Why I Am a Salafi مقالة

It is in this vein of new scholarship on Salafism and western expressions of Islam that Michael Muhammad Knight’s Why I Am a Salafi (2015) should be read. Knight realizes that as an American Muslim, precisely be cause his faith is far away from political power, he is more able to personalize his Islam and let his faith speak to his cultural surroundings. We learn that Knight has been taking graduate level courses in Islamic thought and religion at Harvard, and the time that he has spent with books and intellectual contemplation pays off for the reader. The core of the book is a reflection on the major pamphlets, Qur’an trans lations, and seminal shots at texts that Knight read before and after choosing to become Muslim at the age of fifteen. But this bodily based and lived community aspect of Islam is most certainly compelling and worth reading, if not to understand Knight’s idiosyncratic Muslim identity, but also to gain a new understanding of Salafi thought.