The Bad Muslim Discount

by Syed M. Masood

  I heard Abu shout a sleepy complaint from his room.

  The lid came off a container full of chickpeas, which smashed into the ground, sending the little balls skittering out over the floor, with some of them rolling under the oven.

  I stared at the mess around me, unable to move for a moment.

  I could have gotten a broom and gathered the chickpeas together in a dustpan to toss away. I knew, however, that I could wash them and use them, so I knelt down and began picking them up one at a time.

  ANVAR

  I found things to do. Took on a few more document review jobs to keep busy. I paid more attention to the news. Misery, you may have heard, loves company, and there is no better chronicle of misery than the day-to-day experience of humanity as a whole.

  The Republican bid to turn back time, led by Donald Quixote, went on. It had seemed funny when it started, but it wasn’t funny anymore. My father was apoplectic about it on social media, where he’d once been mocking. It was sobering for him to realize that the nativist ideology he had laughed at as unworthy of a great nation had actually found an audience.

  The growing fear and panic in my father’s posts, and in the Muslim community as a whole, were due to the fact that tens of millions of Americans appeared convinced that we were an existential threat to their survival. It was a result of a rude epiphany that the people around us, our countrymen, viewed us as being inherently, unalterably, alien.

  We’d thought we were home, only to learn that our family thought we were dangerous, unreliable strangers.

  There was, perhaps, another dimension to Imtiaz Faris’s fear. He already knew these people and had run from them before. The great intellectual plague on the Muslim World was the continuing belief that as a civilization our fortunes had declined because we had strayed from the Word of God. It was the call to Make Islam Great Again, to return to the strict religiosity that had reigned in the seventh and eighth centuries, that had made my father pack us up and leave the country of our birth.

  That radical Islamists and “America First” nationalists had essentially the same worldview and the same desire to recapture a nostalgia-gilded past glory was proof, in my opinion, that God’s sense of irony was simply divine.

  Still, I wasn’t worried. The common sense and decency of my fellow Americans would never allow xenophobia and hatred to come to power.

  I started reading voraciously again, not a book here or there, as had become routine, but like I used to in college, going through five or six books at a time, switching from one to another when I needed a break.

  For the next few weeks, I made myself busy enough that I had good and true reasons not to visit my family much or even speak to them at all.

  * * *

  —

  None of it made any difference. Time continued to slip away, Aamir’s engagement to Zuha drawing inexorably closer, until it was upon me. I wouldn’t be able to avoid it, of course. I’d have to go. I’d have to be happy for them.

  “What were you thinking about?”

  I looked at Azza in time to see her reaching for her engagement ring, which lay on my nightstand. I hadn’t said anything about the ring. I wasn’t sure it was my place and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. The cheap diamond struggled to sparkle under the California sun. It remained dutiful despite the fact that the promises it represented were hopelessly, irrevocably broken. Azza smiled at me, her typical skittish, fragile smile, and waited for a response.

  I didn’t particularly like the question, mostly because I didn’t like the answer. I offered her an irritated shrug. “Nothing.”

  This was, apparently, the wrong thing to say, because though she leaned over and gave me a quick kiss on the lips, she also slid out of bed. As she stepped into the panties she had discarded the night before, I glanced at the clock. She didn’t have to leave for a couple of hours yet.

  “You still have time before your father gets home.”

  “Not much.”

  “Stay for a few more minutes.”

  “You just don’t want to be alone because you’ll be thinking about your brother’s engagement.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Don’t lie,” Azza said. “Just say you don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  She chuckled. “I know.”

  “Then why bring it up?”

  “Because you should talk about it.” She paused a moment, as if considering whether or not to say what she wanted to say. “Are you embarrassed?”

  “About what?”

  “About being…what’s the word? It’s not exactly original to be in love with your brother’s fiancée.”

  “You think I’m a cliché?”

  “No. You think you are one. I just think it upsets you. Challenges your self-image.”

  I wanted to tell her that I didn’t need her pop psychology, but before I could, I remembered that she was pretty and the way the sunlight kissed her black hair was wonderful and I wanted her to come back that night.

  I said, “That isn’t until the day after tomorrow. I’ll be here until the weekend.”

  “I might come by.”

  “Sure. Whenever you have time.”

  She finished dressing in silence. I watched her slender frame vanish behind the flowing, loose black robe that I now knew her father forced her to wear outside their home. A woman’s body is sacred, I’d once heard an imam say, so Muslims cover it like they cover the Kaaba in Mecca. The hijab, the purdah, the abayah, the niqab, all of it, is reverence.

  It was meant to be a profound thought, but ultimately it was barely a pretty one. The object of one’s reverence is still just an object. It is a poor dervish who cares if and how the Kaaba is covered.

  Soon I could see nothing of Azza except those remarkable pale green eyes. I knew her well enough by then, however, that even though I could not see her smile, I could hear it in her voice and picture it nearly perfectly.

  “If I don’t see you before you go, remember to try to have a good time.”

