Date: December 24th 2008

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Michael Muhammad Knight, author of five, yes, FIVE forthcoming Soft Skull books is the subject of yesterday's lead story in the National section of the New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/us/23muslim.html (p. A16 for those following along in print...) And it spent all day on the top ten emailed stories of the day.

The focus is on his first book, "The Taqwacores," which we are reissuing next month (moved up from February, and available right now on our website!), "a Catcher in the Rye for young Muslims," as the article describes it. The book has been adapted as an indie feature film to be released in the middle of next year. [More info on this title here: http://www.softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=1-59376-229-1 and here's a link to a sample chapter http://www.softskull.com/files/TaqwacoresSoftSkull1stchapter.pdf ]

We ourselves believe Knight's work is for an audience much broader than just his own subculture (though we think it pretty meaningful that a single book could spawn and name an entire subculture, the death of reading notwithstanding). We believe that this book and the four to follow (details below) represent a third way between a complete inward-looking rejection of society, and an unquestioning assimilation into society that are the typical absolutes for Muslims in the West--"taqwacore" represents instead a liberated, rebellious, critical engagement with both Islam and the West. As such, too, it points to how any outsider (on a personal level) or minority group (on a social level) might grapple with/against the dominant culture.

You might also enjoy this clip from a recent Al-Jazeera story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rbFyBedolM

Anyhow, in addition to the article, we thought you might like to have info on each of the books, to get a sense of what we think is just so goddam great about this writer...

THE TAQWACORES (January 2009) A Muslim punk house in Buffalo, New York, inhabited by burqa-wearing riot girls, mohawked Sufis, straightedge Sunnis, Shi'a skinheads, Indonesian skaters, Sudanese rude boys, gay Muslims, drunk Muslims, and feminists. Their living room hosts parties and prayers, with a hole smashed in the wall to indicate the direction of Mecca. Their life together mixes sex, dope, and religion in roughly equal amounts, expressed in devotion to an Islamo-punk subculture, “taqwacore,” named for taqwa, an Arabic term for consciousness of the divine.

IMPOSSIBLE MAN When Knight was six years old, he asked his single mother about his absent father. His mother answered that his father “got sick and ran away.” Several years later, he learned the true story: how his father, a paranoid schizophrenic and white supremacist, alternately convinced that Michael’s mother was in league with the devil and that she would give birth to a line of superhuman rulers. Impossible Man (April 2009) is the story of a teenager’s troubled pathway toward maturity and the influences that steady him on his way to adulthood. Knight’s encounter with Public Enemy and The Autobiography of Malcolm X leads him to embrace Islam with all the unbalanced overzealousness and naivete of a disturbed adolescent in search of salvation. His affinity for Islam deepens and at age 17 he travels to Faisal Mosque in Islamabad to study his adopted religion, putting him on track similar to that of Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber. For all its extremes, Impossible Man descri
bes a universal journey: a wounded boy in search of a working model of manhood, going to outrageous lengths to find it. And here's a sample chapter: http://www.softskull.com/files/ImpossibleManSampleChapter.pdf

BLUE-EYED DEVIL (May 2009) Knight embarks on a quest for an indigenous American Islam and for the true story of Nation of Islam mystery-man, W.D. Fard, in a series of interstate odysseys. Traveling 20,000 miles by Greyhound in sixty days, he squats in run-down mosques, pursues Muslim romance, is detained at the U.S.-Canadian border with a trunkload of Shia literature, crashes Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) conventions, stink-palms Cat Stevens, and limps across Chicago to find the grave of Noble Drew Ali, filling dozens of notebooks along the way. The result is this semi-autobiographical book, with multiple histories of Fard and the landscape of American Islam woven into Knight's own story. In the course of his adventures Knight sorts out his own relationship to Islam as he journeys from punk provocateur to a recognized voice in the community, and watches first-hand the collapse of a liberal Islamic dream. The book’s extensive cast of characters includes anarcho-Sufi
heretics, vegan kung-fu punks, tattoo-sleeved converts in hardcore bands, spiritual drug dealers, Islamic feminists, slick media entrepreneurs, sages of the street, the grandsons of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, and a group called Muslims for Bush.

OSAMA VAN HALEN (July 2009) Amazing Ayyub, an Iranian Shi'ite skinhead, and burqa-wearing punk Rabeya have kidnapped Matt Damon, and are holding him hostage. They demand that Hollywood depict Muslims in a positive light—“just one movie where we’re not these two-dimensional al Qaeda stereotypes.” But Damon’s concerned they’re playing into that same terrorist paradigm and furthering a neo-conservative perception of Islam.
Meanwhile, Ayyub embarks on a mission to rid the taqwacore scene of a Muslim pop-punk band called Shah 79. Along the way, he makes himself invisible, escapes punk-eating zombies in a mosque off the desert highway, and runs into some psychobilly jinns. Things turn existential when Ayyub finds himself face to face with his creator—no, not Allah, but the author. This riotous journey of enlightenment reads like a religious service for teenagers on Halloween. But it isn’t all raucous fun; written into his own novel, the author finds he is at the mercy of his creation

JOURNEY TO THE END OF ISLAM (November 2009) Most hajj narratives are written as glowing religious propaganda, painting a utopian and simplistic image not only of Mecca but Islam itself. Knight’s personal experience with Islam is very complicated; he has traveled the extremes of both blind faith and apostasy, and currently stand somewhere between. Embarking on the Hajj, then, touch on Knight’s confusions, wounds, conflicts with religion and with the Muslim community at large. Examining the historical background and origins of Islam, as well as the inherent challenges of organized religion, Knight asks the hard questions. What does the Qur’an mean to me? What do I know of Muhammad? And does sacred history have to be fact to be valid? He also asks, Who funds the Hajj? What role does the Saudi government play? What role does the bin Laden family play?

Says the author, before leaving for the Hajj four weeks ago: "These are the two voices that I bring with me to Mecca: Kerouac, the earnest writer-as-spiritual-seeker, and Thompson, gonzo journalist, exposer-of-hypocrisy."

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