Michael Muhammad Knight (born 1977) is a white American novelist, essayist, journalist, and convert to Islam.[1] His writings are popular among American Muslim youth.[2] The San Francisco Chronicle described him as "one of the most necessary and, paradoxically enough, hopeful writers of Barack Obama's America,"[3] while The Guardian has described him as "the Hunter S. Thompson of Islamic literature,"[4] and his non-fiction work exemplifies the principles of gonzo journalism.[5]Publishers Weekly describes him as "Islam's gonzo experimentalist."[6] Within the American Muslim community, he has earned a reputation as an ostentatious cultural provocateur.
Knight grew up in Geneva, New York, raised by his mother in a Catholic family of Irish descent. Knight's first exposure to Islam came when he was 13 when he discovered Malcolm X through the lyrics of the hip-hop band, Public Enemy. After reading Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X at 15, Knight's study of Islam intensified and he converted to Islam. It was also at 15 that Knight met his father, Wesley Unger, for the first time since he was two years old; when Knight informed Unger that he was Muslim, Unger told Knight that he was a white supremacist. At 17, Knight traveled to Islamabad, Pakistan, to study Islam at Faisal Mosque. He came close to making the decision to abandon this course of study to join the war against Russian rule in Chechnya.[9]
On August 2, 2009, he married Sadaf Khatri in San Jose, California.[10]
Books
The Taqwacores
After disillusionment with orthodox Islam, Knight wrote two books, Where Mullahs Fear to Tread and The Furious Cock, which he printed as photocopied zines. In Winter 2002 he wrote The Taqwacores, which told the story of a fictitious group of Muslim punk-rockers living in Buffalo, New York. Characters included a straight edgeSunni, a drunken mohawk-wearing Sufi punk, a burqa-wearing riot grrrl and a Shi'iskinhead.
Knight originally self-published the novel as a spiral-bound photocopy and gave it away for free. The book was later picked up for distribution by Alternative Tentacles, the punk record label founded by Jello Biafra. An encounter with Peter Lamborn Wilson led to The Taqwacores being published by Autonomedia in 2004.
The Taqwacores was intended as Knight's farewell to Islam,[11] but encouragement from readers caused Knight to reconsider his relationship to the faith. The novel has since inspired the start of an actual taqwacore scene, including bands such as the Kominas, Vote Hezbollah, and Secret Trial Five. Carl W. Ernst, specialist in Islamic studies at UNC, called The Taqwacores a "Catcher in the Rye for young Muslims."[12] The novel has been taught in courses at SUNY Potsdam, Kenyon College, Vassar College, the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, Trinity College, Sarah Lawrence College, Canisius College, New College of Florida, Indiana University, Michigan State University, and the Ohio State University.
The Taqwacores' burqa-wearing riot grrrl, Rabeya, and her dialogue from the novel has been adapted in the Rapture Project, an ongoing puppet show regarding religion in American culture and politics. Rabeya, who in one passage of The Taqwacores gives a Friday sermon and leads the mixed-gender group in prayer, also influenced author Asra Nomani to organize a mixed-gender Jumu'ah held March 18, 2005, in New York and led by Quran scholar Dr. Amina Wadud in support of women as imams.[13] Knight worked security for that Jumu'ah.[14]
Blue-Eyed Devil
Knight's travel writing for Muslim WakeUp! led him to write Blue-Eyed Devil: an American Muslim Road Odyssey, in which he traveled over 20,000 miles by Greyhound bus in 60 days, searching for a true American Islam. Andrei Codrescu hailed the work as "today's On the Road ... pertinent and suspenseful, a mystery rendered in brilliant detail and gorgeous depth ... a masterpiece."[15] In the book Knight attempts to uncover the true identity of W. D. Fard, the mysterious founder of the Nation of Islam, who was believed by that movement to be Allah in person.
Blue-Eyed Devil also contains narratives of Knight's encounters with various figures of North American Islam, such as Irshad Manji, Asra Nomani, and the Hasan family, founders of Muslims for Bush. Knight describes his experience as a member of the original board of directors of the Progressive Muslim Union (PMU) and his disillusionment with the Progressive Islam movement. In Blue-Eyed Devil, he claims that PMU considered an alliance with Manji, which he witnessed while having dinner with Manji and PMU founder Ahmed Nassef.
Knight left PMU in 2005.[16] While maintaining a blog at ProgressiveIslam.Org, he continued to reject the term "Progressive Muslim."
