Michael Muhammad Knight is an American novelist, writer, and journalist, well-known within Progressive Islam.

Raised Roman Catholic, Knight's first exposure to Islam came when he was 13 and discovered Malcolm X through the lyrics of rap group Public Enemy. Shortly after reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X at 15, Knight had his first meeting with his father, who dabbled in Nazism and the occult. Knight's study of Islam intensified and he later officially converted. At 17 he went to Islamabad, Pakistan to study Islam at Faisal Mosque and nearly left his studies to participate in jihad in Chechnya.

After a disillusionment with orthodox Islam, Knight wrote two books, Where Mullahs Fear to Tread and The Furious Cock, which he printed as xeroxed zines. In winter 2002 he wrote The Taqwacores, which told the story of a fictitious group of Muslim punk-rockers living in Buffalo, New York. Characters included a Straight-edge Sunni Muslim, a drunken mohawk-wearing Sufi punk, a burqa-wearing riot grrl and a Shi'a skinhead.

Knight originally self-published the novel in a spiral-bound, xeroxed form and gave away copies for free. The book was later picked up for distribution by Alternative Tentacles, the punk record label founded by Jello Biafra, and later published as a perfectbound book by Autonomedia in 2004.

The Taqwacores was intended as Knight's "farewell to Islam," but encouragement from readers caused Knight to reconsider his relationship to the faith. The novel has since inspired the start of an actual taqwacore scene, including bands such as the Kominas, Vote Hezbollah and Secret Trial Five. Carl Ernst, specialist in Islamic studies at UNC, called The Taqwacores "a Catcher in the Rye for young Muslims." The novel has been taught in courses at Vassar, University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, Trinity College and Indiana University.

Knight's Muslim WakeUp travel writing led him to write Blue-Eyed Devil, an "American Muslim road odyssey" in which he travels over 20,000 miles by Greyhound bus in 60 days, searching for an indigenous American Islam. Andrei Codrescu hailed the work as "today's On the Road... pertinent and suspenseful, a mystery rendered in brilliant detail and gorgeous depth...a masterpiece."