Muhammad Entering From the Rear: A review of Osama Van Halen

If punk rock songs are short, loud, offensive, and give a big F.U. to the mainstream, then Michael Muhammad Knight’s new novel, Osama Van Halen (Soft Skull Press) is very punk rock.

The barely there, comic book plot of Osama Van Halen is sketchy at best: Rabeya, a feminist punk Muslimah, and Shi’ite skinhead Amazing Ayyub hold actor Matt Damon hostage with an AK-47. When the two Muslim punks get separated, we follow Ayyub on a cross-country trek on mission to assassinate a band of pretty-boy Muslim punk posers. On the quest, Ayyub encounters zombies in a mosque, psychobilly spirits, and sexual perversions aplenty. Oh yeah, he also uses a Qur’anic spell to turn invisible.

But the real story of Osama, and the reason that this book is worth reading, is Michael Muhammad Knight’s ongoing internal clash; balancing his American punk philosophy with his Islamic faith (a theme Knight wrote about brilliantly in his visionary first novel, The Taqwacores).

Knight places himself as a character in the novel, which is not an original concept. But what makes it fascinating is that Knight’s character is the actual author of the book, interacting with the characters he has created. He writes about himself in the first person, then seamlessly switches to third person, referring to himself as “Michael Muhammad Knight”. Literary boundaries are blurred in a way that hasn’t been done before. But this is punk rock, and that’s what punk rock does.

Fan of Knight’s first novel, The Taqwacores may be disappointed with his new offering. The character development that drove Taqwacores and made the reader weep when the hero dies, and made the reader gasp when Rabeya did the unthinkable is no where to be found in Osama. But Osama is not a novel in the traditional sense. It is a concept. It’s an American Muslim’s emotional therapy session, disguised as a zombie porno mag.

Tagged as: books, fiction, Islam, music