The Five Percenters
Knight's fascination with Fard led him to research the Five-Percent Nation or "Nation of Gods and Earths", a movement that broke from the Nation of Islam in 1964. After spending time with the movement's white elder, Azreal, Knight was given the name Azreal Wisdom; in the Five Percenters' system of Supreme Mathematics, it means Azreal Two.
Knight wrote the first ethnography of the movement, The Five Percenters: Islam, Hip-hop and the Gods of New York (Oneworld Publications). An excerpt from the book appears in the 90-page booklet included with The 5% Album[17] by Lord Jamar of Brand Nubian, which also features members of Wu-Tang Clan such as the RZA and GZA.
Osama Van Halen
Knight's 2009 novel, Osama Van Halen, features The Taqwacores' Amazing Ayyub and Rabeya, who take Matt Damon hostage and demand that Hollywood depict Muslims in a more positive light, while Damon argues that they are "playing into that same terrorist paradigm and furthering a neo-conservative perception of Islam." Also in the novel, Amazing Ayyub embarks on a mission to rid taqwacore of a Muslim pop punk band, Shah 79. Amazing Ayyub's adventures include encounters with zombies, psychobillyjinns and Knight himself, who appears as a character in the story.[18] At the end of the novel, Knight is decapitated by Rabeya. Laury Silvers of Skidmore College, who read the manuscript, wrote:
Don't miss the self-disgust. I have read the whole novel. It is extraordinary. The best he has done yet. It is no mistake that his only woman character who was ever fully portrayed and whom he never saw because of her burqa cuts his head off in the end. The story, the novel, is about the writer coming to terms ... He uncovers some pretty terrible layers of himself, the characters he has created, the character of himself that sometimes does his dirty work. He knows exactly what it is and he is saying it.[19]
Impossible Man
Knight's memoir, released March 2009 by Soft Skull Press, tells the story of Knight's "bizarre and traumatic boyhood and his conversion to Islam during a turbulent adolescence."[20]
From the book's catalog description:
Impossible Man follows a boy's struggle in coming to terms with his father—a paranoid schizophrenic and white supremacist who had threatened to decapitate Michael when he was a baby—and his father's place in his own identity. It is also the story of a teenager's troubled path to maturity and the influences that steady him along the way. Knight's encounter with Malcolm X's autobiography transforms him from a disturbed teenager engaged in correspondence with Charles Manson to a zealous Muslim convert who travels to Pakistan and studies in a madrassa. Later disillusioned by radical religion, he again faces the crisis of self-definition. For all its extremes, Impossible Man describes a universal journey: a wounded boy in search of a working model of manhood, going to outrageous lengths to find it.
Journey to the End of Islam
Journey to the End of Islam chronicles Knight's 2008 return to Pakistan, subsequent travels to Syria, Egypt, and Ethiopia, temporary relocation to Cleveland for the filming of The Taqwacores, and hajj in Mecca. Over the course of his travels, Knight compares and contrasts various Islamic interpretations and practices, juxtaposing heterodoxy and orthodoxy while also addressing issues of sexism and racism in Islam. While in Mecca, Knight syncretizes traditional Islam with his Five Percenter leanings, and also reconverts to Islam as a Shi'a in a tent of Iranian pilgrims. Publishers Weekly gave a mostly positive review, comparing the book to "the archetypal American road novel complete with a harrowing episode of cannabis-induced psychosis, a breezy tone ... and indifference to whether the reader can follow his references." The review also stated that Knight "probes and prods the boundaries of his faith with unabashed emotion and honesty, even questioning, near the end of his journey, whether he really understands anything about Islam. But the book is most engaging when he turns his gaze outward to make pithy observations on the intersection of religion and global capitalist culture."[citation needed]
Why I Am a Five Percenter
Why I Am a Five Percenter was released October 13, 2011, by Tarcher/Penguin Books. The book is a more personal sequel to Knight's first work on the Five Percenters, in which he covers his personal relationship to the Five Percenter community, focusing on the question of whether his research made him a true insider and considering ways in which his identities as white and Muslim complicate his connection to the community.
William S. Burroughs vs. the Qur'an
Knight's eighth book, William S. Burroughs vs. the Qur'an was released on April 1, 2012, by Soft Skull/Counterpoint. The book covers Knight's changing relationship with his mentor and hero, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Knight's literary experimentation with the Qur'an using the cut-up methods of William S. Burroughs.
Tripping with Allah: Islam, Drugs, and Writing
The book, which was released on February 12, 2013, by Soft Skull/Counterpoint, follows Knight's experimentation with ayahuasca and attempts to integrate ayahuasca use into his Muslim practice, first through Santo Daime. Knight pursues and ultimately experiences a vision of Fatimah, daughter of Muhammad. Much of the book relates to Knight's anxieties over remaining an artist while transitioning into an academic, as well as the impact of academic study on his relationship to religion.
