Islam as Rhizome: Heresiology after Deleuze

Michael Muhammad Knight’s Sufi Deleuze: Secretions of Islamic Atheism arrives less as a contribution to “Islam and philosophy” than as an intervention into how theory travels, who it forgets, and what it cannot see from where it stands. Published by Fordham University Press in 2023, the book refuses the polite format of comparative theology. It stages instead a set of collisions: between shrine and seminar, baraka and assemblage, the Qur’an and the Orientalist residue sedimented even in radical European thought. If Deleuze once treated the Qur’an as the exemplary authoritarian “root-book,” Knight answers not by defending Islam within Deleuze’s schema but by prying Deleuze loose from his own archive and forcing him to think from the dargah outward. The book opens at a tomb. Knight purchases the musty orange paperbacks of the Inayati order and approaches the grave of Inayat Khan, remembering that his former mentor Hakim Bey had stood there decades earlier. The scene is intimate and cracked: Knight as Bey’s biographer and initiate (“Mikail El”), their eventual break, the master-disciple relation turned sideways. “I never quit anything,” Bey once said. Neither, it seems, does Knight. The past lingers not as nostalgia but as charge, filling the space between bodies. The tomb is not a monument but a node in a network of attachments, betrayals, and unfinished transmissions.

This opening matters because it displaces theology from the level of propositions to that of arrangements. Sufism appears first not as doctrine but as spatial choreography: books at the front office, steps up to the shrine, breath held before stone. Theoretical reflection emerges from this field rather than hovering above it. What we encounter is not “Islam” as a stable object of analysis but a scene of recomposition in which bodies, texts, and memories are constantly being rearranged. Knight’s rethinking of baraka sets the tone. Rather than translating it as “blessing,” he draws on Islamic studies to emphasize baraka as force –an energy circulating across places, objects, and gestures on a shared plane. It is not a feeling of beatitude but a transmission. Baraka moves. It does not descend from a transcendent center like divine pocket change; it spreads laterally, attaching to shrines, relics, scripts, and laminated prayer cards slipped into wallets. In this sense, baraka names a micropolitics of intensity.

The political stakes become visible when shrine culture is contrasted with revivalist projects. If dargahs proliferate centers –Delhi, Lahore, Fez, Touba, Cairo – then Islam loses any singular gravitational core. Authority becomes molecular, dispersed across custodians, neighborhoods, and itinerant devotees. Against this proliferation, the Saudi state seeks to preserve Mecca as hyper-striated epicenter, demolishing shrines and recoding baraka as reward for obedience within a rationalized divine order. The struggle is not only theological but spatial: between a cartography of scattered intensities and a map drawn with a single bold capital. Baraka, in Knight’s account, resists centralization not because it is anarchic in some romantic sense but because it adheres to bodies and things unpredictably. It is inseparable from circulation. Shrines become engines of distributed power, unsettling regimes that require stable hierarchies of transmission. What is at stake is not simply “folk religion” versus orthodoxy but competing diagrams of how force moves.

This concern with diagrams runs through Knight’s engagement with Deleuze and Guattari’s taxonomy of books in A Thousand Plateaus. Their passing remark about the Qur’an as a paradigmatic root-book – pure recitation, forbidding commentary – becomes a site of excavation. Knight does not treat the comment as an innocent error; he traces its conditions of possibility. How could thinkers so attentive to multiplicity reproduce such a flattened image? The answer lies not in conscious malice but in the archive from which they spoke. Orientalism saturates the ground even of radical theory. One can cite archaeology, anthropology, psychoanalysis in a frenetic spree and still stand on colonial sediment. Yet Knight does not cancel Deleuze. He cuts him. “The first obstruction to rethinking the Qur’an as a Deleuzian rhizome-book is Deleuze.” To use Deleuze as tool requires disassembling him, discarding pieces, recombining others. Rather than asking whether the Qur’an fits Deleuze’s categories, Knight relocates the Qur’an within them –against Deleuze’s own claim. He proposes that the Qur’an, as lived and practiced, operates as rhizome-book: connective, heterogeneous, multiple, open to rupture, cartographic rather than tracing.

