Michael Muhammad Knight Straddles Muslim and Hip-Hop Worlds (original) (raw)
U.S.|Convert Straddles Worlds of Islam and Hip-Hop
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Convert Straddles Worlds of Islam and Hip-Hop
Michael Muhammad Knight, a convert to Islam and a prolific writer, often satirizes fellow Muslims, pricking the traditionalists.Credit...Travis Dove for The New York Times
- Oct. 28, 2011
He was a “15-year-old white kid with Dad a diagnosed schizophrenic, rapist and racial separatist and Mom fresh off her second divorce,” Michael Muhammad Knight writes in his 2006 memoir, “Blue-Eyed Devil: A Road Odyssey Through Islamic America.” At home in Rochester, he “listened to a lot of Public Enemy and read ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X’ and by 16 had a huge portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini” on his bedroom wall.
At 17, Mr. Knight, having converted to Islam, was “running around Pakistan with Afghan and Somalian refugees” and studying “at the largest mosque in the world: Faisal Masjid in Islamabad, which happens to look like a spaceship.”
That was precisely half a lifetime ago. Mr. Knight is now 34, a doctoral student in Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina. He returned to the United States the same year he left, and by age 20 he had traded his fundamentalist Islam for a more liberal, irreverent version. A prolific writer, he often satirizes his fellow Muslims, pricking the traditionalists. He is a court jester to the Islamic world, a provocateur in a kufi.
Mr. Knight has written seven books since 2002, including a memoir in which he describes his disillusionment with orthodox Islam; a novel, “The Taqwacores,” about a fictitious underground of Muslim punk rockers; and another, “Osama Van Halen” (2009), about punks who kidnap Matt Damon and demand more favorable depictions of Muslims in the movies. His writings have perturbed many Muslims, as have his attacks on hypocrisy and fractiousness in the Muslim world.
Until now, he has been recognized as a learned (if mischievous) practitioner of Sunni Islam, the world’s largest Muslim tradition. But Mr. Knight has found a new way to surprise his fellow believers. In his seventh book, “Why I Am a Five Percenter” (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, published this month), Mr. Knight professes an affinity with the Nation of Gods and Earths, also known as the Five Percenters, a mysterious, misunderstood offshoot of the Nation of Islam.
In 2007, Mr. Knight published a history of the Five Percenters, who were organized in Harlem about 1964. They took their name from the Nation of Islam teaching that 5 percent of the people are “poor righteous teachers” who have to educate the oppressed masses. In “The Five Percenters: Islam, Hip-Hop and the Gods of New York,” Mr. Knight argued that the group’s reputation for criminality was wildly exaggerated.
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