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Pretty good. I wish I had read this when I was younger. Reading it in my late thirties, it’s hard to not find the characters� philosophical/theological monologues annoying. But part of that is embarrassment over seeing my younger self in them.
They are clearly stand-ins for different ways of approaching Islam. But Knight does a good job of humanizing them and keeping them from being two-dimensional.

Some other reviews complained that the Arabic phrases peppered throughout felt alienating. I was already familiar with most of them so i found it added depth. And I enjoyed looking up the ones whose meaning I wasn’t sure about. I think it would have been weird to write a book about Muslim punks with a Muslim narrator and avoid using any Arabic.

One complaint is that the book isn’t very kind to its female and gay characters. Rabeya gets to articulate some pretty good feminist readings of the Qur’an and Muzammil and Rabeya both have some pointed retorts to Umar’s homophobia. But for the most part the female characters are just sex objects for the boys. Also the final scene is pretty dramatic but also totally unbelievable and I guess is some weird male fantasy that I don’t get.