Impossible Man

When Michael Muhammad Knight, the author of The Taqwa cores, founder of American Muslim punk, and leading nontraditional scholar of Islam was six years old, he asked his single mother about his absent father. His mother answered that his father ''got sick and ran away.'' Several years later, he learned the true story; how his father, a paranoid schizophrenic and white supremacist, alternately convinced that Michael's mother was in league with the devil and that she would give birth to a line of superhuman rulers. Impossible Man is the story of a teenager's troubled pathway toward maturity and the influences that steady him on his way to adulthood. Knight's encounter with Public Enemy and The Autobiography of Malcolm X leads him to embrace Islam with all the unbalanced overzealousness and naivet of a disturbed adolescent in search of salvation. His affinity for Islam deepens and at age 17 he travels to Faisal Mosque in Islamabad to study his adopted religion, putting him on track similar to that of Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber For all its extremes, Impossible Man describes a universal journey; a wounded boy in search of a working model of manhood, going to outrageous lengths to find it.