  “You know perfectly well that I’ll do no such thing.”

  I showered and shaved after she left. I suppose, despite discovering that Zuha was destined to marry Aamir, I should’ve been grateful for small miracles, like Azza bint Saqr. There aren’t a lot of women, I imagine, who would let you cry on their shoulders about being broken up over your high school sweetheart and still come back to your bed.

  I was pathetic. People got over their first romances, they nursed their broken hearts back to some semblance of health, and they sought out other people to try to be happy with. That was what was expected of me, what would’ve been normal. Unfortunately, I’d made defying expectations a signature feature of my existence.

  Azza hadn’t thought I was pathetic, though, or at least that is how I remembered it. It was hard to know for sure. I’d been pretty drunk.

  What was Azza’s relationship with Qais Badami like for her to seek me out, to break promises she had only recently made? These were uncomfortable thoughts, so I abandoned them. Instead, I studied my phone for information on how the world had changed in the few hours I’d been distracted by the trivial pursuits of sex and sleep.

  The world was much the same as it had always been. My news feed, however, insisted that there were urgent stories requiring my attention. Celebrities had broken up. Dunks had been thrown down and goals scored. Stooge One had insulted Stooge Two and retaliation was anticipated. The latest episode of the hottest television show was apparently epic.

  An epic with commercial breaks. A trick Homer missed out on.

  I skipped over my father’s posts, scrolling past the flood of anxiety and fear that he was drowning in. He was sharing every piece of news he could get his hands on, credible or not, about how the ban on Muslims entering the United States would be
implemented, about how hate crimes against Muslims were on the rise, and how a registry would go into effect, so that Muslims could be tracked by the government.

  I didn’t doubt that my father was concerned. It was going around. Even Imam Sama had started joking—half joking, really—about there being undercover federal agents in the congregation. Ma was probably getting to him.

  As far as Dad was concerned, I suspected that a very real driving force behind his Chicken Little messages was their popularity. Everyone likes to be liked, and Imtiaz Faris had never felt quite liked enough in some quarters.

  Speaking of my mother, her online persona was focused, predictably, on religion. “Glory Be to Allah,” one image she shared read in bright red letters, next to a completely unrelated picture of Istanbul’s famous Blue Mosque. “There are 114 chapters in the Quran. Subtract your age from this number and then add 2. This will give you the year of your birth. Miraculous!”

  I considered pointing out this only worked because the year was 2016 but thought better of it. I never actually replied to anything posted for public consumption. I never shared, never tweeted or chirped or peeped anything online. I was antisocial on social media. I listened but never spoke. It was the way of sages and of brown boys seeking to avoid parental disapproval.

  I was about to log off when a message popped up. I had a new “friend request.”

  The internet wanted to know if Zuha Shah and I were still friends.

  I am not sure how long I sat there, just staring at Zuha’s profile picture, before doing what was inevitable and letting her back into my world. Instantly, a message from her popped up.

  Hi.

  I thought for some time about what to say, so long, in fact, that she must have started to wonder if I’d respond at all. Finally, I wrote back. For the record, we are not really friends.

  I see you haven’t changed.

  I’m virtually the same, I replied.

  Can we meet?

  I frowned at the screen, wondering if Zuha really hadn’t caught my clever bit of wordplay. Did you catch the pun?

  Yes and I ignored it, she replied. Need to talk. Can we meet?

  Busy. Don’t really have time.

  I’ll come to you. Address?

  * * *

  —

  Zuha said she would be by after Friday prayers, so I went downtown as planned, walking to my favorite food truck. It was painted a garish neon orange and decorated with robin’s-egg-blue graffiti, which shouted the name of my friend’s business to the world: Junk in the Trunk.

  Giant sesame seed buns loomed next to the words, in case anyone was dense enough to miss the joke. It was risqué for halal food, but that hadn’t detracted from business.

  Jason Backes, the truck’s sole proprietor, was a client and a friend. He lacked certain talents necessary for running a business. Talents that would enable him to obtain state and city permits, for example, or get a food handler’s certification. Jason only barely accepted that a food truck needed to meet the standards of the Department of Public Health. Actually, I think he barely believed the department existed. When it came to bureaucracy, Jason was a decided agnostic.

  This, of course, meant that the amount of paperwork involved in running a food truck confounded him. I’d agreed to keep track of his insurance, manage his books and make sure the truck’s paperwork was in order. In exchange, as long as I also helped him with advertising, I got a free lunch on Fridays. This weekly meal made Junk in the Trunk my highest-paying client.

  Jason smiled when he saw me. “Yo, Faris.”

  I waved to him and took a place at the back of the line.

  The first time I’d brought my father here, Imtiaz Faris had stared at the lean white man covered with tattoos. His gaze had lingered first on Jason’s perpetually bloodshot eyes, then on the chef’s scruffy beard and shaggy brown hair. “Pothead hippies can’t make halal food.”

  This was, fortunately, not true. Jason made a mean burger, so much so that he could now honestly count my father as a regular.

