When Michael Muhammad Knight, the author of The Taqwacores, founder of American Muslim punk, and leading nontraditional scholar of Islam 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 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 naiveté 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 describes a universal journey: a wounded boy in search of a working model of manhood, going to outrageous lengths to find it.

Michael Muhammad Knight's work has been censored, boycotted, confiscated, and threatened with legal action. He is the author of Blue-Eyed Devil and The Five Percenters: Islam, Hip-Hop, and the Gods of New York, and the forthcoming Impossible Man, a memoir, Journey to the End of Islam, an account of international pilgrimage, and his next novel, Osama Van Halen

Sample chapter download: http://www.softskull.com/files/ImpossibleManSampleChapter.pdf

I spent New Year’s Eve at home watching MTV’s lousy annual special with a kid named Jamie, who had been coming up from Brooklyn every year to stay with my cousins as part of the Fresh Air program. By then I had known him for nearly ten years.

About half an hour into 1993 we decided to go outside and play one-on-one football, which basically amounted to wrestling. Some drunk girl walked by yelling, “Happy New Year!”
“Happy New Year,” we both yelled back. She stopped and turned around.
“What are you guys doing?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Jamie answered.
“I’m just looking for somewhere to go,” she said. “I’ve got nowhere to go, my mom’s having a party and I’m fucking wasted.” Jamie laughed. We introduced ourselves. Her name was Tracy. She had me sit with her on the back steps while Jamie laid on the hood of my mom’s car. “How old are you?” she asked.
“Fifteen.”
“Have you ever had sex?”
“No,” I answered, trying to smile in self-defense.
“I have,” she said with an ugly laugh. “I’ve done it all, everything that you can do. Have you ever kissed a girl?”
“Yes,” I lied.
“I’ve kissed a lot of people. A lot of people.” She looked right at me. “Can you smell my breath? I have this cherry mint, it’s supposed to cover up the booze. Does it smell like cherries?” She leaned over and breathed on my face, but before I could offer insight on the mint she kissed me. I kissed her back and my hands went straight for her breasts, first over the shirt, then under. I pulled her coat off and tried to take her sweater but she refused. “I’d freeze,” she pleaded. I went back to mauling her under the sweater, pulling her out of her bra. While sucking on her tits I thought about the section in Islam in Focus that explained why Muslims did not drink. If this girl was a Muslim, she would have respected herself enough to not get drunk and let fifteen-year olds molest her. On the other side, if I had lived in a Muslim society, I would have been protected from girls like her.
I wasn’t a Muslim, but still took it seriously that Islam would have considered this to be sinful behavior. Then I remembered reading in Islam in Focus that when someone converts to Islam, his previous sins are erased. It’s like a baptism, a born-again moment that wipes the slate clean. If someday I decided to be a Muslim, I wouldn’t have to worry about anything that I did with this girl.
Up until then my erection had seemed bigger than normal and even angry somehow, but as soon as she touched me it died.
“Was it okay?” I asked, forgetting that Jamie had been right there this whole time.