Michael Muhammad Knight

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Michael Muhammad Knight

Michael Muhammad Knight (born September 24, 1977 ) is an American convert to Islam and novelist, essayist and journalist , whose texts are particularly popular with younger Muslims in the USA. In it, he shows the diversity of modern Muslim life in a provocative way, drawing on gonzo literature.

Life

Knight grew up in Geneva , New York , with his single Catholic mother, who left his father, Wesley Unger, because of domestic violence when Michael was two years old. Knight first came into contact with Islam at the age of 13 when he became aware of Malcolm X through lyrics by the hip hop band Public Enemy , read his biography written by Alex Haley and then began to study Islam intensively employ. At the age of 15 , Knight converted to Islam. When he was 17 years old, he traveled to Pakistan to study Islam at the Faisal Mosque in Islamabad . According to his own admission, by this time he almost took part in the Chechen war and fought against Russia .

Michael Muhammad Knight has been married since 2009. In 2011 he completed his Masters degree from Harvard University . He is currently a PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the field of Islamic Studies .

Publications

Knight's novel The Taqwacores was published in the USA in 2004 and was translated into German in 2012 and published under the title Taqwacore . The title is a combination of Taqwa ( Arabic تقوى, DMG taqwā ), fear of God or humility towards Allah , and core analogous to various music genres influenced by hardcore punk . The novel is about a punk flat share in Buffalo, the residents of which are Muslims, but are critical of their religion and regularly violate its rules by drinking alcohol, using drugs and seeking sexual excesses.

Knight worked as a travel journalist for the English language website Muslim Wake Up! , from which the travel report Blue-Eyed Devil: A Road Odyssey Through Islamic America emerged. For this book, Knight covered 20,000 kilometers in a Greyhound bus in 60 days to find out "true American Islam". Knight attempted to uncover the identity of WD Fard , the mysterious founder of the Nation of Islam , meeting and interviewing various well-known representatives of Islam in the United States along the way. Also The Five percenters and Why I am a Five Percenter (2011) deal with an elimination of the Nation of Islam .

In 2009 Knight followed up with Taqwacore . In his novel Osama van Halen , the flat-share residents Amazing Ayyub and Rabeya take actor Matt Damon hostage and try to force Hollywood to use a friendlier portrayal of Islam in film. Amazing Ayyub meets zombies in the novel , but also Knight himself, who appears as the character of the fictional plot.

In his memoir The Impossible Man , also published in 2009, Knight describes his childhood and youth and explains his decision to become a Muslim. The book Journey to the End of Islam is about Knight's stays in Pakistan, Syria and Egypt and a pilgrimage to Mecca .

In 2012, Knight published William S. Burroughs vs. the Qur'an and Tripping with Allah: Islam, Drugs, and Writing .

Why I am a Salafi was published in 2015 . at Soft Skull Press in Berkeley (CA).

reception

Michael Muhammad Knight is a controversial author among Muslims. He has been heavily criticized, among other things, for his participation in women-led prayers and for his provocative texts and his lack of respect for leading figures in the American Islamic community, such as Imam Siraj Wahhaj and Cat Stevens .

The news magazine Der Spiegel wrote that Knight gave the audience the aha moment that you wish for as many people as possible:

"" Islam does not exist. There are as many ways to be Muslim as there are headscarf fashions on Istiklal Caddesi, the main shopping street in Istanbul. And that also includes not wearing one. "

The British newspaper The Guardian describes him as the Hunter S. Thompson of Islamic literature .

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kurosh Amoui Kalareh: Arabian Knights: Punk Islam and Selected Works of Michael Muhammad Knight , MA thesis, The University of British Columbia (2013)
  2. ↑ SWR2: Book of the Week on April 30, 2012, accessed on March 7, 2014
  3. ↑ Islam punk novel "Taqwacore": "Fuck you, fuck you!" , Spiegel article from March 22, 2012, accessed March 7, 2014
  4. ↑ Punk Muslims , Guardian article, March 19, 2007, accessed March 7, 2014
personal data
SURNAME Knight, Michael Muhammad
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American novelist, essayist, and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH September 24, 1977