn’t been permitted to leave home in Baghdad without my niqab. Nothing had changed. It shouldn’t have mattered to me that I was being commanded to wear it not by Abu but by strangers. Except, for reasons I cannot explain to myself, it mattered a great deal.

  Maybe I’d just gotten too used to doing what I wanted, being who I wanted, in my aunt’s garden in Basra. Maybe freedom is addictive, like the fruit of a poppy.

  Bibi was being kind, I think, in not saying anything to warn or scold me when I began stepping out of the house with my hair and face bare. It was brash, but not too brash. Her little home was near the edge of the village, and it was unlikely I’d be seen since I stayed within a foot or so of the back wall. Besides, I only went out right after dawn, just after Fajr prayers, when the village was waking up. She probably thought it was safe.

  Months went by and I was never disturbed. For ten minutes, maybe fifteen, I got to stand alone, looking up at the rising dawn, with only birdsong interrupting the quiet of my rebellion. There were no gardens, no flowers here. It was a wild place that either no one had tried to tame or, if they’d tried, they’d failed.

  Then one day I saw him. I later learned that his name was Qais, but just then he was a stranger, leaning against the wall of a neighbor’s house, his eyes fixed upon me. It reminded me of the way a hawk or eagle might look at a little mouse.

  I jumped and he gave me a smile, which did nothing to calm my startled, suddenly racing heart. I turned to hurry back inside when he said, “You’re a beautiful girl.”

  I stopped. It wasn’t because of the compliment. That I did not want. It was because he’d spoken in English, and the pull of words I could understand was impossible to resist, so I turned to face him. “Stop staring at me.”

  His smile widened to reveal perfectly white but hopelessly crooked teeth. “No.”

  I glared at him for a moment. Then, realizing how improper it was to be out there with him, at that hour, and what people might think and, worse, what they might say, I ran inside.

  * * *

  —

  He was there the next morning. I’d known he would be. I put on my niqab for that very reason. I should’ve just stayed inside, hoping that he would get bored after a few days, and give up on…whatever it was that he was doing standing there in the fading dark. I couldn’t. I was tired of having only Bibi Warda to speak with. The thought of being able to speak to someone else, anyone else really, was too tempting to resist.

  He was standing closer to Bibi Warda’s house this time than he had yesterday, but his smile was the same as before. “Your beauty is in your eyes. It is Allah’s will that it remain unveiled. He has protected you from being covered by his own command.”

  I made a disgusted sound at the back of my throat. No matter how comforting the language, it couldn’t make up for words that were trash. I moved to leave.

  “No. Wait. Don’t go,” he said. “I didn’t realize the truth would offend.”

  I hesitated, then asked, “Where did you learn to speak English?”

  “From my father. He was an educated man, a translator for the Americans during the war.” He took a breath and added, “Before the face of the enemy changed.”

  I nodded and studied him more closely. He was broad and looked strong, like he’d be good in a fight. Maybe he was. He had a pointed chin and a pointed nose and angular eyes. He was drawn with harsh lines, but his manner was soft and pleasant.

  Something felt wrong about him, though. It was easy to see that he wanted to be liked, so everything he said felt too eager and a little insincere.

  “I should go back inside.”

  “I’ll be here tomorrow,” he said.

  “I know,” I told him.

  It was only later that I realized he could tell the villagers I’d been sneaking out of the house without my niqab, that I’d been alone talking to a man I didn’t know.

  He probably wouldn’t. After all, he’d done the same thing. He had spoken to me, looked at me when he could have looked away. I knew, of course, that such things almost always went worse for women than they did for men, and so the doubt remained. Every time I thought I was rid of it, it returned, until I could not wait for the next sunrise, so that I could find out what his intentions were.

  * * *

  —

  We became friends of a sort. I looked forward to speaking to him. Being heard is a rare and powerful thing. Few were the days when I parted from Qais Badami without wishing that we had time to share more words.

  I learned that he didn’t like to go outside during the day unless it was absolutely necessary. The light, he told me, belonged to the Americans. They’d left us darkness.

  “There are Americans here?”

  “There is no escaping Americans,” he said. “They are like the air. Everywhere.”

  He said he hadn’t always been this way. After a drone had burned away his grandmother, however, he’d become afraid to leave home. His father, he said, was impatient with him. He was staying with his grandfather, a pious man who spent his nights standing in prayer. Qais stood next to him, praying, not out of hope that he would be saved, but because of a more mortal fear.

  He listened to the stories I had to tell in silence, and if he thought I’d been cruel to Fahd, he didn’t say so out loud. It was a strange thing for two cowards to meet in a land carved up by war.

