Michael Muhammad Knight - Böcker

The Ansaru Allah Community, also known as the Nubian Islamic Hebrews (AAC/NIH) and later the Nuwaubians, is a deeply significant and controversial African American Muslim movement. Founded in Brooklyn in the 1960s, it spread through the prolific production and dissemination of literature and lecture tapes and became famous for continuously reinventing its belief system. In this book, Michael Muhammad Knight studies the development of AAC/NIH discourse over a period of thirty years, tracing a surprising consistency behind a facade of serial reinvention.It is popularly believed that the AAC/NIH community abandoned Islam for Black Israelite religion, UFO religion, and Egyptosophy. However, Knight sees coherence in AAC/NIH media, explaining how, in reality, the community taught that the Prophet Muhammad was a Hebrew who adhered to Israelite law; Muhammad’s heavenly ascension took place on a spaceship; and Abraham enlisted the help of a pharaonic regime to genetically engineer pigs as food for white people. Against narratives that treat the AAC/NIH community as a postmodernist deconstruction of religious categories, Knight demonstrates that AAC/NIH discourse is most productively framed within a broader African American metaphysical history in which boundaries between traditions remain quite permeable.Unexpected and engrossing, Metaphysical Africa brings to light points of intersection between communities and traditions often regarded as separate and distinct. In doing so, it helps move the field of religious studies beyond conventional categories of “orthodoxy” and “heterodoxy,” challenging assumptions that inform not only the study of this particular religious community but also the field at large.

The Ansaru Allah Community, also known as the Nubian Islamic Hebrews (AAC/NIH) and later the Nuwaubians, is a deeply significant and controversial African American Muslim movement. Founded in Brooklyn in the 1960s, it spread through the prolific production and dissemination of literature and lecture tapes and became famous for continuously reinventing its belief system. In this book, Michael Muhammad Knight studies the development of AAC/NIH discourse over a period of thirty years, tracing a surprising consistency behind a facade of serial reinvention.It is popularly believed that the AAC/NIH community abandoned Islam for Black Israelite religion, UFO religion, and Egyptosophy. However, Knight sees coherence in AAC/NIH media, explaining how, in reality, the community taught that the Prophet Muhammad was a Hebrew who adhered to Israelite law; Muhammad’s heavenly ascension took place on a spaceship; and Abraham enlisted the help of a pharaonic regime to genetically engineer pigs as food for white people. Against narratives that treat the AAC/NIH community as a postmodernist deconstruction of religious categories, Knight demonstrates that AAC/NIH discourse is most productively framed within a broader African American metaphysical history in which boundaries between traditions remain quite permeable.Unexpected and engrossing, Metaphysical Africa brings to light points of intersection between communities and traditions often regarded as separate and distinct. In doing so, it helps move the field of religious studies beyond conventional categories of “orthodoxy” and “heterodoxy,” challenging assumptions that inform not only the study of this particular religious community but also the field at large.

Muhammad's Body introduces questions of embodiment and materiality to the study of the Prophet Muhammad. Analyzing classical Muslim literary representations of Muhammad's body as they emerge in Sunni hadith and sira from the eighth through the eleventh centuries CE, Michael Muhammad Knight argues that early Muslims' theories and imaginings about Mu&7717;ammad's body contributed in significant ways to the construction of prophetic masculinity and authority.Knight approaches hadith and sira as important religiocultural and literary phenomena in their own right. In rich detail, he lays out the variety of ways that early believers imagined Muhammad's relationship to beneficent energy - baraka - and to its boundaries, effects, and limits. Drawing on insights from contemporary theory about the body, Knight 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 remain connected to ideas about Muhammad's body.

