Rabeya's irony
The most beautiful irony in the book, arguably, is Rabeya's character. No one elicits more immediate judgment than Rabeya. Because she chooses to live in the height of Muslim conservativeness in her clothing, she invites everyone who sees her to assume things about her that are false. Then when she speaks her mind, and her ideas are open-minded and philosophically liberal, people are amazed.
How could such a liberal, mystic opinion come from beneath a Burka? The answer is that underneath the Burka is a human being, which means that we can't really know anything about her based on her clothes alone. We should stop judging each other based on what we wear.
The irony of Yusef's diversity quota
At the beginning of the book, we see Yusef sacrifice his desperate thirst for diversity in order to fit into a community better. He settles on a house where young Muslims split the rent, and then, he learns that he didn't actually sacrifice that much diversity at all—even though they share their cultural heritage, every one of them has a religious practice that differs from the others, and in all other regards, the group is rather diverse. Yusef found the ironic sweet spot between homogeny and diversity.
The irony of punk culture
Punk culture is an inherently ironic sub-culture. It involves the irony of appearance. By doing things to one's appearance that a random person would not necessarily expect, the punk rocker says to their society, "You can't judge me on my appearance alone." They accomplish that in the book through their crazy haircuts primarily.
The irony of Islam
Unfortunately, there is an implicit irony in this book relating to Islam. It's unfortunate because Islam is such a beautiful religion that it's a shame people don't typically understand it very well. But the irony is simply this: Just because a person identifies as a Muslim, that doesn't necessarily mean that much about their personality. We often think "People who believe this way or that way, they all are pretty much the same." But that's simply false. Just like punk rock, the point of this book is to kick back against that blanket kind of assumption.
The irony of rules
Umar represents another irony—the ironic tension between religion as it gets handed down between generations, and the truth about our individual experiences of human life, reality, the universe, or even God. This irony often leads to conflicts in the house, because no one can tell where someone's beliefs begin to veer from orthodoxy. Umar is the conservative voice who fights for the group to retain their cultural assumptions, even if they are restrictive, but that is merely his one voice in a group of many who disagree, so they all have to think through things as a community when "rules" get "broken."
