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The Fall Of A King, Rise Of A Servant: A Memoir Of A New York Latin Kings Journey To Islam
From the streets to solitary. From loyalty to survival. From darkness to faith.
This memoir is a raw, unfiltered account of a life shaped by gangs, violence, prison, and loss—and ultimately transformed through faith.
After being shot, incarcerated, and buried in the isolation of solitary confinement, the author is forced to confront everything he was taught about loyalty, brotherhood, and power. In a world where silence is survival and betrayal is fatal, he wrestles with impossible choices that test his morals and his soul.
Alone in “the hole,” stripped of identity and illusion, he begins a journey inward—one that mirrors the early spiritual isolation of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. What begins as reflection becomes revelation. What begins as desperation becomes surrender. And in the most unlikely place, faith takes root.
Structured around 13 chapters that parallel the first 13 years of the Prophet Muhammad’s mission, this book is not just a story of incarceration—it is a story of awakening, accountability, and redemption.
This is not a book about being perfect. It is a book about being honest. It is a book for anyone who has ever been lost—and still hoped to be found.
This memoir is a raw, unfiltered account of a life shaped by gangs, violence, prison, and loss—and ultimately transformed through faith.
After being shot, incarcerated, and buried in the isolation of solitary confinement, the author is forced to confront everything he was taught about loyalty, brotherhood, and power. In a world where silence is survival and betrayal is fatal, he wrestles with impossible choices that test his morals and his soul.
Alone in “the hole,” stripped of identity and illusion, he begins a journey inward—one that mirrors the early spiritual isolation of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. What begins as reflection becomes revelation. What begins as desperation becomes surrender. And in the most unlikely place, faith takes root.
Structured around 13 chapters that parallel the first 13 years of the Prophet Muhammad’s mission, this book is not just a story of incarceration—it is a story of awakening, accountability, and redemption.
This is not a book about being perfect. It is a book about being honest. It is a book for anyone who has ever been lost—and still hoped to be found.
126 pages, Paperback
Published August 24, 2026
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September 2, 2026
Bismillah. I read my brother Tariq’s Fall of a King, Rise of a Servant in about three hours, almost straight through, after receiving the finished book today. I knew a good deal of his story already, and I had read parts of the manuscript before, but I needed the book in my hands. And once I had it there, I barely put it down.
This book was and wasn’t what I expected. If you are expecting a cleaned-up conversion story, some Victorian bowdlerization of gang life where all the ugliness gets pushed offstage so we can hurry toward redemption, this is not that book. Tariq takes you deep into it: the violence, the thrill, the loyalty, the betrayals, the double- and triple-crosses, the codes of masculinity and being “down,” the search for family and identity, prison, death, guilt, and the terrible consequences of choices that cannot simply be taken back. The language isn't cleaned up either. It shouldn't be. At times I thought, Man, this could be a screenplay. There is enough here for a film or television series.
And that matters because redemption means something different when a writer has first been willing to tell us what he needed redemption from.
One passage, from his time in solitary confinement, gets very close to the heart of the whole book:
“People often judge those who find faith while incarcerated, dismissing it as nothing more than desperation—an escape, a crutch, or a way to cope with confinement. But sometimes it takes being stripped of everything to realize that our own will is not enough.”
He continues by describing the moment when the illusion of control disappears and the heart finally opens to something beyond itself. That is not merely a prison-conversion argument. It is an argument about faqr—our radical need before Allah.
It immediately brought to mind Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh al-Iskandarī, who says in al-Ḥikam, aphorism 129:
“Nothing pleads on your behalf like extreme need, nor does anything speed gifts to you quicker than lowliness and want.”
Whatever breaks the illusion that we are sufficient unto ourselves—whatever brings us into genuine brokenness before Allah—can become the place from which something entirely different begins.
And reading Tariq’s story also brought me back repeatedly to one of the most hopeful narrations I know from the Prophet ﷺ. A man had murdered ninety-nine people. He asked a monk whether repentance remained possible for him; the monk told him no, and the man killed him too, making one hundred. But when he finally went to a person of real knowledge, the answer was different: yes, repentance was still possible. The scholar told him to leave the corrupt place in which he had been living and go toward a community of people worshipping Allah. He died on the journey. The angels of mercy and punishment disputed over him, but he was found nearer the land toward which he had been traveling, and the angels of mercy took him. This is an authentic narration in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 2766a-b.
That hadith does not trivialize murder. Neither does Tariq's book. Quite the opposite. Islam can hold two truths together that people sometimes want to separate: the enormity of taking a human life and the enormity of Allah's mercy.
Tariq himself brings in Qur’an 5:32 after describing his first killing:
مَنْ قَتَلَ نَفْسًا بِغَيْرِ نَفْسٍ أَوْ فَسَادٍ فِي الْأَرْضِ فَكَأَنَّمَا قَتَلَ النَّاسَ جَمِيعًا
“Whoever kills a soul—unless for a soul or for corruption in the land—it is as if he had slain mankind entirely.”
