The Brawl for it All

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by Michael Muhammad Knight

Ibrahim Hooper’s a bully, and the only way to deal with a bully is to show that you’re not afraid of him—not in the courtroom, not in the ring, not on the yawmul-qiyamah.

It took nearly three years to bring everything together, but we finally made it happen: Michael Muhammad Knight vs. Ibrahim Hooper, one-on-one. First time, last time, only time, with special guest referee Hamza Yusuf. We rented the ring and put on a show in Basim Usmani’s backyard with local bands and punk kids and beer. The villains of the day were Lexington cops, who showed up during the Kominas’ set, and of course Hooper, who gave it to me good and brutal. In the course of our match he chokeslammed me onto 9,000 thumbtacks, put a dent in my head with some folding chairs and knocked me from the ring onto a beer pong table. Our Rabeya riot grrl in full niqab (with Vote Hezbollah patch on the back) tore up my shoulder with a giant dildo wrapped in barbed wire. That could have been her feminist critique of my work; I'm not sure. Hooper took the dildo and launched it at her like a missile, which might have been a metaphor for CAIR's response to Progressive Muslim feminists. And then Hooper took his Saudi Arabian flag, attempted to staple it to my bare arm and proceeded to wrap it around my neck. Now if that's not a metaphor for something, then those chair shots to the head have really dimmed my analytical skills.

The Taqwacores is about to come out in the UK and I blew my whole advance for it on this match. With thirty days to go I began taking performance-enhancing drugs that affected the function of my prostate, gave me headaches and made me feel like I was going crazy. Maybe I was; Hooper, when I went to Staples week after week to buy up all their thumbtacks, I knew where the tacks were going. When I went to Agway and bought a roll of barbed wire, I knew that it wouldn’t be cutting you, because only one of us would go as far as this thing had to before it could end. Now I have another scar on my head, long barbed-wire scratches on my arms that will never go away, and dozens of little white dots from the thumbtack punctures. On Basim’s bedroom wall hangs a Saudi Arabian flag stained with my blood. When I sit in prayer and recite the Tashahud, I feel a pulling pain in my right knee that I had never felt before, but it’s worth it, because I can finally look past our shared ugliness and move on. So thank you, Ibrahim Hooper, for accepting the challenge and coming to Lexington with everything you had. Thank you for putting me in the thumbtacks and the barbed wire, and thank you for being everything that I needed you to be that day in Basim’s backyard.

The last words that I’ll ever say to Hooper are not my own, but come from our 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt:

“In the battle of life it is not the critic that counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of a deed could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again because there is no effort without shortcoming; who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotion, spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows the triumph of high achievement; and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly so that his place will never be with those cold and timid souls who have tasted neither victory nor defeat.”

Michael Muhammad Knight’s forthcoming book, Blue-Eyed Devil, has been praised by Andrei Codrescu as “today’s On the Road...pertinent and suspenseful, a mystery rendered in brilliant detail and gorgeous depth...a masterpiece.”

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