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Amazing Ayyub-
AMAZING AYYUB THE IRANIAN SHIITE SKINHEAD couldn't have weighed
more than a buck-fifty but he had that wiry survival strength like
an animal that was always hungry but still had to run and fight
and keep its eyes open and never sleep. No fat on his body and no
inch of his skin without detail-poor Ayyub was all scars, veins,
bones and KARBALA tattoo. No shirt and he drove his van like that
same crazed animal, squeezing hard on the wheel, elbows locked,
pulling insane but controlled swerves across lanes. He had his Sham
69 coming in loud from the one working speaker and he had those
streets owned and riding in back he had Rabeya the punk niqabi sitting
on a stolen amp and holding an AK-47 in the direction of a tied-up
Matt Damon. Behind Damon hung a Saudi flag with red anarchy sign
spray-painted on the kalimah. These were the taqwacores, taqwa-cores
who passed the frontiers of all reasonable religion, serving Islam
in exile, trying to realize the imams of their inner being while
saying fuck all to the rest of it-
Tucking the butt of the gun into her side to support it with one
hand, ninja-looking Rabeya reached with the other into the folds
of her black cloak and pulled out her phone. Turn the radio down,
she told Ayyub, she had demands to make.
"Listen up," she told someone on the other end. "We
have Matt Damon and we're gonna blow his head off unless you fulfill
our demands!"
"What we demand is for Hollywood to give a positive depiction
of Muslims, just one movie where we're not these two-dimensional
al-Qaeda stereotypes! No more of this Delta Force bullshit, you
hear me?"
"And no more Sum of All Fears!" shrieked Ayyub from the
front.
"Tom Clancy can suck my cock!"
"No more True Lies," continued Rabeya, "no more Siege,
no more fucking Executive Decision or Rules of Engagement. No more
Not Without My Daughter-I mean, the story was valid, but what if
it was the other way around and this asshole American guy with an
Iranian wife, why can't we tell that story? But anyway, listen!
One decent movie in which Muslims are reasonable human beings or
we kill Matt Damon!" She hung up and let them think about it.
"So you guys are Muslim, I imagine," said Damon, perfectly
calm.
"That's right," replied Rabeya. "Nothing personal
against you, you know, you're just a way to get these guys' attention."
"In that case, as-salamu alaikum."
"Wa alaikum as-salam," she answered.
"I've gotta tell you," said Matt Damon, "I'm worried
about you guys falling into your own cliche stereotype here."
"FUCK YOU, MATT DAMON!" screamed Amazing Ayyub. "TAKBIR!"
"Allahu Akbar," said Rabeya.
"Don't get me wrong," said Damon. "I completely sympathize
with your grievance. Hollywood's depiction of Muslims has been erroneous
and utterly shameful. I'm just afraid that by taking a hostage,
you're playing into that same terrorist paradigm and furthering
a neoconservative perception of Islam."
"What's a neoconservative?" asked Ayyub.
"Not to mention," Damon continued, "there's no basis
in the Quran, nor the Sunnah, for you to take an innocent person
hostage."
"Fuck it," said Rabeya, lowering the AK. "I think
Matt Damon's right."
"Now Amazing Ayyub," said Damon, "I noticed that
your tattoo says Karbala. Are you Shi'a?"
"Yeah, bro."
"So you adhere to the infallible example set by the Twelve
Holy Imams."
"Fuckin' A."
"Then you must be aware that the Fifth and Sixth Holy Imams
both opposed armed rebellion."
"No shit?"
"No shit."
With all the rusty, dusty mystique of a Mad Max archetype, haggard
and worn after driving there all the way from his postbellum nightmare
Amazing Ayyub pulled into the Mobil station and hopped out to pump
gas. Still shirtless he went in to pay, leaving Matt Damon, Rabeya
and her AK-47 in the van. The van had gone down nine thousand miles
with him and had been through enough to become a character in the
story too. It was in this van that Ayyub carted taqwacore bands
like the Mutaweens, Vote Hezbollah and Osama Van Halen on their
tours. The stolen amp was revenge after that show in Oakland when
the club owner stiffed the Gandoos out of their money. Those bands
were genuine taqwa-punks and did it only for the taqwa, nothing
else.