The key move here is methodological. To think the Qur’an solely as literature is already to concede too much. The Qur’an is not only a text to be interpreted but a sonic event, a bodily discipline, an aesthetic technology, a magical device. It acts on and through bodies. Deleuze’s focus on reading must be supplemented by attention to recitation, memorization, inscription, and the cultivation of affect. Translation provides a telling example. The Hilali-Khan edition –Saudi-sponsored and notorious for inserting doctrinal clarifications into the verses in parentheses –demonstrates that even projects committed to literalism open new tunnels between inside and outside. The Arabic remains typographically fixed, but the translation performs a subtle grafting. Parentheses become clandestine entry points. The Qur’an’s supposed impermeability is belied by the very mechanisms designed to protect it.

Knight’s treatment of Idris makes this permeability explicit. The Qur’an mentions the prophet Idris and raises him to a “high station” without elaboration. Later readers identify Idris with Enoch, then with Hermes Trismegistus. Through this chain, vast esoteric archives flow into the Qur’anic universe. This is not “borrowing” from outside; it is the Qur’an becoming what it is through connection. There is no pristine Qur’an prior to encounter. The text deterritorializes itself in the world and reterritorializes the world in return. The rhizome, here, is not metaphor but practice. At every verse, outside forces attach themselves, smuggling new intensities into the script. If Deleuze and Guattari insist that the Qur’an exceeds Jewish scripture in its resistance to interpretation, Knight counters with a history of proliferating commentaries, bodily engagements, and occult expansions that undo the caricature. Even the most arborescent book harbors a secret line of flight. The most striking line of flight in the book runs through the Five Percenter tradition founded by Clarence 13X, emerging from the orbit of Malcolm X in 1960s Harlem. Rejecting the “mystery god” in the sky, Clarence 13X taught young Black men to recognize themselves as “true and living” gods. Not incarnations, not reflections – gods. The divine collapses into immanence. When incarcerated Five Percenters sought recognition as a religion, prison authorities denied their claims on the grounds that they lacked belief in a transcendent higher power. The state, in effect, enforced transcendence. Theology became a carceral technology. The plane of immanence met the prison yard.

Here Knight’s project sharpens. Immanence is not an abstract philosophical position but a site of struggle over whose metaphysics qualifies as legitimate. A theology of Black divinity threatens not only doctrinal norms but institutional classifications. The refusal of transcendence destabilizes the state’s taxonomy of religion itself. The rhizome grows in spaces designed to eliminate it. If there is a through-line connecting shrines in South Asia to prison cells in the United States, it is Knight’s insistence that theology is made in and through bodies. Deleuzian Sufism, as he imagines it, concerns not only doctrines but the forces that arrange corporealities and enhance or diminish their capacities. Sufism is the stack of small laminated cards collected at shrines, each bearing the image of a pir – portable baraka satellites. It is the choreography of prayer: shoulder-to-shoulder, foot-to-foot, breath synchronized.

At the khanaqah, learning a doctrine mattered less than practicing adab. The shared affect produced through silence, posture, and script did the theological work. Even after becoming, by his own account, an unacceptable deviant by every Muslim rubric, Knight continued to participate in normative prayer, cultivating Islamic affects through repetition. The assemblage is the theology. Belief is secondary to the arrangement of bodies in space. This reframing unsettles familiar binaries: orthodoxy versus heterodoxy, belief versus unbelief, mysticism versus law. Knight’s “Islamic atheism” does not simply negate God; it secretes new configurations of attachment. God as transcendent judge can be swapped for God as multiplicity, but such conceptual shifts remain superficial if they do not transform the practices through which bodies relate. The work lies in altering the diagram, not merely renaming the node.

Throughout, Knight practices a kind of militant heresiology. He studies Islam’s dangerous lines of flight – where they emerge, what opens them, how they are blocked. Heterodoxy is not deviation from a stable core but the engine of transformation. Islam appears as “plastic proto-Islam,” always in development, never finished. The task is not to recover an origin but to map mutations. In this sense, Sufi Deleuze performs what it describes. It is itself a rhizome-book: memoir braided with theology, prison studies entangled with shrine ethnography, critique of European philosophy folded into devotional memory. Deleuze is neither master nor enemy but raw material. The Qur’an is neither sealed root nor chaotic multiplicity but a body that connects, breaks, and reconnects. The book leaves us not with a synthesis but with a practice: cut theory from its sediment, carry it to the shrine, let it be rearranged by laminated cards and synchronized breaths. If Deleuze once stood at a distance from the Qur’an, Knight drags him closer – into the crush of bodies, the hum of recitation, the circulation of baraka. The result is not reconciliation but recomposition. Theology becomes something that happens between us, in motion, always at risk of hardening into tree, always capable of slipping sideways into rhizome again.