What makes the passage powerful is what he does with the verse afterward. He tells us that he wasn't Muslim then and didn't know the Qur’an. Looking backward as a believer, however, he says he feels its truth “deep in my bones.” When Manny lost his life, he writes, “something in me died too.”
There is no romanticization in that.
And this is one reason I think this book can matter beyond being a Muslim convert narrative. I spent decades teaching young people in communities where some were already in gangs, some were close to them, and others were trying to figure out whether that life offered them something they needed. Norteño, Sureño, Bulldog, Crip—it changes according to where you are, but some of the attractions repeat themselves: family, identity, protection, masculinity, excitement, loyalty, respect, the desire to prove that you are down. I have watched young people get hurt in that life. I have known young people who died in it.
Sometimes somebody who has actually been deep in that game saying don't get in this game carries a weight that no sanitized lecture ever can.
Tariq understands why the attraction exists because he lived it. One of the things I appreciated most was his treatment of the Latin Kings. He doesn't write as though there was never anything there that could attract an intelligent young man searching for identity, brotherhood, history, discipline, or purpose. He allows us to see the hope first. That makes it much more powerful when we watch that hope collapse under betrayal, violence, ego, and the realities of the life.
I also appreciated seeing Puerto Rican history and resistance woven into the story. I know Tariq personally, and I've gone to the brother myself over the years for references and information about Puerto Rican history and resistance leaders. I know some of the communities he is writing about. We have also had some of the same teachers and shaykhs. So there were places in this book where the people, ideas, and religious world he describes were very familiar to me.
There is something of the tradition of The Autobiography of Malcolm X here—not because the stories are identical, but because Malcolm demonstrated what an American redemption narrative could become when a man refused to falsify the darkness that preceded his transformation. There is courage in going this deeply into the things you have done, including things you are ashamed of and things conscience may require you to wrestle with for the rest of your life. Tariq goes there.
I actually wondered while reading why the book was spending so much time in the street life before getting more deeply into Islam. Then the conversion came. And I understood the structure.
He stuck the landing.
All those chapters before it had been setting up the punch. When the spiritual transformation finally comes, it lands because we understand what had to be transformed. The ending is beautiful. Tariq describes his journey from the Latin Kings to Islam as a struggle with his nafs, trauma, the hunger for respect, and the fear of appearing weak. The Qur’an he memorized, the prayers offered on prison floors, and the tears shed where nobody could see him become, in his words, “stitches in my reconstruction.”
And by the final page, he can look directly at somebody who may still be living the life he escaped and tell them that however far down the road they have gone, the road does not have to end where they think it does. His last formulation brings the entire title home: “The fall of a king wasn’t the end... It was the beginning of a servant.”
That's a knockout punch.
One warning, though: this is emphatically not a G-rated book. It deals with murder, gang violence, prison, drugs, sex, abuse, and other serious material, and the street language is not censored. I don't regard that as a weakness. For this particular story, cleaning everything up would destroy part of its truth.
I would genuinely like to put this book in front of some young people (and I may in my classes) and hear what they have to say about it. Because books like this matter. We need our brothers and sisters who have lived these lives to write them down—not to glorify the life, but to tell the truth about it, including what it costs to live it and what it takes to leave it.
This is in the tradition of our American shaheed, Malcolm X, El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, Rahmatullahi 'alay.
I have a lot of love and respect for my brother for putting this much of himself on the page. May Allah accept his tawbah, reward him for every person who benefits from his story, protect our young people from having to learn these lessons through blood and cages, and make this book a means by which somebody who thinks he or she has gone too far discovers that the door back to Allah is still open.
Read it. Support our brother's message. Pass it on.
Help us bring very real light to this very real darkness.
This book was and wasn’t what I expected. If you are expecting a cleaned-up conversion story, some Victorian bowdlerization of gang life where all the ugliness gets pushed offstage so we can hurry toward redemption, this is not that book. Tariq takes you deep into it: the violence, the thrill, the loyalty, the betrayals, the double- and triple-crosses, the codes of masculinity and being “down,” the search for family and identity, prison, death, guilt, and the terrible consequences of choices that cannot simply be taken back. The language isn't cleaned up either. It shouldn't be. At times I thought, Man, this could be a screenplay. There is enough here for a film or television series.
And that matters because redemption means something different when a writer has first been willing to tell us what he needed redemption from.
One passage, from his time in solitary confinement, gets very close to the heart of the whole book:
“People often judge those who find faith while incarcerated, dismissing it as nothing more than desperation—an escape, a crutch, or a way to cope with confinement. But sometimes it takes being stripped of everything to realize that our own will is not enough.”
He continues by describing the moment when the illusion of control disappears and the heart finally opens to something beyond itself. That is not merely a prison-conversion argument. It is an argument about faqr—our radical need before Allah.
It immediately brought to mind Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh al-Iskandarī, who says in al-Ḥikam, aphorism 129:
“Nothing pleads on your behalf like extreme need, nor does anything speed gifts to you quicker than lowliness and want.”