Why I am a Salafi
Knight's tenth book, Why I am a Salafi was released in 2015 by Soft Skull/Counterpoint. The book begins after Knight's ayahuasca vision in Tripping with Allah, visiting a mosque in Los Angeles and performing conventional Muslim prayer while still feeling ayahuasca's effects. The book then becomes a critical reflection on issues of scriptural interpretation, traditionalism and religious revivalism, and the Salafi movement to which Knight converted as a teenager. Publishers Weekly named the book one of its "Best Books of 2015."[21]
Magic in Islam
Knight's eleventh book, Magic in Islam was released in 2016 by Tarcher/Penguin Books. Magic in Islam examines traditions such as astrology, Hermeticism, amulets and talismans as practiced in Islamic contexts, with focus on deconstructing boundaries between Islam and other religions, as well as the divisions between magic and religion at large. In the journal Correspondences, Kurosh Amoui describes the work as a reflection of Knight's "fascinated with fringe and marginalized narratives of Islam" (he quotes Knight as wondering whether “this book should just be called Weird Shit in Islam"), and identifies its main point as showcasing and proving that "Islams (plural) 'other' than the orthodox and the mainstream also exist or are possible to exist".[1] Knight sees magic, along with religion, as victims of "‘advanced’ scientific nations" which invaded and colonized "magical peoples who had failed [in the minds of the colonialists] to properly develop”.[1]
Controversy
At the 2005 convention of the Islamic Society of North America, Knight and the Kominas fraudulently obtained media passes and sneaked into the press conference of Karen Hughes, Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in the U.S. Department of State. They were taken outside and questioned by a State Department agent, but allowed back in by ISNA officials. It was later learned that the ISNA staff was concerned over Knight's jacket bearing the Alternative Tentacles logo.[22]
Ibrahim Hooper
In a 2003 Muslim WakeUp! article, Knight claimed to have introduced himself to a member of the United Nation of Islam as "Ibrahim Hooper," the name of the Communications Director of the Council on American–Islamic Relations. Hooper threatened legal action if the act was repeated. In a later article on his trip to Elijah Muhammad's grave, Knight wrote that he had introduced himself as Ibrahim Hooper at the cemetery's office. Hooper again threatened legal recourses. Knight responded by publicly challenging Hooper to a wrestling match.[23]
Asma Gull Hasan
In October 2007, Muslim Republican author and commentator Asma Gull Hasan filed a defamation suit against Knight and the Kominas, claiming that Blue-Eyed Devil falsely portrayed her as "wealthy, self-absorbed, insensitive and acutely uninformed" and that Knight had influenced the Kominas to write a song depicting her performance of a sex act. "You can't defeat writers by censoring or punishing them, you only defeat writers by outwriting them," Knight stated in a response to The Denver Post. "And she can't do that, so she has to resort to this."[24] In November 2008, the suit was dismissed.[25]
The Five-Percent Nation, sometimes referred to as the Nation of Gods and Earths (NGE/NOGE) or the Five Percenters, is an Afro-American Nationalist movement influenced by Islam that was founded in 1964 in the Harlem section of the borough of Manhattan, New York City, by Clarence 13X, who was previously known as Clarence Edward Smith.
Liberalism and progressivism within Islam involve professed Muslims who have created a considerable body of progressive thought about Islamic understanding and practice. Their work is sometimes characterized as "progressive Islam". Some scholars, such as Omid Safi, differentiate between "progressive Muslims" versus "liberal advocates of Islam". Liberal Islam originally emerged out of the Islamic revivalist movement of the 18th–19th centuries. Liberal and progressive ideas within Islam are considered controversial by some traditional Muslims, who criticize liberal Muslims on the grounds of being too Western and/or rationalistic.
Irshad Manji is a Ugandan-born Canadian educator. She is the author of The Trouble with Islam Today (2004) and Allah, Liberty and Love (2011), both of which have been banned in several Muslim countries. She also produced a PBS documentary in the America at a Crossroads series, titled Faith Without Fear, which was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2008. A former journalist and television presenter, Manji is an advocate of a reformist interpretation of Islam and a critic of literalist interpretations of the Qur'an.
The Progressive Muslim Union of North America (PMU) was a liberal Islamic organization. The group officially launched on November 15, 2004, in Manhattan but was disbanded in December 2006.
