Why I Am a Salafi. Michael Muhammad Knight

      Copyright © Michael Muhammad Knight 2015

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

      Cover art by Rob Regis

      Interior design by Megan Jones Design

      SOFT SKULL PRESS

      An imprint of COUNTERPOINT

      2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

      Berkeley, CA 94710

       www.softskull.com

      Distributed by Publishers Group West

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-631-5

      Contents

1. Islam for the Post-Apocalypse

2. Return to Pamphlet Islam

3. Disconnected Letters

       4. Digging Through the Crates

       5. Ibn anbal Action Figure!

       6. Salaf Planet

       7. I was a Teenage Islamist

       8. Journey to the end of Coherence: Manhaj of no Manhaj

       9. Pilgrims of the Proto-Islamic

       Notes

       Acknowledgments

       Index

      With love and peace to Azreal, pious predecessor

      1948–2013

1

       ISLAM FOR THE POST-APOCALYPSE

       What are you doing after the orgy? — Jean Baudrillard¹

      I WAS ON THE edge of the desert when the drugs wore off, good-bye Muslim Gonzo. After several hours of dimethyltryptamine-powered inward pilgrimage, the crazy was gone by sunrise. The Mother Wheel had beamed me up screaming, but the beaming back to Earth came slow and easy, leaving me in happy dumb peace. Eyad and I rolled up our sleeping bags, shared good-byes with the people who had provided the medicine, and drove off their land, back to Los Angeles.

      The medicine was ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic tea from the Amazon that had found its way into white New Age scenes and spiritual therapy culture. Ayahuasca’s main ingredients consisted of a sacred vine that opened my body up to the dimethyltryptamine, and another plant that provided the dimethyltryptamine itself. Many Muslims would insist that drinking ayahuasca is not Islamically permissible, that its physical effects amount to either a state of prohibited intoxication or something like black magic. The concern from my sisters and brothers is reasonable: In ayahuasca world, the sublime devotions came with unspeakable transgressions that simultaneously denied and affirmed the words on Allh’s pages. Whether this pushed me out of Islam or drilled me straight into its deepest guts, I can’t say, but that is an old problem of mystical experience.

      Whether all or arm, I couldn’t have experienced ayahuasca as anything other than a Muslim, embarking on an entirely Muslim trip. The chemical purging and healing found their expression through the symbolic language of Islam, or at least an archive of stories and reference points in my brain that I have catalogued as “Islam.” In the car I told Eyad about some of the visions, not sure how it might strike his own Muslim sensibilities or if it was even the kind of thing that I should share with others. Within Islamic tradition, sages have often advised that we lock this kind of experience in our hearts, as the disclosure could harm our communities or even ourselves. I didn’t mention every detail of the trip to Eyad; some of the visions were so far off the map that I needed time alone with them first, if only to ask what in my head could have made those visions possible.

      It would have to come out sooner or later, because writing is my religion as much as anything. The full story went into Tripping with Allah, my Great American Muslim Drug Adventure. After the book came out, the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences described my ayahuasca vision as a “frankly disturbing blending of erotic and religious imagery.”² This pretty much fits.

      Reclining the passenger seat all the way back, carried by Eyad’s machine back to civilization, I not only felt gratitude for what had transpired (whether it had been a genuine mystical penetration or just an explosion of the right chemicals), but also had to smile at what seemed like a private joke between Creator and created. It was at the edge of the desert, far beyond the limits of proper Muslims, that my Islam looked anything like the aqq, the Absolute Reality. It was Out There, viewing the center from the outermost edge, that I found my sweetness for the center. For all the erotic disturbances and throw-stones-at-his-head levels of blasphemy, ayahuasca had put me in the right condition for visiting a mosque.

      Eyad drove us to one of the big ones