The Bad Muslim Discount

by Syed M. Masood

  Aamir, on the other hand, had kept faith with that worldview his whole life and that was why he looked so shaken. He couldn’t understand why something he thought was right had resulted in this much harm.

  I remembered the day, long ago, when I looked at the world for the first time and imagined what it would feel like if there really was no God. That was how Aamir felt now. This was his moment of doubt.

  I wanted to be as angry with him as I had been when I first learned what he had done. However, that anger had faded quickly, and now that he stood before me, I couldn’t summon even the vestiges of the fury that had once gripped my soul.

  For once in my life, I was justified in feeling utterly and completely enraged at something he had done. Despite all his advertised excellence, Aamir Faris had made a mistake, a tremendous error, with calamitous consequences. This was my chance to hold him accountable, to show him that he was no different, no better, than I was.

  But there was a problem. I couldn’t be angry with him because he felt more like a brother to me then, in that moment when we were both broken and imperfect, than he ever had before.

  Besides, I too had done something I thought was right—I’d told Qais to run—and had brought pain into the world. It was like Aamir had taken a step toward me, and I had taken a step toward him.

  “Listen,” he said, “I really don’t know how to begin to apologize. I didn’t mean for you to ever be in danger, much less shot at. And Zuha could have been hurt too.”

  “It’ll be all right.”

  “It will?”

  A movement caught my eye and I looked up. It was nothing, just a trick of the light, or a trick of a shadow, but I noticed for the first time that there were Quranic verses painted in gold under the mosque’s crown molding. At least, I assume they were Quranic verses. It was Arabic, at any rate, and given where I was standing, it was probably not a grocery list.

  The shining words ran from wall to wall, uninterrupted, surrounding Aamir and surrounding me, encircling the prayer hall from all sides. I recognized a few of them, here and there, but I had no idea what they meant when they were put together.

  “You have to know that I’m sorry, Anvar.”

  I looked back at my brother. I saw now a part of him that was also a part of me. Somehow, I hadn’t seen it before.

  “What are you doing after the service?” I asked him.

  “Nothing. Why?”

  “Let’s go for a drive when this is over. We’ll get some bubble-gum ice cream.”

  * * *

  —

  Muslim funerals are simple. There is no beautiful casket. Instead, the body is wrapped in a plain white cotton shroud. There is no elaborate eulogy except the ritual refrain “inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un.” We belong to Allah, and to Allah we return. There is no music or dirge. There is only silence.

  Abu Fahd’s funeral was simpler than most, in the sense that attendance was low. There were a handful of strangers who happened to be at the mosque, my family, Zuha, Hafeez Bhai and, of course, Imam Sama.

  The Imam called for silence and we stood in line to pray for Abu Fahd of Iraq, who once had a name that we did not know.

  Qais knew and Azza knew, but neither one of them was here.

  What’s in a name, anyway?

  “Allah hu Akbar.”

  * * *

  —

  After the service, my mother was talking to Zuha outside the mosque. They fell silent as I approached. Ma’s face was grim, her lips pressed together in a tight line. Zuha wiped tears away with the back of her wrist. When she looked at me, she bit her lip and then hurried past, her hair brushing my shoulder. “Excuse me.”

  I turned to watch her go and then shook my head at my mother. “Come on, Ma.”

  “Don’t you dare question me.”

  “What was that?” I gestured toward Zuha’s retreating form.

  “Don’t. You. Dare.” When I didn’t say anything, she walked up to me and straightened my collar. “And why are you wearing a pant shirt to the mosque? You couldn’t find a decent shalwar kameez?”

  “It isn’t my style.”

  “Yes,” she agreed wearily. “I know all about just how stylish you are. Aamir wore a shalwar kameez. It looks nice.”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “We’ll talk about it some other time. Today, you should try to make up with your brother. He really is the best person with the best heart.”

  “I spoke to him, and we’ll work on that later today. Listen, Ma, I have to go to the cemetery.”

  “Yes, yes. Go. Remember to recite the shahada the entire way there. It’s important.” I nodded and began to walk away, but she called me back. “Do you know where the Quran first existed?”

  “What? No, I’ve never thought about it. Somewhere in Arabia, obviously.”

  My mother rewarded me with a disappointed grimace. “It existed, of course, first in the mind of God. He knew that one day he would reveal it to his Last Prophet, May Peace Be Upon Him. Don’t you dare make that face at me. What I am saying is that just because something is not spoken out loud or told to anyone does not mean that it does not exist or that it is not important. It could be the most important, most holy thing of all.” She took a deep breath and leveled her gaze at me. “So even though we have never said it, you must know that both I and your father love you very much. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I whispered. “I know.”

  * * *

  —

  I slept for a long time. When I got up, I could hear my family moving around downstairs, talking to each other, wondering when I would finally leave my room and come down to join them. I preferred, at least for a moment, to sit by my window and listen to the pattering of rain on glass.

