Good Muslim Boy

by Osamah Sami

  Masturbation is a sin

  Dad thought I was destined to become a cleric to lead the people, so he’d take me with him to the hawza to complete my schooling. It sounds grand, but in practice this meant sitting under the pulpit for endless hours, listening to lectures delivered by the white-bearded imams.

  One such lecture, imaginatively titled ‘Masturbation Is a Sin’, prompted me to join the circle of young men who always gathered afterwards to ask the imam questions.

  ‘What if I have this friend who masturbates but does not reach climax. Is that still a sin?’ asked a horny teenager with pimples on his nose.

  ‘Yes, son,’ preached the imam. ‘Any form of self-pleasure is a sin.’

  ‘What if this person, like my friend, is in bed and he doesn’t really know if he’s dreaming or awake? Can he keep rubbing against the bed?’

  ‘No, son,’ the imam firmly said. ‘Unless it is entirely and solely a wet dream, then it is a sin to continue to rub oneself against the mattress or any part of the bed thereof.’

  Another boy raised his hand. ‘What if a guy I knew inadvertently bumped into a girl at the mall, by complete accident, got an erection, and then tried to do the gentlemanly thing by pushing the erection into his pants, using his hand, and in doing so, reached climax?’

  You had to hand it to the imams. They always answered questions like these systematically and resourcefully. And although their faces were as wrinkly as old paper bags, it’s one of life’s great mysteries how they kept straight faces at times like these.

  Dad’s struggle to keep his cool

  While the boys kept up their best attempts to find some religious loophole that would allow them, definitively, to masturbate without guilt, Dad came in and excused me from the imam question time.

  ‘You’re too young to sit in these lectures,’ he said. To make up for it, he promised to take me to my favourite juice bar, and then to the bookstore, where I’d be allowed to pick any three books of my choice. He also told me he’d enrolled me at the Kanoon Parvaresh Fekri—Iran’s leading arts institute—for the fourth year running.

  All of this news was uniformly excellent. At the Kanoon, I learned literature and was able to write poetry; I went there to express my rage, and was encouraged to do so. It was more exciting than the illegally imported poster of Pamela Anderson my cousin had shown me under cover of darkness one night, and it definitely gave me a higher high than the imam’s masturbation seminars.

  We walked towards the rusty gates of the hawza to collect Dad’s motorbike. Dusk was sneaking down on Qom; the moon had just crept into the sky, getting ready to take over for full-blown night shift. In its low light, we spotted two policemen ordering a tow truck to take away Dad’s motorbike. Dad ran towards them, which wasn’t easy in full religious garb.

  ‘Lieutenant! Please! I’m here!’

  ‘Cleric, Your Reverence, is this your bike?’ an officer asked. You could hear the effort it took to put respect into his voice.

  ‘Yes,’ Dad confirmed, shaking both the officers’ hands and offering them a tired smile. ‘Please don’t tow it away.’

  ‘You are Arab?’ quizzed the officer. He’d picked up Dad’s broken accent.

  Dad and I had witnessed this scene many times before. ‘I am a citizen of this earth and your fellow brother in humanity,’ Dad replied.

  ‘So you are Arab,’ said the officer. ‘This is a disabled veterans parking zone, cleric. You are a man of the cloth and should know it is a sin to take someone else’s spot illegally…’

  ‘I am a veteran,’ Dad responded, taking out an ID card.

  ‘A disabled veteran?’ asked the officer. ‘You don’t seem all that wounded. Unless you’re wearing a prosthetic leg under that garb.’

  Dad was trying to keep his cool; he was better at it than I was. But he knew how to push his case, when to take a stronger tone. ‘Are you suggesting that a person who served eight weeks, got wounded and then never served again is more entitled to this spot than a person who watched thirty-two changes of season on the front line?’

  ‘Of course! He lost a limb!’

  ‘And we lost our minds, lieutenant.’

  ‘How do I even know you were not like those traitor Arabs who played both sides?’ the officer muttered. ‘Might explain why you left the war unscathed…’

  Dad’s eye twitched. His lip quivered. For a minute, I thought my stoic, ice-cool father was about to take the policeman’s rifle and knock him out with it.

  Then he smiled at the officer, and wished him a good day instead. Our plans for juice bars and bookstores were not brought up again; we needed the money to free the motorbike from the police yard.

  Looking for Mr X

  Today, the snow had coloured the whole city perfect white, and everyone was walking cautiously across the spongy carpet, in mutual agreement to keep all of Qom virgin-white. My cousin Musty and I were walking to the holy shrine, tiptoeing across the thick snow. We were discussing alcohol, naturally.

  ‘When you grow up, do you think you’ll try it?’ Musty asked.

  I considered the question thoroughly. ‘Only if I was alone and stranded on an island.’

  ‘That’s so stupid,’ Musty said. ‘Where would you get the alcohol?’

  ‘You’re stupid! In any other situation Mum and Dad would be nearby.’