No sign of the clerk anywhere, so Ayyub ripped open a Twix and smashed
both bars into his mouth. Before even swallowing he did it again
with a 3 Musketeers, then attacked a Reese's. He smeared the mess
of chocolate, peanut butter and saliva from his face to his bare
forearm. Left the wrappers on the floor and looked at the magazines,
tearing open the plastic sheath on a Penthouse. Then he picked up
the glossy music mag Punk Press and it drilled him like a Shawn
Michaels superkick to the chin:
On the front cover, four pretty and clean desi boys with piercings
and sleeve tattoos and one wearing a Vote Hezbollah t-shirt for
underground cred. "Shah 79," it read off to the side;
"Godfathers of Muslim Punk."
ARE YOU FUCKIN' KIDDING? scoffed Ayyub loud enough for anyone in
the place to hear, but there was still nobody there. Look at this
slick shit, he mumbled, flipping the pages until he found those
douchebags again. They had a whole spread with more cool poses and
a rundown of who in the group got wasted and who didn't ("Javed
has never had a beer in his life, but Omar will party his tits off")
and what a hard time they had recording their new album ("I
wanted the song to be this intricate Sufi allegory, you know, but
Omar thought it was about a girl"). One of the pussies had
a line about aiming for the moon because if you missed, you'd fall
in the stars. Another showed off the bismillah inked around his
neck and said, "like my tattoos, my heart hurts for Allah."
Amazing Ayyub had never heard of them and they didn't look like
anything that would have cruised around in his terrible van-their
magazine faces were too soft and well-rested to have ever suffered
a real taqwa road war with Ayyub behind the wheel. The taqwacores
were Gutter Sufi heroes; these kids were a new breed, weak and grafted
from the original.
Could it be?
Taqwacore...pop-punk?
Ayyub threw down the rag and still couldn't find a clerk so he just
walked back out, cursing Shah 79 and shouting that Rabeya wouldn't
believe that shit-
But the van was gone.
Ayyub looked in every direction and made a quick lap around the
Mobil, then ran up the street and turned to look the other way.
He figured that he had probably taken too long in there looking
at magazines and stealing candy, causing Rabeya to get scared and
bust out of there for the good of the mission. Or maybe Matt Damon
had pulled some Hollywood heroics, gotten himself loose and overpowered
her-but fuck no, Rabeya had that AK on him and wouldn't have had
any doubts about pulling the trigger. But Ayyub hadn't heard the
gun. Only other thing he could think of was that the cops had showed
up and Rabeya peeled out. They could have been chasing her down
the freeway right then with helicopters overhead and everything.
Walking back toward the Mobil, Amazing Ayyub had nowhere to go but
he knew that in such a scenario he had to at least leave the scene.
He stood at the fresh oil-leak puddle where the van used to be,
thanked Allah that Rabeya at least had a free tank of gas on her
side, said a quick Al-Fatiha for her sake and then strolled down
the sidewalk, no sprint, no panic.
Less than a mile down the street he went behind a bowling alley
and sat down with his back against the wall. He wondered what the
odds might have been that Rabeya was driving up the I-5 with a bloody
Matt Damon corpse, and then joked to himself about it coming alive.
Zombie Matt Damon, haha. Then he thought about Shah 79 again. Godfathers
of Muslim Punk? More like Cocksuckers of Muslim Punk, he said out
loud, wishing that someone was around to laugh at it.
Fuckin' Shah 79, Cocksuckers of Muslim Punk, look at those guys
with their skateboarder t-shirts, you know they're biting the pillows
for somebody-
What was happening? Had Muslim Cool taken over? Was Shah 79 showing
up on TRL with green taqwa laces in their Docs? Ayyub didn't have
anything to say beyond fuck 'em. After a while of just sitting behind
the bowling alley, he got up and walked to the Greyhound station.
Bought a ticket to Santa Cruz and gave his last quarter to the Galaga
machine.
