The Taqwacores
After disillusionment with orthodox Islam, Knight wrote two books,
Where Mullahs Fear to Tread and
The Furious Cock, which he printed as xeroxed 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 edge Sunni Muslim, drunken mohawk-wearing Sufi punk, burqa-wearing riot grrl and Shi'a skinhead.
Knight originally self-published the novel in a spiral-bound, xeroxed form and gave away copies 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, 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 Ernst, specialist in Islamic studies at UNC, called
The Taqwacores a "
Catcher in the Rye for young Muslims." The novel has been taught in courses at Vassar, University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, Trinity College, Sarah Lawrence College, Canisius College, and Indiana University.
The Taqwacores' burqa-wearing riot grrl, 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 prayer held March 18, 2005, in New York and led by Qur'an scholar Dr. Amina Wadud in support of women as imams. Knight worked security at the Wadud prayer.
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." 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 an original member of the Progressive Muslim Union's board of directors 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. 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 Percenters, aka 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 2.
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 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're "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, psychobilly jinns and Knight himself, who appears as a character in the story. At the end of the novel, Knight is decapitated by Rabeya. Laury Silvers of Skidmore College, who read the manuscript, wrote at progressiveislam.org:
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.
Impossible Man, Or, F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Rise of Islam
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."
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.
Publisher's 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."