  “I know a place where we can be safe from the Americans,” he said.

  “The grave?”

  He laughed, then, realizing his voice had become too loud and might attract attention, whispered. “Two places then. But in this world, there is one place they will never burn.”

  “What place is that?”

  “America, of course. No man sets fire to his own house.”

  I smiled, though he could not see it. “We should go there as soon as we can.”

  “Yes,” he said. “We must.”

  He was not smiling.

  * * *

  —

  Again my father looked different when he returned home. He had shaved his head and he actually smiled when he saw me. It wasn’t like the smile I remembered from my childhood. It was cautious and guarded and it did not reach his eyes.

  “As-salamu alaykum, Safwa,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything. I did not run up to Abu this time, and I did not wait for him to tell me to go pack my things. I just got up from next to Bibi Warda and walked out of the room. I knew what I had to do without being instructed.

  I heard Bibi Warda chuckling as I left.
“There is a price to pay, Abu Fahd, for the things we do in this world.”

  “Doesn’t your tongue get bitter,” he said, “from all the truth you speak?”

  The old woman laughed, then followed after me. She kissed both my cheeks, then taking my hands, kissed them as well. “Come back whenever you want.”

  I nodded, and didn’t say anything, because there was nothing to say. As I was heading out the door, however, the old woman added, “And be careful in the morning hours.”

  Abu frowned as he took my light bag. “What did she mean by that?”

  I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t answer that question, and I didn’t want to talk to him at all. I had stopped speaking to him before he left home. Just because he’d gone for Hajj, just because God had forgiven him all of his sins, didn’t mean that I would.

  He tried to speak to me again, a few times, when we were home. I kept silent.

  It was a foolish thing to do. He had beaten me for less, and he was one of the few people in my world with whom I shared a language. I could, however, not understand him, and so I had decided that nothing he had to say would mean anything to me.

  The days of silence went on, and for a time, it seemed that they would have no end.

  ANVAR

  Months after Zuha broke me, Aamir walked into my room without knocking, searching for his laptop, and found me in bed in the dark. My face was buried in a pillow, my shoulders shaking.

  He hesitated in the doorway for a moment, then came to sit down next to me. The old box spring creaked uncomfortably under his weight. He smelled, because of his overpowering, outdated cologne, like an old man. For a while, Aamir didn’t say anything. Then he put his heavy arms around me. It was an awkward gesture, unfamiliar to us both. His voice was gentler than I had ever heard it before. “What’s wrong?”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t tell him. I’m not sure I would have told him, even if the secret were mine alone.

  “I might be able to help you if you tell me. Did you fail a class?”

  I couldn’t help but chuckle at that assumption. Aamir couldn’t imagine a worse fate than flunking a test. “No,” I said, raising my head and wiping at my eyes, “I just lost something important.”

  “Expensive?”

  “Invaluable, I think.”

  “I don’t have a lot of money, Anvar, but I’ll lend you everything I can and—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I told him. “I’ll be fine.”

  I wasn’t.

  I couldn’t escape Zuha, and she could not escape me. We saw each other at parties our parents threw when we could not beg our way out of attending, and we smiled at each other as we had in front of other people in the past, as if we were strangers. The difference was that we actually were strangers now, as much as former lovers can ever truly be strangers. Those familiar smiles lacking familiarity, designed once to deceive, became horribly genuine.

  * * *

  —

  Attending San Francisco State became difficult. Zuha was still there and so every moment was consumed with thoughts of her. I constantly wondered when I might see her walking down a corridor, how I would react, what she might say or do.

  I transferred to Boston University for my third year. It was there that I learned to believe in God.

  It was an intellectual decision, not a spiritual one. I met people in Boston who encouraged me to question dogma. Their influence, combined with the many hours I spent at libraries, immersed me in a river of doubt and ambiguity.

  I no longer enjoyed reading like I once had. Maybe because I wasn’t used to doing it alone. Maybe because I found myself reaching for my phone to call Zuha after finishing a book, desperate to share with her some artful line I’d found or some beautiful sentence I’d uncovered. For once in my life, I managed to resist temptation and leave her in peace.

  I still wandered through the stacks of the library aimlessly. It was, Zuha claimed, a way to let the universe guide you to the next world you would spend time in.

