TRIPPING WITH ALLAH: ISLAM, DRUGS AND WRITING - MICHAEL MUHAMMAD KNIGHT

Not often does a book so accurately diagnose its own weaknesses as this one. And so late in the book as well. In the last 5 pages or so of MMK’s book about drugs and Islam he confesses that his true addiction, beyond his obsession with weightlifting and masturbation or the drugs or the many strains of Islam he’s interested in, all of which are explored to some degree or another in the text, is writing. He comes clean about how driven and obsessed he is with writing, especially of the autobiographical variety, and how he’s been this way his whole life. And this book really reflects that. There’s some really good, interesting shit in here, including the climatic ayahuasca trip the whole thing is built around, but also a ton of chaff that should have been cut. Chaff first: there’s a bunch of stuff about wrestling, that basically comes out of nowhere. I gather that professional wrestling is important to Knight, and he relays a story here about a time where he wrestled some old guy (who, apparently, is pro-wrestling famous, though that’s not my world so I didn’t recognize him) which seems to only be in this book because it happened to him and he’s compelled to write about it. Likewise, he spends a lot of time watching and thus writing about Transformers, the shitty 80’s TV show, which also never seems to actually connect with the stuff he’s talking about. There’s a ton about his chronic masturbation and bodybuilding and his fears that becoming an academic, he’s in grad school at Harvard during the book and, I believe, is a professor of Islamic studies now, will make his gonzo-style (he himself brings up Hunter Thompson multiple times, it’s not me putting that on him) writing boring. And perhaps that is true, academics do often write boring detached essays that suck the life out of their subjects. However, I’m most interested in Knight when he’s not writing about his personal life but rather writing about more “academic” studies. For instance, there’s long passages and chapters about the history of Islamic thinking w/r/t drugs. Does the Koran bar all drugs, or just alcohol (or, really, just wine)? What about caffeine? How do other religious traditions deal with substances? How does one read an almost 2000 year old text for rules regarding matters that were not at issue when the Prophet was alive? All of this is more interesting than Knight’s personal reflections. The drug stuff itself does lead to a satisfying conclusion. Knight attempts to do Ayahuasca a few times, first with the Santo Daime church then with some new-agey Shaman in California. The last time he really gets blasted into the spirit realm and has a pretty insane vision in which he becomes Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet and gets fucked by her Husband (and first male Islamic convert) Ali. Very far-out and he uses the experience to talk about the divine feminine in Islam and monotheistic religions in general, which is a topic I wish he’d spent more time on. I was somewhat disappointed he didn’t really investigate “Ayahuasca” as a whole, especially the recent YT, western obsession with it. He has this whole thing about how it’s “natural” and embedded in a cultural tradition and, thus, better than something like LSD. I was reminded of a recent Erik Davis essay where he talks about how one of Acid’s main selling points is that it doesn’t come with the culturally appropriator baggage that these other hallucinogens do. Mushrooms and Ayahuasca and Ibogaine are all culturally embedded in societies ravaged by colonialism and capitalism. Even if you’re doing these things “with a shaman” you’re not part of those cultures. Authenticity is not for sale in this way. Despite what Knight thinks you most certainly can just take Ayahuasca without a shaman’s oversight. I did exactly this when I was 19, with ingredients I bought online and cooked up in my shitty apartment, and ended up with a very, very powerful and strange experience that I think about to this day. And, as a YT guy who’s into fringe religious beliefs and who is working/studying at Harvard, LSD is actually his heritage and culture, he just doesn’t like it because it’s not cool the way Ayahuasca is. Anyway, I wish he’d thought about those issues more. There’s a part where he talks at a gathering of intelligence community folks about Islam and Al-Queda and I wish he’d been more ‘noided about why he was being asked to be there besides “this is really weird.” Especially given his love and involvement with the Black Muslim communities of NYC, since, to name just one example, the CIA sent Tablighin Jamaat and Sheik Mubark Gilani  into USA mosques to recruit Black American Muslims, especially in Brooklyn, to fight USSR in Afghanistan. Anyway, when Knight’s talking about something I’m interested in, he’s great and full of interesting information, I only hope that his fears become true and his deepening involvement in academia remove the more autobiographical aspects of his writing and he can focus on the more “boring” non-personal issues. 1 endless trip.