Why I Am a Salafi. Michael Muhammad Knight

Why I Am a Salafi

Allh had expressed himself through a form. In sober world, Allh was not represented in statues or pictures or anything accessible through my bodily senses but still promised that he was closer to me than the vein in my neck. My body, the only means through which I could begin to comprehend anything, became my sign and proof. My body gave voice to an Allh with no body, both in my recitation of Allh’s speech and my body’s existence.

Ayahuasca, like the Qur’n, both says and unsays. I testified to a big nothing with the vague sense that this nothing was somehow benevolent, that the nothing showed me love (after torture) during my holy drug quest. I named Muammad as the messenger who pointed me to the nothing, and through my testimony named myself in the Muslim family. Who was Muammad? Our invisible father that I would chase after forever, perhaps an idea of being human that I hoped to actualize with my movements and postures. Muammad was an experience that I sought in my skin. Muammad, whoever or whatever he was, had made a brief appearance in my ayahuasca visions, during which he seemed to undergo the same kind of psychic purging and healing that ayahuasca was supposed to give me. Maybe the healing that I witnessed in Muammad signified only what was happening in my own self. Tradition says that if you see Muammad in a dream or vision, you’ve really seen him, because devils cannot assume his form. My relationship to Muammad—that is, my imagination of Muammad—had always been complex, but ayahuasca cleaned him out, or rather cleaned my imagination of him, allowing the two of us to start over. Yearning for Muammad, who was dead and buried but existed everywhere as a set of bodily disciplines, I hoped that adherence to these practices could actualize Muammadness in my heart—producing first a conception of Muammad and then a better lover of Muammad in me.

After my return to the East Coast, I started attending congregational Friday prayers held by the Muslim Students Association (MSA) at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Sermons by college kids, engineering professors, and community uncles were fairly hit-or-miss, but there was more to our assembly than mere discourse or even conformity of belief. I did not interrogate the brothers and sisters in those congregations for their views on scriptural controversies. Nor am I convinced that terms like mainstream or orthodoxy could hold much power to explain every participant’s private beliefs: MSA kids don’t tend to be theologians. On the other side, they knew nothing of the unacceptable offenses in my head. No one asks for your beliefs at the door. Whatever they/we believed about the fundamental nature of the universe, we could become intelligible Muslims to each other through physical gestures. Moving together in accordance with a shared script, our bodies performed/created a bond between us—and also between our congregation and a larger tradition, because we did not invent those movements. We had to inherit them from somewhere. In acting out the prayer, we followed the movements of Muammad’s body, and the bodies of those who knew him, the people who followed him and loved him and struggled and sometimes drank the water from his ablutions.

This prayer acted as a kind of medicine for me. Following my long run of doctrinal offenses, transgressive actions, questionable affiliations, and drugs, it felt as if I had exhausted the possibilities. The condition of being a Muslim might require that some things be concretized and knowable as “Muslim.” For all the internal breaks and cuts and chaos in my psychedelic visions of gushing blood and theophanic genitalia, I also loved the mosque as a house of predictable behaviors. Stumbling into a mosque while in a state of shock from my interstellar voyage, I still knew what to do and how to interact with my sisters and brothers. In a head like that, perhaps a tradition of practice could anchor me down, stabilizing what had been thrown to the winds.

Embodied practices are often dismissed as irrational and superstitious, and many would see it as a hallmark of post-Enlightenment modernity that good religion does not concern itself with the minutia of ritual performance. Good religion is supposed to focus on consciousness and intentionality; bad religion means marking truth on the body itself. Belief in the importance of the flesh is seen as a primitive worldview that must surrender to the light of abstract, disembodied reason. To have an apparent fixation on “correct” practice causes some Muslims to be ridiculed by their peers, but practice might have been what I needed. After the chemically informed cracking and resealing of my selfhood at the edge of the desert, I felt thankful that being Muslim gave my body a script to follow. Sometimes I prayed because I already believed in the script, but sometimes adherence to the script transformed me into someone who could believe in the script. The Islam that I needed was not intellectual, but operational. After coming down from ayahuasca, you realize that what you do might actually make you what you are.

With this rethinking of my Muslim body, my practice—and the roots of my practice, the predecessors from whom I inherited this technology of Muslim selfhood—began to matter to me in new ways, and I could reconsider the discipline of my brothers at the mosque who rolled up their pant legs because they wanted to imitate the Prophet, whose garments never passed his ankles. These brothers were also the ones who taught me to sit when I pissed because it had been the Prophet’s way. Maybe they weren’t so bad. A lifetime ago, I had a run as one of those guys, but I ditched it all to become the kind of Muslim who consumes psychoactive teas with Amazonian shamans. Muslims often speak of

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