  In this way, toward the beginning of my senior year, a black book caught my eye. It was a collection of essays written under pseudonyms by various authors, historians allegedly, who sought to discredit the traditional version of Islam’s narrative. Their arguments were factual, not theological. They weren’t asking whether or not there was a God but rather, for example, if Mecca had ever really been a stop on a trade route over which caravans passed. The goal was a simple one. Early Islamic history and theology were oral, not written traditions. The Quran itself had lived only in the memories of those who heard it, until years after the Prophet passed. If it could be established that initial Muslim sources had lied about one thing, doubt could be cast on everything they had said and taught. Like Peter was the Rock of the Church, the veracity of Muhammad’s Companions was the foundation on which all of Islam stood. This was what these authors sought to break.

  They used false names to hide their identities. It was an understandable precaution, in case their scholarship made them targets for people eager to take offense, but it undermined their own credibility. Trained by now to question everything, I did not trust the black book. However, truth be told, it did affect my soul. I no longer trusted conventional Islam any more than I trusted anything else.

  I walked out of the library and looked at the world for the first time—with its vast sky, its cold buildings and its fall-plagued trees—as if there were no God.

  Never before and never since have I felt my own insignificance as keenly as I did then.

  The greatest reassurance of religion is the promise that there is someone out there—someone with all the power in the universe—who cares about you. He records your life, listens to your prayers and wants to ease your pain. The moment that I took God out of the equation, the world became too large, too cruel and too indifferent for me to live in.

  I decided then that there was a God. There had to be. I needed Him.

  Whether or not he was the same God that I had been taught about since I was a child was a different matter entirely. It was a strange spiritual state to be in. I no longer believed that I believed, though I did have faith without knowing what I had faith in.

  I did what any reasonable person who is faced with such a terrible epiphany would do.

  I went and bought myself a television.

  * * *

  —

  Muslims have always been a thread, albeit a subdued one, in the tapestry of America. We fought against the Confederacy in the Civil War, so our presence in the States is not exactly a new phenomenon. Before September 11, 2001, however, no one talked about us because, despite our facial hair and head coverings and odd prayer routines, we were like everyone else. We lived our lives in peace and were, though noticeable, generally unnoticed.

  After the fall of the Twin Towers, there was no anonymity to be had. Some people saw the thread that represented Islam in the United States and began furiously yanking at it, hoping to rip it away from the idea of America, not realizing that doing so would change the very fabric they sought to preserve. The message was clear. We no longer belonged where we had always been.

  I never had to face overt hatred or bigotry. Clean shaven, dressed in Western clothes, blessed by television with more or less the right accent, I thought I blended in.

  Bariah Faris, however, did not. In her hijab, she stood out, which was fine. People are allowed to stand out in California. It is, in fact, encouraged. As the years went by, my mother didn’t face any discrimination that she felt worth mentioning.

  On the sixth anniversary of 9/11, however, my father called.

  “You will hear from Bariah soon,” he said. He sounded exhausted. “So she can yell at you.”

  “Why?”

  “All your life you’ve been crooked like a dog’s tail. I expect she’ll try to straighten you out today. She needs someone else t
o be angry with. I’ve taken all I can. Now it is your turn.”

  I sighed. “Let me guess. You did something to piss off Ma and found a way to use me as a human shield.”

  Imtiaz Faris shrugged. I couldn’t see it, of course, but I could imagine it perfectly in the pause that followed.

  “She’s not angry with me,” he said. “Not really. She’s angry with America.”

  Apparently, Ma had gone to get bread from a grocery store she’d shopped at for years. When her turn came to be checked out, the cashier held out a hand for her to stay where she was, pointed at the customer behind her to come forward and served him instead.

  She was made to wait while five people skipped ahead of her, until she was the only one remaining.

  “All he said was ‘Never forget.’ ”

  “Dad, what the—”

  “Don’t you start raising your voice as well, okay? I’ve been getting the business here all day. ‘I told you it was a lie. You said all men are created equal but no one believes that. Not really.’ So, yes, I moved us here. How long—”

  “Did you call the store?” I asked. “You need to speak to the manager.”

  “That’s exactly what I said we should do. I told Bariah, I’ll call over and give them a piece of my mind. She wouldn’t let me. You don’t have the brains to spare, she says.” He said, “Anyway, it took a long time, but I’ve finally convinced her that this is your fault.”

  “How?”

  “If you’d gone to law school, like all the cool kids are doing, instead of reading useless novels all day, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.”

  “That’s completely illogical.”

  “Well, your mother agrees with me. Expect a call soon, okay? I’d say I’m sorry, but you know, Anvar, this kind of situation is pretty much the only reason I had kids. So, in a way, you’re fulfilling your purpose in the world. That should make you happy.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”