Sahar's Reviews > The Bad Muslim Discount

The Bad Muslim Discount is yet another failed attempt at using the medium of contemporary literature to earnestly portray the lives of American Muslims—if you can even call the protagonists in this novel ‘Muslims’ in the first place (not speculating, their own admission). The dual perspective narrative centres on Anvar, a Pakistani boy and Safwa, an Iraqi girl, both of whom flee their respective home countries to find refuge in the States.

Amusingly, what makes this book stand out amongst its representation-boasting fraudulent brethren is the protagonists acute awareness and acceptance of being a ‘bad’ Muslim in the first instance, differing vastly from the ignorant/in-denial characters that populate other Muslim-centred novels. It’s almost as if the author was trying to break the literary fourth wall by using the veneer of first person self-awareness and humour to justify the delusory narrative and insulting portrayal of religion. I’ve personally never seen that done before, so kudos to for spicing things up and taking a new angle to slate orthodoxy. This feat is further evidenced by Anvar’s incessant hostile behaviour towards anyone deemed religious in any capacity. Is this unrealistic of someone who had an irreligious upbringing? No. But the excessive cynicism with which he approaches religion/practicing individuals comes across as nothing more than thinly-veiled projections of his own insecurities.

It’s not even that the protagonists are the ones baselessly perceiving religious individuals in this book as toxic, manipulative, irrational and abusive for no reason—it’s because those religious side characters truly *are* all of the above. I’m not about to sit here and blindly defend such vile characters by virtue of them being practicing Muslims, but I find it flagrantly dishonest that not ONE of these so-called “religious” characters serves any function other than to ‘prove’ the protagonists poor stance on religion and it being the ultimate source of evil. This narrative is no different from right-wing media at this point, not least because the book counterproductively drives home the notion that Muslims that practice their faith in earnest are inherently evil and intolerant. It’s interesting. Anvar readily defends atheists, getting personally offended at a minor mockery of their “creed”, but when it comes to making an effort to understand his own beliefs (or lack thereof) to dissolve his constant mental conflict, he simply decides to put his intellect on hold, for cognitive reconciliation is just too much effort.

We can break down this notion of religious people being evil further: Anvar’s mum is religious and toxic, his brother is performatively religious and manipulative, his religious MSA is mean for defending their deen (rapper btw), his girlfriend who later finds religion is suddenly unlikeable, the hijabi chick is judgemental for believing hijab is fardh, and all the masjid uncles are misogynistic and abusive. Contrastingly, every irreligious, liberal, Islam-loathing character is the exemplar of tolerance, kindness and love, which is obviously everything Islam and Muslims are not.

E.g. 1 - girlfriend Zuha on the road to religiosity whilst still being with him:
“She’d convinced Zuha that it was worthwhile to at least try to pray five times a day, which meant that whenever we managed to get a night together, an alarm went off at five or six in the morning for the predawn prayer. I was tempted to get up and pray myself a couple of times, if only to ask Allah to rain down misery, pestilence and maybe boils, if He was so inclined, onto Zuha’s religious friend for these ridiculously early mornings.”

E.g. 2 - Safwa’s abuser being religious:
“He was—no, he is a bad man. He looks nice and he talks nice, you know, and he acts religious, so Abu liked him.” (using religion to justify heinous acts).

To reiterate, the author attempts to pitch Anvar’s lacklustre perception of organised religion as a deliberate, intentional reflection of cognitive dissonance and irreconcilable beliefs about God and/or religion, but that being said I utterly fail to buy into the fact that in big California he is unable to find ONE person in his vicinity that follows Islam like a normal person and doesn’t have an ISIS-fan boy (or girl 😳) condemn-the-entire-world-to-hell mentality. At least try to make your clever and charming on-par-with-neo-atheists-in-intellect protagonist a bit realistic. Being indifferent to religion is one thing, but being actively anti-religion (read: borderline Islamophobic) is simply not convincing of a character who bears little to no religious or spiritual trauma/abuse and simply decides to up and loathe religion one day by virtue of it preventing him from having fun.

He also bizarrely compares himself to Lot’s wife:
“I felt something like kinship with her then, that woman centuries removed from me, abandoning her city in distress, leaving her home to its perilous fate. How could she have been expected to resist a glance back, and why had her punishment, for so small a transgression, been so severe?”

Now, let’s talk about Safwa. She lives in Iraq, her father is captured and horrifically tortured by American soldiers during the invasion of Iraq, her family is extremely poor and both her mother and siblings pass away, leaving Safwa with her traumatised, abusive father. She is exposed to another abusive man when they flee to Afghanistan and it is with this man that Safwa and her father flee to the States. Unlike Anvar, Safwa is a deeply emotionally traumatised and unstable individual and so her bleak outlook of life and poor perception of religion was indeed justified and realistic.

That being said, I didn’t see the point of her character in the overall story, as it mainly focused on Anvar’s life struggles. When both protagonists’ paths eventually converge, it was a very lacklustre moment and Safwa’s subsequent actions with him were deeply unrealistic given her trauma, abuse and hatred of men. Safwa’s character didn’t really add to the story at large.

“Because I am a bad person and a bad Muslim. I’d like to be worse.” - Safwa. Idk why but this made me laugh.

If there is one thing I will the author credit for, it is that he has a knack for storytelling. Yes, the narrative was a pain and I didn’t like a single character (perhaps bar Hafeez Bhai), I couldn’t help but marvel at the quick wit of some of the characters. Though Anvar’s endless banter did get old, I actually enjoyed the conversations he had with other characters. I’m not sure whether to praise or criticise the clear distinction in tone and writing for each perspective, it was either intentionally done to represent the male/female traumatised/non-traumatised dichotomy or it’s just that the author doesn’t know how to write female characters and this just happened to play in his favour.

2/5 ⭐️⭐️

Here are some excerpts I liked:

“Turned out that being with someone is an acquired skill. There is an art to it. Basically, you have to watch your partner take a chisel—or a war hammer, depending on the day—and chip away at the ideal version of them that you’ve created in your mind. The person you fall in love with is always slightly different from the person you need to stay in love with.”

“For the first time in forever, my world began to get bigger again. How amazing a thing a book is. How wonderful a piece of paper and a pen. A lot of things about religion do not make sense to me, it is true, but I understand why, in that desert mountain cave, when the history of man was about to change, God’s first command to His last prophet was one simple word.

Read.”

“Young people are so silly. You think you know the whole world. You think you understand everything. The truth is that you read aloud the story of your life and don’t realize that it is in first person. Each and every one of you tells their own life story to the soul of the world, all the while thinking you are the only one with a story to tell.”

“It’s like there is nothing good, nothing noble, nothing precious left. Everywhere I look there is only pain and struggle and just a shadow over everything. You should know that I never feel that way when I am with you. You’re the light of my world. You make the universe beautiful.”

“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?”