Michael Muhammad Knight has a new book out, “Journey to the End of Islam,” that has been written up in the New York Times.
Mr. Knight has published another Islamic travelogue, “Journey to the End of Islam,” which recounts visits he made in 2008 to Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia, in search of the many varieties of Islamic experience.
Mr. Knight’s new book, which has gotten a fair amount of attention, especially on National Public Radio, is full of streetwise profanity, side excursions into Islamic history and doctrinal disputes, and a kind of casual, hip erudition. Reading it is often a bit like coming into the middle of a long and impassioned monologue, one replete with Islamic terms and references that won’t be entirely clear to the uninitiated.
But there’s no mistaking the overall drift of Mr. Knight’s argument and whose side he’s on.
If Islamic radicals — the “fundys” in Mr. Knight’s terminology — yearn to rescue what they see as authentic seventh-century Islam from the accumulated corruptions of the centuries, especially the corruptions of Western contact, Mr. Knight wants to do the inverse: save Islam by shedding antiquated and retrograde seventh-century ideas (about women and gays, for example) and making it consistent with the personal and sensual liberations of the 21st century.
And so he rejoices in the multiplicity of Islamic practices, especially in Pakistan, which was his first destination, and where he was received by a local group of American-educated Pakistanis intent on bringing punk to their own country.
The reviewer says the “Tawqacores” book has a “cultlike status among many young Muslims” and he cites the comments of an Islamic studies professor who calls the book a “Catcher in the Rye” for many in the current generation of young Muslims.