After getting off the bus he slumped down behind a dumpster and
his eyes felt like they were sealed shut, but he rubbed them hard
and opened them up to the hard sun and the first thought in his
head was Shah 79, those fuckers, the great betrayal. He got up and
scouted around the parking lot for proper materials to pull off
a curse. To do Hakim Bey's Malay Black Djinn Curse you need a hard-boiled
egg along with three iron pins and an iron nail to stick in it,
a dried scorpion, a lizard and/or beetles, a small chamois bag of
cemetery dirt, magnetized iron fillings, ajafoetida and sulfur.
You sew the charm into yellow silk and place everything in a bottle,
cork it and seal it with waz. Hakim Bey says that the curse is useful
for dealing with evil institutions. You mail your curse to the target
with a note stating that these premises have been cursed by black
sorcery, the curse has been activated according to proper rituals
and this institution is cursed because it has oppressed the Imagination
and defiled the Intellect, degraded the arts and so on.
While Amazing Ayyub was in a Santa Cruz parking lot hunting magical
items, Michael Muhammad Knight was in Buffalo wanting to warn him
that the energy in Western New York was bad and he'd better not
come back. On the Buffalo news they said that an unidentified man
was found dead by the railroad tracks, late teens to mid twenties.
If you know a guy like Amazing Ayyub, you get scared at every story
like that because it could so easily be him. Even with Ayyub in
California, Michael still called the Buffalo PD to see if the body
wore KARBALA on its chest. Poor Amazing Ayyub, kullu ardh'n Karbala,
I wanted to give him a ring like the one worn by his Sixth Holy
Imam, Jafar as-Sadiq, reading "ALLAH IS MY MASTER AND MY DEFENSE
FROM HIS CREATION." There was so much evil around Ayyub and
he didn't even know yet...and even with the ring, the Sixth Imam
was killed off with poisoned grapes.
But there was also a taqwacore show that night-Ayyub discovered
this after venturing beyond the parking lot and reading the flier
on a telephone pole-which meant not only a show but also a chance
that he could find places to crash or maybe a ride somewhere. Ayyub
ripped the flier off the pole and kept walking.
The sad and terrible fact of taqwacore was that it put Muslim kids
in kafr bars but Hafiz said that the time for judging sober and
drunk and far and near has passed, and the Sixth Holy Imam said
that you cannot expect your children to do things as you did, takbir
takbir takbir. The first band that night was classic California
taqwa-punk, Muhammad Muzammad, which looked less like a band than
a gang-just three brown kids wearing their mohawks the same way,
like the broom atop a Roman gladiator's helmet, thousands of Aqua
Net'd bristles giving the illusion of a single solid ornament upon
the scalp. The guitarist's was pink, the bass player wore his green
and the drummer's was yellow. The guitar and bass players hopped
and moved the same way. At one point the guitar player, the singer
said something along the lines of FUCK SHAH 79, FUCK THAT BULLSHIT!
and Ayyub screamed his approval with the cool kids. It didn't even
hit Ayyub that the cool kids were really kids and he wasn't, that
he was living on borrowed time when it came to anything you'd call
youth culture.
Second band was the Zaytuna Rejects: four more brown boys, heroin-skinny
with sleeveless shirts and spiked bracelets loose on their wrists,
the singer holding his drink and spilling beer as he slouched behind
the microphone, working this detached crooner-punk style like he
was too cool to care either way. When he really got going, though,
he got good, entering into crazy fits like he was fighting three
invisible cops. Sometimes it looked like the cops were winning,
but then he'd fight his way through them. For most of his songs
the kids in the crowd stood still with their hands in their pockets,
but by the time he whipped out his sing-along anthem he had them
bouncing around with their arms around each other. FUCKIN' A, yelled
Ayyub. A lone mohican from Muhammad Muzammad, the back of his vest
covered in thousands of even-columned spikes, stood on the outer
edge of the audience and nodded from his authority.
