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Congratulations. You have just come across the most vital work of fiction of the new millennium.

But first, you are going to have to check your anti-Muslim biases, your western-centric points of view, your right-wing or pro-Christian rhetoric, your music snobbery, your squeamishness and your deeply rooted beliefs of American Exceptionalism at the door. Because according to Michael Muhammad Knight, it isn't the best of us that will bring the world together, it is the worst of us. The fringes of two cultures coming together to form something completely new, punk rock and wayward Islam clashing to form Taqwacore. And this is where Western meets Middle Eastern and Southern Asian to form the basis of something similar to a working society, even if it is based on very loose rules.

You will have to stop what you're reading several times to look stuff up. You will have to try to put certain points of view and phrases into the proper context and that isn't easy to do as you are trying to absorb the story. But you have to do this to grasp the scope of what the author is doing here. He is telling you an epic parable through two seemingly incompatible lenses and the results are amazing.

Knight first demonstrates how to the outsider (that's you, dear reader) both movements seem independent and completely incongruent. But then, he explains how the exact opposite is actually true, how Islam and Punk Rock appear on the surface to be completely fractured and factioned, but they do in fact come together under broad headings at the end of the day. And in doing so, Knight is able to bring you out of your Western biases and give you entry to these seemingly exclusive worlds.

But, what makes these social forces reconcile in the end? Knight shows you that as well by helping you understand that the values which the adherents ascribe to their respective movements are really all that truly matter in the end. And that all that differentiates one group of Punks from the other or one sect of Islam from another is how they intend to practice within that loose framework of values that end up being all-encompassing and remarkably similar.

Then Knight introduces you to his visionaries that get the message, a household full of dreamers, wastoids, hard-assed social dysfunctional straight-edgers, feminist burka-wearing punk chicks, wannabe-Rastas, skaters, and one person to chronicle the entire carnival, Yusef (the straight man).

One point though that I would like to make is that the comparisons with The Catcher In The Rye are completely ridiculous. Catcher in the Rye is about an outsider railing against the class structure of society. The Taqwacores is a story about an insider to a group of outsiders, being the ultimate inside man allows the main character to bear witness to the birth of something unique and possibly earth-shatteringly dangerous in its implications, because one wonders which will absorb the other, Punk Rock or Islam. The question is never really answered even as Jengahir Tabari brings the crowd to a frothy boil-over in the book's final scenes. The narrative from Yusuf Ali is not one to tear down an existing society like Holden Caufield's, but rather to build up something that has never been seen before and may never be seen again but that is amazing and honest and filled with the possibility of inclusion, because if Islam is great enough to accept punk, then there is hope. And if there is room in punk rock for this cast and crew then anyone can find a home.

If you have the wits to take this on and the courage to leave behind the things that you think you know, you will meet a group of individuals too fantastic to have been made up. You will wish that you had a true friend like Yusef, that you could know an Amazing Ayyub and count him among your friends, you will sympathize with an Umar and wish that you could show him that tolerance and fairness tempers the most faithful soul, you will wish you had someone as smart and outspoken and committed to their beliefs as Rabeya (no matter how edgy they may be, or how grounded). And you will definitely wish that you knew someone like Jengahir Tabari.

Because it is the optimists who are the true believers and people like Jengahir are the ones who change the world. The ones who aren't afraid to say, I'm going to take things that should not be together and force them into something new, the ones who aren't afraid to take a skateboard and ride it down a 100 foot long stair rail because they have no fear of falling, the ones who know deep down that they have flaws but accept them and still go on to do amazing things in spite of them.

I'm fairly certain that there is not a Jengahir Tabari in your life as I know there is not one in mine.

And meeting him makes reading this book worthwhile.