I should begin by confessing that I have been a fan of Michael MuhammadKnight’s work ever since I first read his novel, The Taqwacores, and his travelmemoir, Blue-Eyed Devi: A Road Odyssey through Islamic America, back in2007. I have since read all of his books and have taught several of them in mycourses on contemporary Islam and Islam in North America. I regularly teachhis account of the hajj from Journey to the End of Islam in my first-year “Introductionto Religion” course. I consider his book on the Five-Percent Nation,The Five Percenters: Islam, Hip Hop, and the Gods of New York, to be one ofthe finest ethnographies of a religious community ever penned. I was thereforepleased to find I have a blurb on the back of Tripping with Allah in which Ipraise him for his talent, his authenticity, and his passion. I consider the authora great writer. I envy his skill with language, his creative intellect, and, mostof all, his formidable work ethic. After all, this is his ninth book since the publicationof The Taqwacores (Soft Skull Press: 2004). However, I sometimeswonder exactly for whom he is writing because his books assume a sophisticatedaudience with backgrounds in a wide range of topics from the historyof Islam to American popular culture.In the final pages of Tripping with Allah, Knight sums up his career sofar with this remarkable paragraph.I’ve spent roughly twenty years as a Muslim of some form or other, a crazyconvert and then an ex-Muslim, progressive Muslim, ghulat Shi’a, Nimatullahidervish, Azrael Wisdom, Mikail El, Islamic Gonzo, “godfather ofMuslim punk rock,” Seal of Muslim Pseudo and now Pharmakon Allah,Muhammadus Prine, Quetzalcoatl Farrakhan who trips and says FatimaKubra but has this goofy idea of taking up the way of the salaf, and Dr. BruceLawrence just called me a malamatiyyah at a lecture in Vancouver. (p. 248)This paragraph is striking because it assumes so much of its reader, includinga rather encyclopedic knowledge of Islam, African-American religioustraditions, pop-culture, and what Frank Zappa might have called the “conceptualcontinuity” of the author’s entire body of work. The line that grabbed memost powerfully was the image of Bruce Lawrence, the eminent scholar ofIslam and Sufism, referring to Michael Knight as a malāmatīyah. This term, ...
G.A. Leonov: eminent scholar, admired teacher and unconventional administrator