  I rarely got a burger though. Jason didn’t take orders from me. Instead, he just gave me whatever happened to not be selling. San Francisco, as was too often the case, wasn’t feeling his grilled chicken sandwich that day.

  As always, my meal came with a side of bright pink flyers. I took them dutifully, intending to get to the mosque quickly, before the limited space on the console table by the front door was taken. That way, I could drop the flyers off and let people pick them up if they wanted, instead of handing them out one at a time.

  My friend was apparently onto the trick. “Actually, give them to people this time. Don’t just leave them lying around in a corner. I’ve heard that’s what you’ve been doing.”

  “I wouldn’t mind handing them out so much if you’d picked a better name for the truck. Something less offensive to delicate Muslim sensibilities.”

  “There are no better names. I have the best name. I have all the best names. Believe me.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “What?” Jason asked with a wicked grin. “Sound presidential?”

  I snorted and picked up the pink stack of paper.

  “If you just leave them lying around, I’ll know.”

  “What? You have spies at the mosque now?”

  Jason winked. “Doesn’t everybody?”

  * * *

  —

  I was too late to find a spot for Jason’s flyers on the table by the mosque’s entrance, so I hung on to them and sat on the ground at the back of the prayer hall, waiting for the service to begin.

  Soon after Imam Sama took the pulpit and began speaking in his sonorous voice, I realized this was going to be a poor sermon, which wasn’t particularly unusual. Ahmed Sama had many fine qualities, but he wasn’t an organized orator. He jumped from topic to topic, often without any detectable pattern. Today, he started with the story of Adam, the Islamic version. Where the Bible said Adam had transgressed gravely, committing the original sin that would taint all of humankind, the Quran claimed that it was just a little slipup. It was a mistake for which Adam had begged for forgiveness and for which forgiveness had been granted.

  I knew the exact words Adam had used to repent. My mother had forced me to memorize them when I was young. She’d predicted I would need them often.

  Unfortunately, instead of discussing how this single shift in perspective had led to the development of two very different dogmas, Imam Sama somehow ended up lecturing the congregation on the importance of smiling at people when passing by them on the street.

  He covered some of his favorite topics—cellphone etiquette, the importance of respecting your parents, making sure your breath doesn’t stink—along the way. I’d heard him speak on all of this before, and I usually tuned him out after around five minutes.

  His speech was uninspiring, but as the congregation rose to pray, I couldn’t help but admire the friendly, practical religion that was California’s Islam. I’ve either visited or been dragged to mosques in many parts of the world. There are thinly veiled politics in some mosques in Karachi and the severity of brimstone can be found in the mosques of Bradford, England. Islam in Toronto is sometimes shrill; I remember an imam there screeching at his audience, demanding that they go home and take hammers to their television sets, because the devil resides therein. In the mosques of California, however, a calm prevails.

  I tried to focus on prayer but, as always, whatever I was supposed to feel in such moments eluded me.

  The man praying next to me could have been from here or from Indonesia or Malaysia or China or Myanmar. Wherever he was from, the nuances of the religion he was raised with must have been different from the rather puritan upbringing my mother had given me. Yet as we stood together, our movements synchronized by prayer, we seemed for a moment to be and to believe exactly the same things.<
br />
  It was, perhaps, understandable that the rest of the world saw us, labeled us, as being the same.

  After all, we’re told that is what God does.

  * * *

  —

  Despite Qais Badami’s desperate friendliness, I avoided his company. It was his ring Azza wore. It’s not pleasant to be very long in the presence of the man you are actively cuckolding.

  I didn’t know why Azza objected to him. It probably wasn’t because of his appearance. His features were sharp—perhaps a touch too sharp—and his skin fair. He was better looking than I was.

  Granted, he was too polite, too solicitous and too generous with his honeyed smile, for my liking, but then I’d always preferred people with a little spice to them. Like Naani Jaan.

  Or Zuha.

  Fortunately, I didn’t have much time to think about her, as Qais walked up to me, a cheerful grin pasted on his face. “Anvar. Good to see you. As-salamu alaykum.”

  I thrust a flyer at him before the other peddlers around me, all advertising their own restaurants, bookstores or charitable causes, could ambush him with their offerings. “Yeah,” I said, struggling to sound sincere, “always good to see you too.”

  He looked down at Jason’s ad. “Junk in the Trunk. Odd name.”

  “It’s not ideal.”

  “You’re working in a food truck?”

  The second question had a small “I thought you were a lawyer” sneer to it.

  “Just doing a favor for a client,” I told him.

  “Then you don’t actually know anything about the business? You must know something if you are handing out flyers, I think. It is run by a non-Believer, isn’t it?”

  “Jason believes in a lot of things.”

  “I’m sure he does,” Qais said after a small pause, during which I could almost see his mind working to decipher my comment. “But he doesn’t believe in what we believe in.” When I simply shrugged my shoulders, he went on. “Are you certain then that the meat is halal?”