  Leaning my head against a wall, I wondered where Azza bint Saqr was, what she was doing and how the world was treating her.

  Then my door flew open and Zuha walked in.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hi. I’m not sure if they told you…”

  “You’re superbusy brooding.”

  “I wasn’t letting anyone in.”

  She shrugged. “That’s why I didn’t ask for permission.”

  I smiled.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I got some sleep. And you’re here. Things are looking up.”

  “They’re watching a movie downstairs, if you want to join them. I’m told there will be popcorn.”

  I made a face. “I’d rather not. Wait. How did you get up here?”

  “It turns out that your parents have discovered a marvelous new technology. They’re calling it stairs and I think—”

  “How’d you get past my mom is what I meant.”

  “It wasn’t hard to give her the slip. I’ve got the One Ring.” Zuha held out her hand. She wore a platinum band with a modest marquise diamond set in it. “Thank you, by the way, I absolutely love it.”

  “What?”

  “The ring is yours. I mean, it’s mine, but it’s from you.”

  “Ma gave it to you?”

  “I think she was worried you would never get around to it.”

  “Your conversation with her outside the mosque…”

  “Was her telling me that, while she thinks we’re both unbelievably stupid and, unless we repent, bound to end up in a very bad place, she is not willing to sacrifice her son’s happiness for anything in the world.”

  “That isn’t what it looked like.”

  Zuha sat down at the edge of my bed, opposite me.

  “I would have, you know,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Proposed.”

  “Your mother says you don’t know how to do anything. She says she still has to pick out your clothes for you.”

  “And Aam
ir?”

  “He says he is fine with it. I think it is his way of making amends.”

  “For being a—”

  “Don’t start,” Zuha warned me.

  I didn’t start.

  “So…” she began, before trailing off.

  “What?”

  “So will you marry me?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “That sounds like a bad idea.”

  “It’s not. It’s the best thing you’ll ever do.”

  THE ENDGAME

  I win again.

  —Naani Jaan

  ANVAR

  Donald Trump was elected the forty-fifth president of the United States on a day Ma liked better than did any other Muslim in America. It was as if, for her, Eid had come early.

  I was with my parents, watching the news, when the results were announced.

  Bariah Faris turned to her husband and said what she had been waiting to say since the day he decided to move our family to the United States.

  “I told you. Did you listen? No. You always do what you want. You had your head in the clouds with that Jefferson fellow. All men are created equal, you said. We won’t be second-class citizens, you said. Look at what just happened. What did I tell you? He’ll find a way, you know, to kick people like us out. He hates people like us, Imtiaz. Don’t you dare shake your head at me. He’ll do it. You’ll see. One day, they will kick us out and your Jefferson won’t come back from the dead to help you. Don’t you dare tell me I am wrong, Imtiaz Faris. Don’t you ever dare tell me I am wrong about anything ever again.”

  My father watched her stomp off and then offered me a sheepish smile.

  “You would think that after all these years, she would know that I am not a very daring man.”

  “That’s not true. You left your home. Crossed oceans. Came here.”

  He chuckled. “It sounds like a big thing when you say it like that, Anvar. It wasn’t all that big a thing, you know. I just wanted to have a little space to myself. Not a lot, you understand, but just a little. Just enough. For a while there, I thought I had found it.”

  He turned his attention back to the television, to the adoring, cheering crowd greeting their incoming nationalist president.

  “When did Americans become so afraid?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I understood the business of trying to go back to the safe glory of Islam’s past when it came to Pakistan. It came at the end of a long, slow decline the causes of which we didn’t fully understand. America is still the most powerful nation in the world. So why are its people so terrified all the time?”

  A map of the United States flashed on the screen, splashed with the colors of water and blood. I studied it as I tried to come up with an answer to the question Imtiaz Faris had posed.

  “We live on stolen land,” I finally said, “in a country built on slavery and reliant on the continued economic exploitation of other people. The oppressor always lives in fear of the oppressed. Americans have always been afraid—of those native to this continent, of Black people, of Japanese citizens they interned, and now of Muslims and immigrants. So the real question, I think, is who is next?”

  We watched as, on-screen, the president-elect made his way onto the stage to begin his speech, and Imtiaz Faris let out an exhausted sigh.

  “I suppose we have to change the national anthem then.”

  “You want to take out ‘the land of the brave’?”

  “No,” he protested. “The whole thing has to be replaced.”

  “With what?”

  “With Britney. Remember ‘Oops!…I Did It Again’?”

  * * *

  —

  On January 27, 2017, a ban on Muslims entering the United States was ordered by the White House. It was disguised as a ban on entry from seven Muslim-majority countries. Interestingly enough, they were almost all countries the United States had recently attacked or droned or waged wars in. None of them, or their citizens, had orchestrated an attack on the United States.

