SUGAR LAND, TEXAS — The front door shuts with a thud, and Hiba Siddiqui heeds her father's footsteps, heavy from a day at work, plodding across the foyer downstairs.
Time to change clothes, Hiba thinks, peeking her face over the balcony to shout "Hi, Baba!" before rushing into her bedroom, brightened by lime green and tangerine bed covers, splashed with the words "I ROCK." A magazine photo of a punk band called Anti-Flag is taped behind her door.
Hiba slips out of the white T-shirt with black letters that read "HOMOPHOBIA IS GAY," which she wore to Kempner High School, where she is a junior. It's one of a collection of slogans the 17-year-old has silk-screened on T-shirts in her bedroom, unbeknownst to her parents, both Muslim immigrants from Pakistan.
There are other aspects of Hiba's life lately she thinks they might not approve of either, like the Muslim punk music she has been listening to with lyrics such as "suicide bomb the GAP," or "Rumi was a homo." Or the novel she bought online, about rebellious Muslim teenagers in New York. It opens with: "Muhammad was a punk rocker, he tore everything down. Muhammad was a punk rocker and he rocked that town."
This much Hiba knows: She is a Muslim teenager living in America.
But what does that mean?
It is a question that pesters her, like the other questions she is afraid to ask her parents: Can she still be a good Muslim even though she does not dress in hijab or pray five times a day? If Islam is right, does that make other religions wrong? Is going to prom haram, or sinful? Is punk?
Hiba loves Allah but wrestles with how to express her faith. She wonders whether it is OK to question customs. Behind her parents' backs, she tests Islamic traditions, trying to decipher culture versus religion, refusing to blindly believe that they are one.
"Isn't that what Prophet Muhammad did?" asks Hiba, raising her thick black eyebrows and straightening her wiry frame, which takes on the shape of a question mark when she stands hunched in insecurity. "Question the times? Question what other people were doing?"
Hiba's hunt for answers has led her to other books too. They line her bedroom wall next to copies of Nylon magazine, one with "Gossip Girls" on its front cover. There's "Radiant Prayers," a collection from the Koran, and "Rumi: Hidden Music," a Persian poet celebrated in parts of the Muslim world.
