San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Muslim immigrants try to find their way in S.F.
In “The Bad Muslim Discount,” Syed M. Masood (“More Than Just a Pretty Face”) weaves together the stories of two Muslim immigrants who arrive in San Francisco under very different circumstances and charts the ways in which they try to escape the confines of religion, culture and family.
First there is Anvar Faris, a Pakistani teen who is essentially a disappointment to his parents in his lack of respect for tradition and Islam. Looking to escape the rising fundamentalism in their home country, Anvar’s father moves him, along with his candonowrong brother and textbookstrict Muslim mother, to the Bay Area in the mid’90s. It’s there that Anvar becomes an even worse Muslim, talking back to his mother and falling in love with his classmate, a bookish woman whom he follows to college. There he discovers his love for her is no match for her love of Allah, and when she calls it off, it sets him on a course toward an aimless and lackluster adult life.
Then there is Safwa bing Saqr, a young woman in Baghdad who loses her mother to terminal cancer, which is followed by the death of her brother and the capture and torture of her father by U.S. forces during the Iraq War. When her father returns, he is irrevocably altered and violent toward her. It’s then that Safwa meets Qais, a local man who agrees to take her and her father to San Francisco, in exchange for unlimited access to her body.
The two narratives collide when Safwa and her father move into Anvar’s apartment building. Anvar and Safwa, who now goes by the name
Azza, begin an illicit affair and are catapulted into a dangerous and complicated series of events that could cost them everything, including their lives.
As Anvar continues to eke by as a lawyer, known mostly for representing a case where his Muslim client ends up assassinated by the U.S. government, Azza takes classes and schemes a way to escape the abuses of her father and the man who owns her. She asks herself the unspeakable, “What if I want no children? And what if I want no husband?”
Both Anvar and Azza struggle with the desire to escape the constraints of their religion. As Anvar puts it, “The day I was first told I was damned was the day I felt I had been blessed.” How to balance being a good person with being a good Muslim is at the heart of both of their struggles. When Anvar hears his true love is being married off to an unlikely suitor, he musters up the courage to make a move. When Azza discovers reading and writing — “How amazing a thing a book is. How wonderful a piece of paper and a pen” — she begins drafting an elaborate scheme meant to bring down the men who keep her hostage, and finds the strength to build a life of her own against all odds.
Set against the backdrop of Trump’s election and the Muslim ban, the book is not only a beautiful portrait of what it means to be Muslim in America but also a pointed reminder of the way in which America has impacted Muslims around the world. As Azza’s captor says to her, “There is no escaping Americans. They are like the air. Everywhere.”
“The Bad Muslim Discount” reads like a bingeable TV series — fastpaced and surprising at every turn. As the characters rebel, we root for them, eagerly hoping that they are able to build a life that’s true to them without losing everything they love.
Anisse Gross is a San Francisco writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker online, the New York Times and the Guardian. Email: books@sfchronicle.com