Michael Muhammad Knight explores American Islam in seventeen books that traverse the genres of fiction, memoir, reflection, and original scholarship
Join us October 24th at 12:15pm
200 Center Bldg Classroom
Michael Muhammad Knight explores American Islam in seventeen books that traverse the genres of fiction, memoir, reflection, and original scholarship. Knight’s writing lives began in 2003 with his self-published novel, The Taqwacores, which told the story of a fictitious Muslim punk rock scene that inspired multiple films and numerous real-life taqwacore artists; from there he wrote memoirs of his conversion to Islam in the 1990s and travels throughout American Muslim communities, accounts of new Muslim movements, intersections between Islam and ayahuasca shamanism, and painful breaks from his mentors, and critical but deeply personal reflections on Islam’s ongoing construction in the U.S. His academic work spans communities such as the Nation of Islam, Five Percenters, and Nubian Islamic Hebrews, as well as representations of Muhammad’s body in hadith literature, and reading Islamic traditions through a lens informed by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. In this conversation, Knight discusses movements, tensions, and harmonies between his multiple writing lives.
