Michael Muhammad Knight: Sufi Deleuze: Secretions of Islamic Atheism

The issue of how to deal with, and take into account, multiplicity in Islam has taken up many pages of densely packed tomes (and minutes of YouTube videos) (see, for example, Ahmed 2016, Islam on Demand 2012).Michael Muhammad Knight, with his work Sufi Deleuze: Secretions of Islamic Atheism, has inserted himself into this debate with a potential solution.The introduction sets the scene for the work by telling the reader an anecdote that led to Knight writing the book.It also sets the terms through which Knight will be dealing with Deleuze.Knight states that he wants to "preserve Deleuze's atheism" (2023: 13) and, after going through some potential retorts from Muslims to this, simply states that his book launches from Deleuze and Guattari's point that all religions secrete atheism (2023: 13).This launch point will lead, Knight states, to seeing Islam as rhizome thus bringing about "Deleuzo-Islam" which will "pursue an inversion of orthodoxy".This, along with other statements around "flight from canonical Islam" (Ibid 2023: 5) and the lack of a centre from which to exercise "universal authority over tradition" (Ibid 2023: 4) show the central place that multiplicity takes for Knight.The question, however, that Knight does not answer is why we need Deleuzian atheism to account for this.The first chapter covers the development of a Deleuzian understanding of the Qur'an as a rhizome book.This would make the Qur'an a work that "forms infinite connections with its outside" rather than trying to represent this outside with a single truth (Ibid 2023: 35).This is one of the early pointers towards the concern with multiplicity that runs through the entire work.This conceptualization of the Qur'an is in direct confrontation with Deleuze's own view that the Qur'an is a "root-book that forbids interpretation" (Ibid 2023: 20).Knight goes on to state that "white supremacy's archive" (2023: 31) is the hill from which Deleuze and Guattari speak about Islam and makes clear the wider colonial context that informs Deleuze and Guattari's view of the Qur'an.After Deleuzising the Qur'an, Kinght attempts to create a Deleuzian understanding of the hadith and the position they take in Islam/the Islamicate.Starting