Michael Muhammad Knight is a novelist, writer, and journalist. His writings are popular among American Muslim youth. Within the American Muslim community, he has created a reputation as an ostentatious cultural provocateur. Of Irish descent and raised in the Roman Catholic religion, Knight's first exposure to Islam came when he was 13 when he discovered Malcolm X through the lyrics of the hip-hop band, Public Enemy. After reading Alex Haley's Autobiography of Malcolm X at 15, Knight's study of Islam intensified and he converted to Islam. At 17 he traveled to Islamabad, Pakistan, to study Islam at Faisal Mosque. He came close to making the decision to abandon this course of study to participate in the guerilla war against Russian rule in Chechnya.