The band that followed the Zaytuna Rejects wasn't even punk as such,
they were more death-metal than anything but the taqwacores still
loved them, starting pits and climbing on stage to jump back off
into the waiting chaos. The band sported classic metal hair, wore
all black and even had a metal-sounding name: Zulfikar, after the
mythical sword of the Prophet. The meaning of Zulfikar was alternately
read as "the one who distinguishes between right and wrong"
and "cleaver of the spine," for legend said that a single
blow from the blade would split you right down the middle, clean
in half. The Prophet had first picked up Zulfikar as booty from
the Battle of Badr. He bequeathed the sword to Imam Ali, who in
turn left it to his son Husain, who'd die with it in his hands on
the terrible battlefield of Karbala. Despite their metal pretenses,
Amazing Ayyub liked Zulfikar best out of all the bands because they
were so openly Shi'acore and bellowed deathrock songs about the
final battle between Mahdi and Dajjal. The entire band looked buff
enough to be on steroids, and the singer's torso resembled an upside-down
pyrmid: massive shoulders, massive lats and no waist at all. On
his bare chest he wore a tattoo of the sword Zulfikar. Spread across
his broad back was a lion composed of elaborate Arabic calligraphy.
The lion was an elegant manipulation of words, most likely holy
words, words praising Allah or His Prophet or the Prophet's House.
The singer's long hair was dyed blonde, but he kept his thick beard
black.
Like the other bands, after its set Zulfikar reassimilated into
the audience. Amazing Ayyub found his way over to the singer and
they simultaneously noticed each others' chests: the Zulfikar singer
with his long curvy Ali sword, Amazing Ayyub with his Olde English
KARBALA. Without any words beyond smiling salams they embraced,
automatic brothers.
"What's that lion say on your back?" asked Ayyub, turning
him around so he could see it again.
"La fata illa Ali, la saif illa Zulfikar," answered the
singer. "There is no hero except Ali, no sword except Zulfikar."
"That's tits bro," said Ayyub. "You don't see a lot
of Shi'a taqwa-punk bands out here. There was this one I saw in
LA, I don't even remember their names but the dudes were fuckin'
slicing their arms up with razor blades and crying and going nuts."
"There are different ways to manifest your love for the Ahlul-Bayt,"
replied the singer, coming off almost as a professor. Ayyub looked
at the guy's forehead, even in the darkness spotting those deep
old scars. The singer saw the same razor-blade roadmap on Ayyub.
They caught each other looking. "We're serious on our shit,"
said the singer. Ayyub nodded.
Later it was Ayyub and the singer sitting on the curb outside the
bar, each of them with a brown bottle, the show still going on inside.
"D'you hear about these Shah 79 fags?" asked Ayyub.
"Yeah," replied the singer. "It's all about selling
a watered-down deen to the kafirun."
"Fuck 'em," said Ayyub.
"They're changing Islam to make it soft and safe. They're cutting
our balls off."
"I don't know who these fuckers are."
"You should," said the singer. "That's your scene."
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
"Shah 79? They're from your neck of the woods, y'akhi. Buffalo."
"Those cocksuckers are from Buffalo?" The singer realized
the weight of Ayyub's discovery and kept his mouth shut. Ayyub stood
up, unsure of what choice he could make with his body at that moment,
wishing there was a movement right then and there he could offer
to destroy Shah 79, but all he had was to grip his bottle by the
neck and whip it into the air. The bottle sailed in a high arc and
went far enough for its crash to make almost a gentle sound. "That's
some bullshit," Ayyub said. He repeated himself a few times.
"Fuckin'...how did that happen, bro?"
"They weren't always Shah 79," said the singer, still
sitting on the curb. "They used to call themselves the Black
Box Khatibs."
"What does that mean?"
"You know what a black box is, like on a plane? So they were
the khatibs, giving khutbahs into a black box. Think about it, bro."
"Jesus," said Amazing Ayyub.
"I don't agree with the reference, personally. Rasullullah
sallallaho alayhe wa salam did not teach the taking of innocent
lives. But those kids, at least they had the balls to do their shit
and really mean it. Now they're just pussies."
"Buffalo, I can't believe it. Buffalo was no joke when I was
there, shit-"
"It's a joke now."
"I'm going back. These Walden-Galleria punks don't know how
it used to be! I can set 'em straight, I'm like a fuckin' legend
out there. They'll know who I am. I can tell them about the old
days and shit, I don't know, turn it around."
"If you need to go east," said the singer, "you can
ride with us. We're playing shows all the way to the coast. You
can drive the van and work our merch table."
"A-plus, bro. I'm the fastest driver in the whole history of
taqwacore."
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