"[This book] offers a distinct and nuanced take on the life and teachings of the prophet Muhammad, using a traditional genre of Islamic literature called the forty hadiths collection. Hadiths are the reported sayings and actions of Muhammad that have been collected by the tens of thousands throughout Islamic history. There is a tradition in which Muslim scholars take from this vast textual ocean to compile their own smaller collections of forty hadiths, an act of curation that allows them to present their particular understanding of Muhammad's legacy and the essential points of Islam. Here, Michael Muhammad Knight offers forty narrations that provide windows into the diverse ways in which Muslims envision Muhammad. He also examines his own relationship to Muslim traditions while exploring such topics as law, mysticism, sectarianism, gender, and sexuality."--Page 4 of cover.

"Knight approaches hadith and sira as important religio-cultural and literary phenomena in their own right. In rich detail, he lays out the immense variety of questions and depictions early followers produced regarding Muhammad's sacred power (baraka)-its boundaries, effects, and limits. Drawing on insights from contemporary theory about the body, he shows how changing representations of the Prophet's body helped to legitimatize certain types of people or individuals as religious authorities, while marginalizing or delegitimizing others. For some Sunni Muslims, Knight concludes, claims of religious authority today continue to be connected to ideas about Muhammad's body"--

Impossible Man is the story of a teenager's troubled pathway toward maturity and the influences that steady him on his way to adulthood.

Publisher description: A Muslim punk house in Buffalo, New York, inhabited by burqa-wearing riot girls, mohawked Sufis, straightedge Sunnis, Shi'a skinheads, Indonesian skaters, Sudanese rude boys, gay Muslims, drunk Muslims, and feminists. Their living room hosts parties and prayers, with a hole smashed in the wall to indicate the direction of Mecca. Their life together mixes sex, dope, and religion in roughly equal amounts, expressed in devotion to an Islamo-punk subculture, "taqwacore," named for taqwa, an Arabic term for consciousness of the divine. Originally self-published on photocopiers and spiral-bound by hand, The Taqwacores has since been published in foreign translations, become the basis for two films, and is taught in various colleges and universities as a "Catcher in the Rye for young Muslims."

Semi-autobiographical quest for an indigenous American Islam in a series of interstate odysseys. Traveling 20,000 miles by Greyhound in sixty days, the author squats in run-down mosques, pursues Muslim romance, is detained at the U.S.-Canada border with a trunkload of Shia literature, crashes Islamic Society of North America conventions, stink-palms Cat Stevens, and limps across Chicago to find the grave of Noble Drew Ali, filling dozens of notebooks along the way. From publisher description.

Amazing Ayyub, an Iranian Shi'ite skinhead, and Rabeya, a burqa-wearing punk, have kidnapped Matt Damon and are holding him hostage. Meanwhile, Ayyub embarks on a mission to rid the taqwacore scene of a Muslim pop-punk band called Shah 79. Along the way, he makes himself invisible, escapes punk-eating zombies in a mosque off the desert highway, and runs into some psychobilly jinns.

The Five Percenters are denounced by white America as racists, and orthodox Islam as heretics. Encoded within Five Percent culture is a profound critique of organized religion, from which the movement derives its name: only Five Percent can act as "poor righteous teachers" against the evil Ten Percent, the power structure which uses religion to deceive the Eighty-Five Percent, the "deaf, dumb, and blind" masses. Questioning his own relationship to the Five Percent, Knight directly confronts the community's most difficult teachings.