  Alcohol in Qom was sold in seedy underground markets, usually someone’s old war bunker. I was the son of a cleric, my cousin was the son of a cleric and another set of cousins had been born into another family of clerics. In other words, access to these merchants was out of the question.

  We had heard about a Mr X, which was bizarre, seeing as the letter X does not exist in the Persian alphabet. He ran a legitimate business near the shrine selling pictures of the Ayatollah, which was as profitable in a place like Qom as fish and chips in London. But he also had a storage space behind the religious photos, where he plied another trade that was more interesting to teenagers.

  My cousins and I tried hard to look like ordinary citizens, ones without religious parents. We wore huge silver chains around our necks, thinking these gave us a reckless look. When Musty and I got up the courage to walk into Mr X’s shop, we amplified our thuggishness by undoing the top buttons of our shirts, straw hanging out the sides of our mouths like regular John Waynes.

  ‘How can I help you young boys?’ said Mr X.

  ‘Are you Mr X?’ I asked, suddenly unsure. He was a bearded old man in a kofia hat.

  ‘I don’t know about this X thing,’ he said, ‘but I highly recommend this new photo of the Ayatollah. He’s overlooking a nature strip. Very colourful, sure to bring a zing to your decor.’

  Musty jumped in. ‘We want the Mr Walker.’

  ‘What do you think of the Ayatollah?’ asked Mr X.

  ‘He’s, uh…’ I searched for a response. A trap, as usual. If I said I loved the Ayatollah, it would prove I had religious affiliations and expose our thuggy costumes as a terrible front. If I said I hated the Ayatollah, he could hand us to the authorities for a lengthy punishment.

  ‘Get out of my shop,’ concluded Mr X, gesturing to the exit with as much force and f
inality as a cricket umpire.

  A real thug would’ve known how to respond to this scenario. As for me and Musty, we never learned the correct response. We tried schemes like this one time and time again, with various alcohol vendors—there were many men like Mr X. But they always chose not to deal with such unconvincing clients, who could always be gathering intel for the Piety Police. The punishment for selling alcohol was either jail or death.

  Beware the Monkerat

  Calling them the ‘Piety Police’ may sound like a diminutive term, but there was a Persian proverb that duly applied to these people: ‘Don’t scoff at chilli, so puny and small—gorge a handful and your balls will fall.’

  They were better known as the Monkerat, which literally means ‘against vice’. They worked undercover, and had a talent for smashing people’s teeth—in or out, it was up to them. They landed precise punches.

  They were different to regular police. They only executed religious warrants. Beardless men were slapped around, as were young ladies who left the house with but a strand of hair poking out from under their hijabs. As for beardless men like me who tried to chat up girls like these? We made the perfect public punching bags for the Monkerat.

  The Monkerat shaved their beards to blend in with the sinners. They popped their top two shirt buttons, wore silver chains like me. They slicked back their hair and hung around noteworthy hotspots of sin. They chewed gum far too indolently, spat on the sidewalk to look ‘hard’. They even used their prayer beads like genuine street rats did, spinning them in circles round their index fingers while they smoked cigarettes hands-free.

  They were very good at what they did, always three moves ahead. Of course, we all spent countless hours trying to make them. We analysed gum-chewing techniques, comparing the styles of thugs to those of the average man on the street: thugs chewed like camels, while the average person chewed gum like a cow. A novice Monkerat would ham his chewing and show too much tongue. But that was when they were novices; they got real good, real quick.

  They also spat their phlegm differently. A real spitter with no agenda wouldn’t care where their chunky throat soup might land; a rookie Monkerat would hesitate, look around, lest he accidentally dirty a freshly painted wall.

  Following this logic, I one day saw a thug spit on a wall that had a slogan from the Ayatollah sprawled across it in official font. A Monkerat would never go as far as blasphemy—that would be like a cop taking real heroin, which doesn’t happen, most of the time. I sauntered up to him to get the goss about an alcohol vendor.

  ‘Sup,’ I said, bouncing up and down like a gangster.

  ‘Fuck off,’ the thug replied.

  ‘Take it easy, bro,’ I said.

  ‘You with the pigs? They send you?’ He looked me up and down. Lately, the Monkerat had been hiring kids younger than me.

  ‘No, swear to God.’

  ‘Swear on your father’s eyes,’ he said. ‘Say, “May he go blind if I’m lying.”’

  ‘May my dad go blind if I’m a cop rat,’ I said solemnly. ‘Now can you please tell me who’s selling some liquid around here?’

  ‘What sorta liquid?’

  ‘You know. Get high.’

  ‘Alcohol?’ he said.

  My face turned pale. A real thug would never use that word. I inspected his attire again, as casually as I could, trying to pick out a glitch, and suddenly there it was: he was wearing black business socks beneath his basketball shoes.

