Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

Marty Martel was a face. Once he was in the ring he gave a long speech about kicking out all the immigrants who were stealing good American jobs. This earned him a lot of laughter and support. In the middle of his speech he was interrupted by the heel, a masked Mexican wrestler named Gonzo, who lambasted Marty for denying his family an opportunity to pursue the American dream. The crowd booed Gonzo and cheered for Marty. They were egged on by Charlie Main, who walked around the arena swinging the broadsword and saying gibberish in mock Spanish. I found myself rooting for the heel, though in the face of Marty Martel’s large following I didn’t cheer out loud. Ali Ansari wasn’t so shy. He stood and rooted for Gonzo, screaming at him to “choke the fucking cracker.” It shocked me that no one else in the audience seemed to find Martel’s commentary offensive.

After a number of super kicks and iron claws the fight turned in Gonzo’s favor; he made Martel submit with a mean camel clutch. But the apparent victory was thwarted when Charlie Main jumped into the ring and distracted the referee by complaining that Gonzo was an illegal immigrant and didn’t have the work authorization to be in the ring in the first place. The referee tried to tell Charlie Main that such bureaucratic things didn’t matter in the ring, which was a place of honor, a place of equality. But as the two men had their dramatic discussion, thoroughly engrossed in each other, Martel was able to slither out of the camel clutch and pinned Gonzo with a suplex. As the reversal took place, Charlie Main excitedly directed the referee’s attention back to the action and within seconds the referee was on the floor, counting Gonzo out. Not wanting to give the judges a chance to review the end of the fight, Marty Martel and Charlie Main ran out of the ring and toward the tunnel.

The masked Mexican wrestler, now all alone in the ring, with only Ali Ansari’s support in the audience, was left stomping mad, clutching his hair, beating his chest. On his way out of the ring he took hold of the announcer’s microphone and vowed that he would exact justice against the entire association, going so far as to challenge the referee to a match. That fight was scheduled for next Wednesday. The crowd roared their approval and booed Gonzo out of the arena.

There were more fights scheduled for the evening, but Ali Ansari said he had seen all he had come for and we headed back to Center City, for beer and mussels at Monk’s.

“I had no idea these things were so political,” I said.

“Wrestling represents the American narrative like nothing else. Any issue there is, it can address. Liberal versus conservative. Antiwar versus prowar. Man versus woman. Rich versus poor. Wrestling’s got it all.”

“All this time I thought it was just a bunch of fake pummeling.”

“The fighting is fake,” Ali Ansari said, “but that’s not why people go there. People go for the story. It’s social drama.”

“I take it Gonzo is a friend of yours and we came to support him?”

“I don’t know Gonzo. I came for Marty Martel. Whose real name is Martin Mirandella.”

It turned out that Martin Mirandella had once been a wrestler in the WWE, where he’d played a heel called Hasan Hussain. He had been managed by the same guy who now played Charlie Main. Back then Charlie was called Rasheed Shaheed, though originally he was an Irish kid from Maryland. Their story in the WWE was that they were a pair of Arab cousins from Dearborn, Michigan, who were fed up with the way the United States treated its Muslim minorities, and wanted nothing more than to expose the manner in which they were denied their fair shot at the title.

“Basically it wouldn’t matter who they beat,” Ali Ansari explained. “The association would always find a way to deny them the title shot. This only caused Hasan to fight harder and beat more guys. After each fight he demanded a title shot and every time the association, playing the part of the racist, or the oppressive white man controlling the glass ceiling, turned him down. People loved it. Hasan became one of the best heels in years. But the more wrestlers he beat the more the other wrestlers turned against him. At one rumble that I remember, all nine of the other wrestlers stopped fighting each other when he entered the ring and ganged up to beat him up.”

“Then what happened?”

“What happened next will break your heart,” Ali Ansari said. “It’s what prompted me to make a documentary on the guy.”

It turned out that the WWE writers had gotten lazy with Hasan’s act, and instead of keeping him going as a victim with some understandable anger issues, they started heaping terrorist imagery on him.

“It was as if they couldn’t imagine a Muslim as honorable, as having a point, as being on the cusp of heroism. One Monday night, on Hasan’s behalf, a gang of four men dressed in ski masks carried out a mock execution of one of the WWE referees who had cheated Hasan out of a sure win. The bit went too far. It evoked al-Qaeda and whatnot. Huge mistake. The network that aired the show flipped out and declared that Hasan Hussain and Rasheed Shaheed couldn’t ever again show their faces on the network. Martin Mirandella lost his contract. His promising career was destroyed. All because he had the misfortune of playing the role of a Muslim in American wrestling. Now he’s in this low-end independent association, playing the role of a European supremacist, the second coming of Charles Martel who fought Muslim invaders in the eighth century.”

“And Rasheed Shaheed is Charlemagne, the king who backed Charles Martel. ” I knew all the pivotal moments in the making of the West. “How ironic.”

“It’s not irony they are going for,” Ali Ansari said. “They really hate Islam now. It’s unjust what happened to these guys. I want to show that to the world.”

“I had no idea.”

“This whole thing played out in front of millions of viewers, yet people still don’t know Martin Mirandella was born in Italy to Catholic parents or that Charlie Main’s dad is Brian O’Brien from Annapolis, and runs a pub. Half of America watched these kids get screwed and forgot about it in the blink of an eye. I want to remind them.”

“Are these guys even open to the documentary?” I asked. “I can’t imagine he would want anything to do with Muslims anymore.” I wasn’t sure if I was speaking on Martin’s behalf or mine. The scimitar that had swiped his head was the same one that had taken mine. I pictured the media executive who had cut Martin. He probably looked like George Gabriel. He probably considered himself on the frontline of protecting America, or the West, or “our way of life,” somehow capable of identifying every sign of Islamic supremacism. If I hadn’t been conditioned against it, I would have thought there was a central place where leading American men were trained to declare people infiltrators and traitors.

Ali Ansari sipped his beer. “Martin needs a little convincing. But Charlie Main is receptive. I went to high school with him. He’s working on Martin. I think I can get him to talk about what happened. We probably can’t get the character of Hasan Hussain back in the main events, but maybe Martin Mirandella can at least get another character. The guy is only twenty-four years old. He has his entire career in front of him. I like him. A soft-spoken giant. He works as a bank teller in Lancaster. His wife’s name is Miranda; she’s a janitor at Jefferson Hospital. Miranda Mirandella.”

We drank and pulled up old videos on our phones of Hasan Hussain in the main events, entering to Algerian rai music or Pakistani qawwalis, draped in all sorts of West Asian headgear. Sometimes he yelled in Arabic, at other times in Persian or Pashto. I watched him beat contender after contender, only to be repeatedly denied the opportunity to take on the champ. The closest he ever came was when he interrupted one of the godfathers of wrestling, a grizzled veteran and former champ named Gold Bone who, after calling Hasan a whiny chump, did at least admit that Hassan’s contentions were legitimate. Houston even gave Hasan a shot at a lesser title. To make sure the fight was fair, Gold Bone served as referee. Hasan ended up winning that fight. “That was the closest Hasan Hussain every got to the title,” Ali Ansari said, and shut off his phone. “After that came the infamous ski mask incident and the rest is history.”