Böcker av Michael Muhammad Knight

From Malcom X to the Wu Tang Clan, the first in-depth account of this fascinating black power movementWith a cast of characters ranging from Malcolm X to 50 Cent, Knight's compelling work is the first detailed account of the movement inextricably linked with black empowerment, Islam, New York, and hip-hop. Whether discussing the stars of Five Percenter rap or 1980s crack empires, this fast-paced investigation uncovers the community's icons and heritage, and examines its growing influence in urban American youth culture.

Describes the Ansaru Allah Community/Nubian Islamic Hebrews (AAC/NIH), a 1970s religious movement in Brooklyn that spread, in part, through the production and dissemination of literature and lecture tapes. Tracks the development of AAC/NIH discourse to reveal surprising consistency and coherence behind the appearance of serial reinvention.

¿There is always an atheism to be extracted from a religion,¿ Deleuze and Guattari write in their final collaboration, What Is Philosophy? Their claim that Christianity ¿secretes¿ atheism ¿more than any other religion,¿ however, reflects the limits of their archive. Theological projects seeking to engage Deleuze remain embedded within Christian theologies and intellectual histories; whether they embrace, resist, or negotiate with Deleuze¿s atheism, the atheism in question remains one extracted from Christian theology, a Christian atheism. In Sufi Deleuze, Michael Muhammad Knight offers an intervention, engaging Deleuzian questions and themes from within Islamic tradition. Even if Deleuze did not think of himself as a theologian, Knight argues, to place Deleuze in conversation with Islam is a project of comparative theology and faces the challenge of any comparative theology: It seemingly demands that complex, internally diverse traditions can speak as coherent, monolithic wholes. To start from such a place would not only defy Islam¿s historical multiplicity but also betray Deleuze¿s model of the assemblage, which requires attention to not only the organizing and stabilizing tendencies within a structure but also the points at which a structure resists organization, its internal heterogeneity, and unpredictable ¿lines of flight.¿A Deleuzian approach to Islamic theology would first have to affirm that there is no such thing as a universal ¿Islamic theology¿ that can speak for all Muslims in all historical settings, but rather a multiplicity of power struggles between major and minor forces that contest each other over authenticity, authority, and the making of ¿orthodoxy.¿ The discussions in Sufi Deleuze thus highlight Islam¿s extraordinary range of possibilities, not only making use of canonically privileged materials such as the Qur¿an and major hadith collections, but also exploring a variety of marginalized resources found throughout Islam that challenge the notion of a singular ¿mainstream¿ interpretive tradition. To say it in Deleuze¿s vocabulary, Islam is a rhizome.

When Michael Muhammad Knight sets out to write the definitive biography of his “Anarcho-Sufi” hero and mentor, writer Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), he makes a startling discovery that changes everything. At the same time that he grows disillusioned with his idol, Knight finds that his own books have led to American Muslim youths making a countercultural idol of him, placing him on the same pedestal that he had given Wilson.In an attempt to forge his own path, Knight pledges himself to an Iranian Sufi order that Wilson had almost joined, attempts to write the Great American Queer Islamo-Futurist Novel, and even creates his own mosque in the wilderness of West Virginia. He also employs the “cut-up” writing method of Bey’s friend, the late William S. Burroughs, to the Qur’an, subjecting Islam’s holiest scripture to literary experimentation.William S. Burroughs vs. the Qur’an is the struggle of a hero-worshiper without heroes and the meeting of religious and artistic paths, the quest of a writer as spiritual seeker.