Why I Am a Salafi. Michael Muhammad Knight

ammad suggested Ethiopian), and even a vision in which the Prophet personally breastfed him from his left teat, the one closest to his heart.¹⁴ Though al-Zaww’s motive for writing his dreambook was “first and foremost an insatiable quest for recognition,” according to scholar Jonathan G. Katz, the quest failed: Al-Zaww became a “failed saint,” more or less forgotten.¹⁵ It was partly because of al-Zaww’s failed-saint status that he appealed to me; I dreamed of an Islam written by the losers, an Islam of rejected possibilities and subaltern voices.

      On the advice of Malcolm X’s grandson, I picked up Ahmet Karamustafa’s God’s Unruly Friends, a discussion of tattooed and pierced dervishes from the Ottoman Empire who abandoned religious laws, smoked hashish, spread ashes across their naked bodies, begged for food, and said dangerous things about God. I also joined an Iranian f order, the Nimatullahis, which had been founded in the fourteenth century as a Sunn order, reoriented itself as a Sh’ order following Iran’s Sh’ turn in the Safavid period, and largely dropped any self-identification as “Muslim” after the 1979 revolution. “We don’t advocate reading Qur’n here,” a Nimatullahi shaykh told me.

      Exploring America’s unique Muslim heritages, I looked beyond the standard narratives of Sunn triumphalism that had moved me as a teenager—i.e., Malcolm X was duped into following a charlatan cult leader until he went to Mecca and discovered genuine Islam—to consider the teachings and mission of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad in a serious way. This led to my encountering the Five Percenter community, which had originated in 1960s Harlem with what a vast majority of Muslims would consider the most outrageous offense possible: a man naming himself Allh. Seeing themselves as their own gods, the Five Percenters lived Islam as they personally saw fit; there were no imms or shaykhs or ‘ulama who could tell them anything. Clerics could never offer genuine transcendence: No matter how many verses they had memorized, the invisible “mystery god” for whom they claimed to speak remained invisible. Mastery of a textual tradition brought no one closer to transcendent knowledge; for Five Percenters, this made the business of religious authority a con game, because the scholars cannot claim to possess anything that you don’t already have inherent within yourself. That idea nourished me for a long time, placing the Qur’n and Muslim traditions, along with full power to determine their meanings and value, in my own hands.

      Because the Five Percenter movement was young enough for me to become a student of men who had walked with that first Allh from the ’60s, I often imagined the culture with parallels to the seventh-century community of Muammad and his Companions. Inheriting a legacy from the first Five Percenter generation, I could be classified within the Five Percenter tradition’s equivalent of what Sunns call the Tbi’n, the Followers. The righteous name that I was given reflects this inheritance: My primary teacher had been named by the first Allh himself, and Azreal in turn named me Azreal Wisdom, which meant “Azreal No. 2” in Five Percenter vocabulary. Traveling in a young tradition, I witnessed competing memories, power struggles, and a narrowing field of possibility as debate was suppressed, and reinterpretations and innovations found themselves projected backward upon the authority of foundational figures. Similar to the constructions of orthodoxy in broader Muslim traditions, Five Percenters imagined their tradition to have emerged fully formed and coherent in an instant “Big Bang” moment, rather than having taken shape over time as a historical process. In my engagement of Five Percenter tradition, guided by the elders who taught me, I made my own choices about which texts and historical personalities I would treat as authoritative.

      I also experienced community with the new phenomenon of “progressive Muslims” who sought gender-egalitarian modes of understanding the Qur’