He was a "15-year-old white kid with Dad a diagnosed schizophrenic, rapist and racial separatist and Mom fresh off her second divorce," Michael Muhammad Knight writes in his 2006 memoir, "Blue-Eyed Devil: A Road Odyssey Through Islamic America." At home in Rochester, he "listened to a lot of Public Enemy and read 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X' and by 16 had a huge portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini" on his bedroom wall.

At 17, Mr. Knight, having converted to Islam, was "running around Pakistan with Afghan and Somalian refugees" and studying "at the largest mosque in the world: Faisal Masjid in Islamabad, which happens to look like a spaceship."

That was precisely half a lifetime ago. Mr. Knight is now 34, a doctoral student in Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina. He returned to the United States the same year he left, and by age 20 he had traded his fundamentalist Islam for a more liberal, irreverent version. A prolific writer, he often satirizes his fellow Muslims, pricking the traditionalists. He is a court jester to the Islamic world, a provocateur in a kufi.

Mr. Knight has written seven books since 2002, including a memoir in which he describes his disillusionment with orthodox Islam; a novel, "The Taqwacores," about a fictitious underground of Muslim punk rockers; and another, "Osama Van Halen" (2009), about punks who kidnap Matt Damon and demand more favorable depictions of Muslims in the movies. His writings have perturbed many Muslims, as have his attacks on hypocrisy and fractiousness in the Muslim world.

Until now, he has been recognized as a learned (if mischievous) practitioner of Sunni Islam, the world's largest Muslim tradition. But Mr. Knight has found a new way to surprise his fellow believers. In his seventh book, "Why I Am a Five Percenter" (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, published this month), Mr. Knight professes an affinity with the Nation of Gods and Earths, also known as the Five Percenters, a mysterious, misunderstood offshoot of the Nation of Islam.

In 2007, Mr. Knight published a history of the Five Percenters, who were organized in Harlem about 1964. They took their name from the Nation of Islam teaching that 5 percent of the people are "poor righteous teachers" who have to educate the oppressed masses. In "The Five Percenters: Islam, Hip-Hop and the Gods of New York," Mr. Knight argued that the group's reputation for criminality was wildly exaggerated.

Nevertheless, orthodox Muslims resent the connection in some people's minds between mainstream Islam and the Five Percenters, whose theology they consider heresy. And the Five Percenters no longer profess any connection to mainstream Islam.

Still, what interests non-Muslims is not theological precision but the Five Percenters' unique allure. The sect's lingo, its abstruse numerology and its eccentric formulation of racial pride -- in which black men are considered "gods," black women "earths" -- have been widely influential in hip-hop music, and therefore beyond black America.

In his earlier book about the group, Mr. Knight reclaimed the Five Percenters' deep history, back to the founder, Clarence 13X Smith, who called himself Allah. He also broke down the Five Percenters' messages in the lyrics of artists like Wu-Tang Clan, Busta Rhymes and 50 Cent (who took his name from another 50 Cent, a street hustler and Five Percenter murdered in 1987).

For millions of rap fans analyzing those bizarre lyrics by the Wu-Tang Clan rapper RZA, or musing on the origins of the street affirmation "Word," or even wondering why Erykah Badu named her son Seven, here at last were some answers.

(For the uninitiated, Seven refers to God.)

But in offering his sympathetic exploration of the Five Percenters, Mr. Knight never suggested he was one of them. He was a Sunni Muslim, studying an alien group. In the new book, however, things have changed.

Mr. Knight now writes that his immersion in the world of Five Percenters made him, in a sense, an insider. He does not accept the literal truth of all their claims (and he is skeptical that all Five Percenters do). But he is no longer an outsider looking in.

"While my encounter with the Five Percenters influenced my thinking about race and religion," Mr. Knight writes, "something else happened, something deeper than intellectual positions." He found himself contemplating these issues "in Five Percenter terms, using Five Percenter language."

"It became completely natural for me to reflect on the day's date using Supreme Mathematics," the Fiver Percenter system in which numbers represent spiritual concepts (one is knowledge, two wisdom, and so forth).

Sometimes Mr. Knight even "experienced a deeper emotional resonance with narratives of the former Clarence 13X and his teen gods than with those of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions."

Mr. Knight does not live as a Five Percenter. Some would say he barely lives as a Muslim. In his two years at Harvard, where in May he finished a master's degree, he "went to a mosque maybe twice," he told me this week. But that seeming tension only points to a principal argument of "Why I Am a Five Percenter," that religious identity is not necessarily about belief, or even about culture.

Scholars spend a lot of time volleying the tennis ball of what "religion" is; for Mr. Knight, it is a way of seeing the world. He came to Islam not because of specific truth-claims about God, but because "those Arabic prayers gave me the right soap to wash myself clean of America, my father, my stepfather, white Jesus, and all of the ignorant small-town" classmates at his Catholic high school.

Now, he has a newer language: less Muslim, more Five Percenter. By the time he finished his first book on the Five Percenters, Harlem was "more relatable" to his world "than the unimaginable setting of premodern Arabia. To stand in front of the Hotel Theresa," where Allah, the first Five Percenter, was arrested in 1965, "or visit Marcus Garvey Park, where Allah held his first parliament, would affect me as no less than a pilgrimage."

In his book's introduction, Mr. Knight offers a bit of advice to other scholars doing fieldwork: "Keep your guard up and keep your distance. You spend that much time with a culture and fail to check yourself, you'll fall in love and become your subject."

How will you know when you have gotten too close to your subject? For Mr. Knight, there were clear signs. In 2008, he made the traditional pilgrimage to Mecca. "Here I am," he told me, "a quasi-orthodox Muslim in Mecca, walking around the Kaaba" -- the shrine Muslims around the world face during prayers -- "and I am interpreting it through mathematics, the lessons, Wu-Tang lyrics. I had to make sense of that."

Mark.Oppenheimer@nytimes.com; twitter/markopp1

First Published: October 29, 2011, 4:00 a.m.