Author Michael Muhammad Knight Talks Taqwacores

Michael Muhammad Knight, author of Taqwacores, is living a dream.  His novel is now releasing as a film, and definitely has people talking.  Knight, 33, channels his personal struggle with Islam into his writing, resulting in other novels like: Where Mullahs Fear to Tread and The Furious Cock.  We got a chance to speak to the writer, journalist and novelist.

Can you give us a little background about yourself, more specifically how you got into writing?

I was into writing since I was a little kid.  When I was in 7th and 8th grade I was going through a lot of personally challenging stuff; my mom was going through her second divorce and I was asking questions about my biological father so my home life was chaos.  This creative teacher who I was close to showed me stories he wrote, as a healing process.  I never saw that aspect that you could write something personally and emotionally that’s when I started writing more ‘teen angsty’ stuff, so later in life when religion became challenging to me I reached back.

What is Taqwacores about?  What does that scene/movement mean to you?

When people call it a scene or a movement I’ve always resisted it because the problem is you want to create a space outside of an establishment and ultimately if you become too successful it ends up becoming an establishment.  So you’re rebelling against the establishment in it’s own right and ideally for me, Taqwacores would retain that type of anarchic space.  When it’s a movement it has a center, and if I’m put at the center of this movement, then it becomes equated with my voice or how I feel about things, and I wouldn’t want that.

What is the purpose of Taqwacores?  What do you hope to achieve with this release?

It’s basically what I was doing with the book. When I was writing the book I was making this desperate call saying, ‘Is there anyone outside of the mosque space?’ I’m not reveling in my estrangement; I’m just looking in the mosque window, and looking for a way to get back in.  That’s what I was trying to do with the book.  I wanted to talk about my wounding experience with religion, expressing hope that it would be different and imagining there would be an Islam that I could have a place in.  It’s funny, kids wrote to me after I wrote the book and they told me it gave them that.  I’d say to them,’You’re doing for me what you say, I did for you,’ because I thought I was so alone when I wrote the book, and I thought I was the only Muslim that felt the way I did.  I never dreamed that it would do what it did or that there could be a sense of community for me.

Can you explain what the Muslim punk scene is?

No, because the vast majority of the people who write to me don’t have Mohawks or are starting bands, maybe they hate punk music, it’s just the spirit of what I was feeling at that moment that reached out to them, not the references to the Dead Kennedy’s, etc.  The main question of the book is:  Do I have to apologize for who I am?  The punk stuff is just external.  It works well with punk.  Punk by nature doesn’t apologize for who you are, doesn’t negotiate with everyone who tells you that you can’t, and doesn’t submit to everyone who says you don’t deserve to be.  There’s a natural tendency in punk to throw the middle finger up, and the book really needed to do that.

What has been the reaction to the film, so far?

It’s been really positive.  Like I said I felt alone when I wrote it, I didn’t know whether I could call myself a Muslim or what a Muslim really was and writing the book I was imagining a mosque in which there was no Imam.  You couldn’t just defend your opinion by just saying, ‘it’s what the scholars said,’ you have to have your own opinion. That’s what I wanted, but I didn’t know I could have that.  I had a very difficult experience with Islam.  I was very naive about what Islam was.  There were a lot of kids out there that I didn’t even know existed and I only saw them with their mosque mask on.  The fact that you could be confused, that you don’t have answers, maybe you don’t know what you believe, its okay.  I didn’t know that Muslims could be complicated people and when people wrote back, we kind of became that community for each other.

How does it feel to have your book now published as a film?

It was an amazing experience. When I was on the set I felt like I was hallucinating. I would see figments of my imagination as I was walking around in real life and that tripped me out, like I was talking to my characters.  The actor who played Jehangir, Dominic Rains, he and I would stay up all night having deep discussions about Sufism.

What other Muslim American authors inspire you?

Part of what I do is I write the book that I want to see and honestly the book that I wanted to see wasn’t there. No one was doing this. So I just did it.

What do you think is the biggest issue facing Muslim youth today?

To say a single issue is hard, because you prioritize personal development, politics, etc.  So to define themselves in relation to the Muslim community that may or may not accept them, or even the American community at large, who may or may not accept them, it is essential for Muslim youth today to have their own space.  On one hand you can have a Muslim kid thrown out of their homes for being gay, or you can have a Muslim kid who’s home is getting bricks thrown at the window because their parents are building a mosque.  Everyone is telling you something is wrong.  That’s the main issue.  What they have to do is find their own space.

What other projects are you working on?

Right now I’m presently in graduate school at Harvard doing Islamic Studies. That challenges the writing a little bit, but my latest book just came out, Journey to the End of Islam, which is about my Hajj to Mecca.  One thing in my experience with publishing is that it’s always way behind where you are personally.  It takes time for the book to come out, takes time to find its audience, and by the time people react to where you are, you’re already a different person.  Especially with Taqwacores it’s hard because I’m at a different place, so all I can do is continue to write and keep putting more stuff out.