Michael Muhammad Knight's The Taqwacores is a novel about a punk rock subset founded on observance of Islam. Knight made copies of The Taqwacores available free online before its acceptance and publication by Soft Skull in 2004, causing a social and musical scene like the fictional one in his book to arise.
Knight says we make religious choices based on what's available to us, which is perhaps one reason for the polarization of Muslims and gentiles in America. "Growing up where and when I did, Islam was presented to me in a certain way, and I responded to it. I was 12, 13 years old, watching Public Enemy videos on Yo! MTV Raps, and seeing Malcolm X's face. That was my introduction to Islam. In the early 1990s, Islam in one form or another was all over hip-hop, and Malcolm X had become pop culture."
He says it's hard reconciling his faith with his current commercial success, "because people are starting to give me something that I didn't ask for. I don't want review blurbs calling me a "daring voice of reform" or anything like that. I'm not reforming shit."
Despite severe racial undertones to the practice of Islam in America (the notion of the white man as the devil was standard Nation of Islam rhetoric for many years), Knight's example as a relatively recent gentile convert is a leap in the direction of recognizing people as all-one-family regardless of cultural tint, but the modernization depicted in his books is an uneasy subject among traditionalists. The Taqwacores has been likened to a Catcher in the Rye for Muslim youth. Now there's a movie in the works, with him as co-writer and co-producer.
Knight has spent time with the Nation of Islam and the Nation of Gods and Earths, sometimes called The Five-Percent Nation, The Five-Percent Nation of Islam or the Five Percenters. This group was founded in Harlem in 1964 by a man known to his disciples as "Allah." The first white Five Percenter was a helpful student given the name "Azreal" by Intelligent Allah. Azreal is the name of an angel who watches over the dying, and separates the soul from the body, also sometime referred to as the "spirit of vengeance," and its conferral connotes a sort of necessary evil. This original "blue-eyed devil" opened the gate for Muhammad Knight into the 5 Percent community.
"Azreal's a special person. We spent a lot of time together, and he eventually passed his name to me, which is a teacher-student tradition. He named me Azreal Wisdom. Because Wisdom represents the number 2 in Supreme Mathematics, my name means ‘Azreal 2.' I take that very seriously and I try to carry it with respect for what it means. I believe that whiteness is devil, yes. No, I don't believe that a white baby is genetically or spiritually inclined towards wickedness. But to be born white in a white supremacist culture means that you receive a material and mental legacy that's devil. Devil is the only word for it."
The Nation of Islam was founded in Detroit Michigan in 1930 by the mysterious Wallace D. Fard Muhammad, a figure of uncertain origin who went by many names. In June of 1934, Fard disappeared without a trace en route from Detroit to Chicago. Some supporters came to believe that he had been killed by police, while others asserted that he had returned to Mecca to prepare for his eventual return (his follower Elijah Muhammad stated Fard was Allah come to earth). Still others thought Elijah Muhammad had rubbed him out. Official Nation of Islam policy teaches that W. D. Fard boarded the Mother Plane at this time, but the FBI maintained an open file on him as late as 1960, and In 1981, after researching Fard's life, a Pakistani scholar named Zafar Ishaq Ansari supposedly unmasked him as Muhammad Abdullah, a Pakistani Ahmadiyya Muslim who was the tutor of Elijah Muhammad's son and successor, Warith Deen Mohammed. Abdullah denied he was Fard: "It is all right to say I am Fard Muhammad for Wallace [Warith] D. Muhammad. I taught him some lessons. But I am not the same person who taught Elijah Muhammad and I am not God."
Part of Blue-eyed Devil concerns Knight's own attempt to unravel the mysteries surrounding this man. "Master Fard figures pretty heavily into my life as a Muslim," he says. "I still have his picture on my wall and I take guidance from his lessons. There are a few different stories I build on. Each has its own appeal. I can get into the Warith Deen story on Fard as an Ahmadiyya scholar from the Punjab, or Elijah's story that Fard came from Mecca, and every time I have a conversation with someone about Fard, a new theory comes up. Maybe Fard was Ismaili. Maybe he knew something about Sufism. There's even a guy who argues that Fard was a Buddhist. Fard is now a clean slate and can be anything, the man escaped history. In that way, he showed me how to deal with the Prophet Muhammad, because we also make Muhammad what we want him to be."
The cross-country tour of modern Islamic culture in America he writes about in Blue-Eyed Devil brought Knight to Denver at one point, where, he says, "It was all peace. I just breezed through, but I had a good time with my friend Maria, who's a white convert like me, and her family."
Soft Skull has published several more of Knight's books in recent years, each offering an up-close personal history of one Muslim's experience in America.
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