Recognized by readers of his novel, The Taqwacores, as the godfather
of American Muslim punk, Michael Muhammad Knight is a voice for the
growing number of teenagers who choose neither side of the "Clash of
Civilizations." Knight has now written his personal story, a chronicle
of his bizarre and traumatic boyhood and his conversion to Islam during
a turbulent adolescence.
Impossible Man follows a boy's struggle in coming to terms with his
father--a paranoid schizophrenic and white supremacist who had
threatened to decapitate Michael when he was a baby--and his father's
place in his own identity. It is also the story of a teenager's troubled
path to maturity and the influences that steady him along the way.
Knight's encounter with Malcolm X's autobiography transforms him from a
disturbed teenager engaged in correspondence with Charles Manson to a
zealous Muslim convert who travels to Pakistan and studies in a
madrassa. Later disillusioned by radical religion, he again faces the
crisis of self-definition.
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.