The Progressive Muslim Union (PMU) is the result of almost two years of conversation and collaboration between a group of North American Muslims who are committed to representing and renewing our community in all its social, ideological and political diversity. PMU members range from deeply religious to totally secular, sharing in common a commitment to learning, political and social empowerment, a commitment to justice and freedom and a concern and love for the Muslim community.
Clarence 13X, also known as Allah the Father, was an American religious leader and the founder of the Five-Percent Nation, sometimes referred to as the Nation of Gods and Earths (NGE/NOGE). He was born in Virginia and moved to New York City as a young man, before serving in the United States Army during the Korean War. After returning to New York, he learned that his wife had joined the Nation of Islam (NOI). He followed her, taking the name Clarence 13X. He served in the group as a security officer, martial arts instructor, and student minister before leaving for an unclear reason in 1963. He enjoyed gambling, which was condemned by the NOI, and disagreed with their teachings that Wallace Fard Muhammad was a divine messenger.
Tarek Fatah was a Pakistani-Canadian journalist and author. He was a Punjabi born into Islam and was a vocal critic of the Pakistani religious and political establishment, and the partition of India.
Taqwacore is a subgenre of punk music dealing with Islam, its culture, and interpretation. Originally conceived in Michael Muhammad Knight's 2003 novel, The Taqwacores, the name is a portmanteau of "hardcore" and the Arabic word "taqwa" (تقوى), which is usually translated as "piety" or the quality of being "God-fearing", and thus roughly denotes reverence and love of the divine. The scene is composed mainly of young Muslim artists living in the US and other Western countries, many of whom openly reject traditionalist interpretations of Islam, and thus live their own lifestyle within the religion or without.
The Kominas are a punk rock band formed in 2005 by two Pakistani-Americans from Worcester, Massachusetts. In over ten years, the band has experienced a number of line-up changes and self-released albums.
The Taqwacores is the debut novel by Michael Muhammad Knight, depicting a fictitious Islamic punk rock scene. The title is a portmanteau of taqwa, an Islamic concept of love and fear for God, and Hardcore, the punk rock subgenre. Some of the most popular taqwacore bands are The Kominas, Al-Thawra, Secret Trial Five, and Fedayeen.
The Majelis Mujahideen Indonesia (MMI), or Indonesian Mujahedeen Council, is an umbrella organisation of Indonesian Islamist groups. The group was designated as foreign terrorist organization by the United States on 13 June 2017.
Dominic Rains is an Iranian-American actor, best known for his roles in independent films, including The Taqwacores (2010), A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), as well as Dr. Crockett Marcel in Chicago Med and as Kasius in the fifth season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
A number of overlapping punk rock subgenres have developed since the emergence of punk rock in the mid-1970s. Even though punk genres at times are difficult to segregate, they usually show differing characteristics in overall structures, instrumental and vocal styles, and tempo. However, sometimes a particular trait is common in several genres, and thus punk genres are normally grouped by a combination of traits.
Secret Trial Five is a Canadian five-piece political punk rock band formed in 2006 in Vancouver.
Denise A. Spellberg is an American scholar of Islamic history. She is professor of history and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Ali Sina is the pseudonym of an Iranian-born Canadian ex-Muslim activist and critic of Islam. Sina is the founder of the anti-Muslim website WikiIslam and maintains a number of websites promoting what he refers to as "the truth" about Islam. He is associated with the counter-jihad movement.
Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam is a 2009 documentary film, directed by Omar Majeed and produced by EyeSteelFilm, about various Taqwacore bands and performers touring the United States and Pakistan. The documentary was filmed between 2007 and 2009. It was pitched at the 2007 Sheffield Doc/Fest MeetMarket prior to completion.
Taqwacore is a subgenre of punk music dealing with Islam. It may also refer to:
The Taqwacores is a 2010 film adaptation of the 2003 novel The Taqwacores by Michael Muhammad Knight. The film was directed by Eyad Zahra and stars Bobby Naderi, Dominic Rains, and Noureen Dewulf. The film imagines a fictitious Islamic punk rock scene through characters living in a punk house in Buffalo, New York. It was filmed in Cleveland, Ohio.
Jonathan Andrew Cleveland Brown, born August 7, 1977, is a university academic and American scholar of Islamic studies. Since 2012, he has served as an associate professor at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He holds the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization at Georgetown University.
African-American Muslims, also known as Black Muslims, are an African-American religious minority. African-American Muslims account for over 20% of American Muslims. They represent one of the larger Muslim populations of the United States as there is no ethnic group that makes up the majority of American Muslims. They mostly belong to the Sunni sect, but smaller Shia and Nation of Islam minorities also exist. The history of African-American Muslims is related to African-American history in general, and goes back to the Revolutionary and Antebellum eras.
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