Whatever breaks the illusion that we are sufficient unto ourselves—whatever brings us into genuine brokenness before Allah—can become the place from which something entirely different begins.
And reading Tariq’s story also brought me back repeatedly to one of the most hopeful narrations I know from the Prophet ﷺ. A man had murdered ninety-nine people. He asked a monk whether repentance remained possible for him; the monk told him no, and the man killed him too, making one hundred. But when he finally went to a person of real knowledge, the answer was different: yes, repentance was still possible. The scholar told him to leave the corrupt place in which he had been living and go toward a community of people worshipping Allah. He died on the journey. The angels of mercy and punishment disputed over him, but he was found nearer the land toward which he had been traveling, and the angels of mercy took him. This is an authentic narration in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 2766a-b.
That hadith does not trivialize murder. Neither does Tariq's book. Quite the opposite. Islam can hold two truths together that people sometimes want to separate: the enormity of taking a human life and the enormity of Allah's mercy.
Tariq himself brings in Qur’an 5:32 after describing his first killing:
مَنْ قَتَلَ نَفْسًا بِغَيْرِ نَفْسٍ أَوْ فَسَادٍ فِي الْأَرْضِ فَكَأَنَّمَا قَتَلَ النَّاسَ جَمِيعًا
“Whoever kills a soul—unless for a soul or for corruption in the land—it is as if he had slain mankind entirely.”
What makes the passage powerful is what he does with the verse afterward. He tells us that he wasn't Muslim then and didn't know the Qur’an. Looking backward as a believer, however, he says he feels its truth “deep in my bones.” When Manny lost his life, he writes, “something in me died too.”
There is no romanticization in that.
And this is one reason I think this book can matter beyond being a Muslim convert narrative. I spent decades teaching young people in communities where some were already in gangs, some were close to them, and others were trying to figure out whether that life offered them something they needed. Norteño, Sureño, Bulldog, Crip—it changes according to where you are, but some of the attractions repeat themselves: family, identity, protection, masculinity, excitement, loyalty, respect, the desire to prove that you are down. I have watched young people get hurt in that life. I have known young people who died in it.
Sometimes somebody who has actually been deep in that game saying don't get in this game carries a weight that no sanitized lecture ever can.
Tariq understands why the attraction exists because he lived it. One of the things I appreciated most was his treatment of the Latin Kings. He doesn't write as though there was never anything there that could attract an intelligent young man searching for identity, brotherhood, history, discipline, or purpose. He allows us to see the hope first. That makes it much more powerful when we watch that hope collapse under betrayal, violence, ego, and the realities of the life.
I also appreciated seeing Puerto Rican history and resistance woven into the story. I know Tariq personally, and I've gone to the brother myself over the years for references and information about Puerto Rican history and resistance leaders. I know some of the communities he is writing about. We have also had some of the same teachers and shaykhs. So there were places in this book where the people, ideas, and religious world he describes were very familiar to me.
There is something of the tradition of The Autobiography of Malcolm X here—not because the stories are identical, but because Malcolm demonstrated what an American redemption narrative could become when a man refused to falsify the darkness that preceded his transformation. There is courage in going this deeply into the things you have done, including things you are ashamed of and things conscience may require you to wrestle with for the rest of your life. Tariq goes there.
I actually wondered while reading why the book was spending so much time in the street life before getting more deeply into Islam. Then the conversion came. And I understood the structure.
He stuck the landing.
All those chapters before it had been setting up the punch. When the spiritual transformation finally comes, it lands because we understand what had to be transformed. The ending is beautiful. Tariq describes his journey from the Latin Kings to Islam as a struggle with his nafs, trauma, the hunger for respect, and the fear of appearing weak. The Qur’an he memorized, the prayers offered on prison floors, and the tears shed where nobody could see him become, in his words, “stitches in my reconstruction.”
And by the final page, he can look directly at somebody who may still be living the life he escaped and tell them that however far down the road they have gone, the road does not have to end where they think it does. His last formulation brings the entire title home: “The fall of a king wasn’t the end... It was the beginning of a servant.”
That's a knockout punch.
One warning, though: this is emphatically not a G-rated book. It deals with murder, gang violence, prison, drugs, sex, abuse, and other serious material, and the street language is not censored. I don't regard that as a weakness. For this particular story, cleaning everything up would destroy part of its truth.
I would genuinely like to put this book in front of some young people (and I may in my classes) and hear what they have to say about it. Because books like this matter. We need our brothers and sisters who have lived these lives to write them down—not to glorify the life, but to tell the truth about it, including what it costs to live it and what it takes to leave it.
This is in the tradition of our American shaheed, Malcolm X, El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, Rahmatullahi 'alay.
I have a lot of love and respect for my brother for putting this much of himself on the page. May Allah accept his tawbah, reward him for every person who benefits from his story, protect our young people from having to learn these lessons through blood and cages, and make this book a means by which somebody who thinks he or she has gone too far discovers that the door back to Allah is still open.
Read it. Support our brother's message. Pass it on.
Help us bring very real light to this very real darkness.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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