Osama Van Halen

Embarrassingly (or not), pretty much everything I know about Islam comes from MMK's novels.

If you haven't read Taqwacores, this novel (?!) will not make a bit of sense. If you didn't like Taqwacores, you will hate it. But what the fuck, you should read it anyway because it's amazing. Read Taqwacores and then this and then kidnap Matt Damon.

Michael Muhammad Knight and Joshua Cohen are my favorite young writers. Fucking maniacs. Give me more more more.

A mess, but an entertaining one. As if Jack Kerouac got into a brawl with Hunter S. Thompson while they co-wrote the script to Repo Man—but less filling. A wild road trip steeped in Islamic youth culture that involves battling zombies, kidnapping a Hollywood celebrity and debating the value of Muslim Emo vs. Muslim Punk while seeking to do something about it all. I didn’t always follow the Islamic goings on, sometimes googling furiously for context, but I did appreciate the brisk and approachable writing style. I was reminded of the feeling of being young and needing to take part in a world that you are just discovering. The sex, language and violence will not be to everybody’s taste, but they are a part of the worldview. The show more inherent value of following Islam is understood to be a given and thankfully not a moment is spent justifying its presence in America. Being Islamic post 9/11 is to encounter many conflicts. In much of the book, the characters lurch from one battle to another as if trying to figure out which ones are important and which are just crazy distractions. The book concludes with a not so subtle lesson that what you don’t respect may bite you—not every battle is in front of you but rather sometimes occur inside.


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Really, I don't know what to say about this book. It's offensive and obscene, but it's intentionally so. The objectification of women is blatant, and I thought Knight was unaware of how very sexist his work is, but in the end one of Knight's characters "addresses" that issue, you could say. There are some clever bits of satire scattered through the book, but it's an uncomfortable read, and I still don't know what to think of it.