  I shook my head and addressed him formally. I was very close to having a very real problem. ‘What alcohol?’ I spat. ‘Damn you and your evil mind! This is the Islamic Republic! If I ever catch you loitering here again, I’ll report you to the Monkerat! Be gone!’

  A real thug would have belted me. The Monkerat just froze.

  It was no use trying to spot them most of the time; they were chameleons. They had a cloak of invisibility unique around the world, thicker and blanker than any other police I’ve ever seen. That was what happened when you took your job this seriously.

  In the end, all we could do was dutifully grow our beards. But we were young, and our faces ended up looking as patchy as KFC chicken wings.

  Selling rockets to buy a smoothie

  It sucked being cold in winter, and it sucked being in school. But when summer engulfed the city, and we went on break from school, it still sucked being poor. It always did. I wanted to buy an ice-cream, but I was dreaming even bigger. I wanted to buy a cool, luxurious smoothie.

  And this was why I moved into a lucrative new business: the provision and sale of fireworks, both legal and illegal. I recruited my cousins and Moe Greene.

  We knew of a few Afghan boys who smuggled fireworks across the border, so I negotiated with them to get some merchandise on credit. I had to swear on my mother’s eyes that I would not rat them out to the cops and then swear on my mother’s womb that I would pay them back.

  After consulting with my cousins, we decided to give our goods peculiar names, to find a point of difference and ensure a wildfire word-of-mouth campaign. We stocked the Hitler 1000 rocket—small and Russian-made—and the Genghis Khan, a Chinese-made missile that packed a bigger punch. Our other bestsellers included the Attila the Hun 441, the Pharaoh 2000 BC, and the God’s Fury 3000. Each name had its internal logic, sometimes multiple layers. The Pharaoh was Egyptian-made, but it also concealed a rocket within a rocket—inside a tomb, if you will. Better yet, the inner shell generally detonated a while after the initial rocket had popped. Just like a real Pharaoh, it was built to be resurrected. We also sold a Bin Laden for the right fee.

  We decided not to cater for weddings or birthdays, or the ever-popular return-of-POW celebrations. It was important not to sell our rockets to just anyone, because (a) they could be Monkerat, and (b) if they didn’t know how to set the rockets off, the explosions could be fierce. It was a fast way to get yourself comfy one-bedroom lodgings at the local hospital.

  The return-of-POW celebrations were particularly tempting: scores of POWs were trickling back into the country, so we knew that we could make a lot of dough. But one day, we’d sold some rockets to the excited child of one of these returning war heroes. The boy had set off the thunderous fireworks upon his dad’s return—and the father, upon hearing the ear-splitting blasts, was forced into nightmarish flashbacks of his days on the front lines. He completely lost his mind, right there and then. He stripped off his boots and fatigues in front of the entire neighbourhood, and ran through the streets of Qom wearing nothing but his socks and a freshly stained set of underpants.

  It was a volatile business. Like certain alcohol vendors, our base of operations had to be constantly on the move. We eventually settled at the foothills of the mountains, which had a huge geographical advantage. We knew the landscape well, and there was a low possibility of ambush. We bought two-way radios and tuned them to the police band. One of us would climb the mountain—a full half-kilometre—where he could get a good view of the police. In the event of a police raid, he’d send an emergency signal, a mirror-flash from our comrade at the peak.

  Every Friday, we smoked cigarettes atop Prophet Khezr Mountain, tucked inside the small worship cabin, which was built from logs and rocks. Legend had it that the Prophet Khezr, born a thousan
d years before Christ, had passed through this mountain, built the chapel as a place of prayer, and then vanished, by act of God. The ancient sanctuary was a deeply spiritual place. It was also the perfect stash-spot for our illegal fireworks.

  ‘Sami-Sami-Musty,’ I radioed up the mountain.

  ‘Come in, Sami, over,’ Musty replied.

  ‘The plain clear, over?’

  ‘Clear as plastic, over.’

  ‘Double-check, over.’

  ‘Shit, I think I see cops. Over.’

  For the most part, we aborted missions purely from paranoia—which was still better than getting too comfortable.

  The whole job was arduous, and sneaking around only made it more so. We’d instruct buyers to leave their money by a certain cave, and direct them to another cave, where their product was stored. Some buyers ripped us off by depositing fake money. One of them threw in a note that read, Go fuck yourself.

  ‘This guy’s written go suck twelve dicks,’ I complained, more incredulous than frustrated. ‘Why?’

  ‘Who cares about the twelve dicks. He’s stolen the stuff,’ spat Musty.

  ‘Yeah, but why twelve? Why not seven or three or a thousand?’

  ‘Shut up, Osamah! We’re losing money here. We have to think.’

  We all thought for a solid sunset, smoking quietly at the peak.

  ‘How about we pull off the Persian instruction sets from the packaging?’ I suggested. ‘Leave the Chinese ones on. That way people have to call us to learn how to set the fireworks off.’ I got excited. ‘Maybe they leave their phone number alongside their payment. And we can call them and give them the details on how to launch the rockets.’