  * * *

  —

  On January 28, 2017, protests broke out all over the country, as Americans stood up against the Muslim ban. They stood at airports and in streets, they stood by monuments and before government buildings. My father watched the coverage and seemed caught between the desire to break into tears and the desire to break into a jig.

  When the news cut to scenes of attorneys, sitting on the ground in airports, drafting habeas petitions, he looked at me.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to be a lawyer?”

  * * *

  —

  I don’t know what happened to Azza bint Saqr or even Qais Badami. If Agents Hale and Moray ever tracked them down, they didn’t tell me. A small part of me wants them found, the part of me that wishes to understand entirely the causes behind the events that so altered my life.

  Most of my soul realizes that the cost of those answers would be too high. Most of my soul hopes that Azza found some measure of peace. I sometimes imagine her watching her first snowfall, and I find myself hoping that she thinks it is beautiful.

  It’s part of growing up to realize that often, perhaps inevitably, we are left with incomplete stories about the lives of other people. It is impossible, therefore, to understand any other being as completely, or incompletely, as we understand ourselves. The best we can do is find some common ground in self-evident truths about how we are, if not the same, then at least similar. We can recognize that our experiences of the world, no matter how various and varied, how tinged with excess or want or joy or sorrow, make us all irredeemably, undeniably, irrepressibly human.

  * * *

  —

  Zuha and I married. It was an extremely small affair. Imam Sama officiated a brief, solemn ceremony in my parents’ backyard. A lot of our guests complained that the food, while delicious, was not appropriate for the nature of the celebration. I will concede that having Junk in the Trunk cater the event was an unusual choice.

  Hafeez Bhatti didn’t get us something off our registry. Rather, he gave us a sterling silver paan daan, an exquisite rectangular box, which is supposed to house all the ingredients necessary for the construction of a good paan. We have yet to find a use for it, though it is by far the most valuable thing we own.

  Aamir was soon introduced to an eligible young woman who, my mother made certain, had never heard of me. The spectacle of their union was lavish and grand and, I suspect, exactly what Aamir wanted. My father designated himself the DJ and also found time to dance with Zuha at the wedding.

  It was a good night, a joyous celebration of two perfectly scripted lives.

  ZAHRA

  The sun was still asleep when I left the basement I was renting, a backpack heavy with books on my shoulder. My breath touched the bitter cold around me, became a ghost and then vanished. The dying night was peaceful. The moon was distant but full, and a few stars were shining, waiting to kiss the dawn.

  There was a rhythm to my mornings. I opened Mrs. Popova’s café for her at five-thirty, and my world filled with the smell of brewing coffee and baking bread. At six, my employer wandered in, still rubbing sleep from her eyes. Four hours later, I went to class.

  Before any of that, however, there was Henry. He was a short, thin man, in his early thirties with a nervous smile, and hair that he parted neatly every day, like a schoolboy, but that his toque always messed up a little. Ever since I’d started working for Mrs. Popova, a year and a half ago, he’d become a regular.

  More than a regular, actually, because he showed up before I did, before we even opened. On that day, like always, he was waiting for me at the storefront. He waved a gloved hand and offered me his best grin.

  “Hi. Hello. It’s a good morning, right?”

  “It’s freezing, Mr. Bowman. What are you doing out here?”

/>   His shoulders dropped a little. “I asked you to call me Henry.”

  “I forgot.”

  “I’ve asked fourteen times.”

  “I’ve got a really bad memory,” I said.

  “That’s funny. Have you always been funny, Zahra?”

  “No. I just had a good teacher. Let’s go inside. I’ll get you your usual.”

  “Sure. Okay, yeah.”

  I fumbled around in my backpack for the keys, wondering if I should say something else to him. Mrs. Popova was always telling me to give Henry a break. The fact that he was wretched at flirting, she said, didn’t mean he’d be bad in a relationship. I needed to either have pity on him, she thought, or end all his hopes.

  Where were my keys? I set the backpack down on the ground and knelt next to it, looking through it under the glow of a streetlight.

  “Uh…so…” Henry said. I looked up and saw that he had his phone in his hand. “Zahra is a pretty name.”

  It had not always been my name, of course, but he didn’t need to know that.

  “It was my mother’s name actually.”

  “It’s nice,” he said, then turned his attention back to the screen and read, “Ask her what it means…uh…I mean—”

  I couldn’t help it. I laughed. He flushed, his cheeks, already pink from the cold, going almost red.

  “Sorry,” he said, “I was just…I’m not good at, you know—”

  “It means flower,” I said. I didn’t like seeing him struggle.

  “Oh. Where does she live?”

  “My mother? She died years ago.”

  Henry looked like he’d stepped on her grave. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to bring it up.”

  “Happens to everyone,” I said.

  “Your father?”