Muhammad's Body introduces questions of embodiment and materiality to the study of the Prophet Muhammad. Analyzing classical Muslim literary representations of Muhammad's body as they emerge in Sunni hadith and sira from the eighth through the eleventh centuries CE, Michael Muhammad Knight argues that early Muslims' theories and imaginings about Mu&7717;ammad's body contributed in significant ways to the construction of prophetic masculinity and authority. Knight approaches hadith and sira as important religiocultural and literary phenomena in their own right. In rich detail, he lays out the variety of ways that early believers imagined Muhammad's relationship to beneficent energy - baraka - and to its boundaries, effects, and limits. Drawing on insights from contemporary theory about the body, Knight 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 remain connected to ideas about Muhammad's body.

Combining insights from the best published historical and religious studies scholarship, original research, and rich first-person perspective, this highly readable book offers a comprehensive yet concise introduction to the founder and central figure of the Islamic tradition: the prophet Muhammad. Narrating Muhammad's life story, teachings, and daily practices, and assessing how his legacy is received, interpreted, and applied around the world, Michael Muhammad Knight reveals how the project has become simultaneously one of the most beloved historical figures in the world and also one of the most contested, challenged, and disparaged. Knight argues that there was never a singular Muslim vision of Muhammad but rather always multiple perspectives. While Muslims defend Muhammad's legacy against Islamophobic polemics, they also challenge each other regarding the proper authorities through which Muhammad's life and message become comprehensible and applicable in our world. Thinking across time and place, Knight argues that Muhammad is always contextual and contemporary.

Combining insights from the best published historical and religious studies scholarship, original research, and rich first-person perspective, this highly readable book offers a comprehensive yet concise introduction to the founder and central figure of the Islamic tradition: the prophet Muhammad. Narrating Muhammad's life story, teachings, and daily practices, and assessing how his legacy is received, interpreted, and applied around the world, Michael Muhammad Knight reveals how the project has become simultaneously one of the most beloved historical figures in the world and also one of the most contested, challenged, and disparaged. Knight argues that there was never a singular Muslim vision of Muhammad but rather always multiple perspectives. While Muslims defend Muhammad's legacy against Islamophobic polemics, they also challenge each other regarding the proper authorities through which Muhammad's life and message become comprehensible and applicable in our world. Thinking across time and place, Knight argues that Muhammad is always contextual and contemporary.

"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.

"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.

From its beginnings in 1930s Detroit, the Nation of Islam has relied on a guarded series of texts, known as the Supreme Wisdom Lessons, to initiate and educate members. These texts appear primarily as exchanges between Nation founder Fard Muhammad and his student, Elijah Muhammad. Memorization, recitation, and interpretation of the Lessons have been of central importance to the Nation throughout its history. Even after Elijah Muhammad's passing in 1975, the "orthodox" reforms of Elijah's son Wallace Muhammad (later Warith Deen Mohammed) were grounded in part on Wallace's authority to derive new meanings from the Lessons. The Lessons are also foundational for the Five Percenters, a community that emerged in 1960s Harlem through former Nation members' reinterpretation of the Lessons. This monograph, the first dedicated exclusively to the Lessons, places the Lessons in conversation with their historical milieu, exploring political and metaphysical discourses that informed Fard Muhammad's world. Attention is also given to the education programs offered to convicts at San Quentin, where Fard Muhammad was incarcerated in the 1920s, for insights into his pedagogy. This monograph additionally performs deep dives into the text of the Lessons, exploring the Lessons' process of codification, tracking differences between versions, and calling attention to points at which Elijah Muhammad appears to have performed edits within the text. Finally, The Supreme Wisdom Lessons looks at the diverse interpretive traditions surrounding the Lessons, and includes an annotated edition of the Lessons themselves.

Yusef is living in Buffalo, New York with a group of Muslim punks. A pot-smoking mohawked Sufi called Jehangir plays the rooftop call to prayer on his electric guitar, while debates rage downstairs about the Quranic sources for Iggy Pop songs. With a living-room serving as mosque by day and hosting punk parties by night, and a hole in the wall marking the direction of Mecca, Yusef's friends are all dealing with what it means to be young and Muslim in modern-day America. Amidst all this, Yusef embarks on a fascinating, clumsy journey towards faith and love in this surprising and unsettling read.

With 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.