Monday , March 18 2024
One of the more vivid descriptions of the artistic soul taking the next steps on its long road of creativity.

Book Review: Tripping with Allah: Islam, Drugs, and Writing by Michael Muhammad Knight

The idea of using drugs in order to achieve some sort of spiritual enlightenment has been around for probably as long as humanity. Whether looking for answers to great mystical questions or just on a personal quest for enlightenment, the use of external stimulants cut across all lines of race, creed, and colour. However, there’s also a lot of bullshit associated with the whole “take drugs and see god” line of thought. First there’s the whole idea that one man’s sacrament is another man’s criminal offence or sacrilege. Then there are those who will look for any excuse to take drugs and pass it off as looking for god in an attempt to justify their actions.

Complicating matters is the fact there seems to be just as many ways to achieve hallucinations without drugs as with. Is a vision more valid because you starved yourself until you were out of your mind instead of ingesting a peyote button? The intent is the same after all. You’re trying to enter an altered state of conscience through artificial means. Of course, you also have to ask why does a person feel they need to have some sort of vision about their god. Are they looking to make themselves important because they’ve received some great communique to spread among the masses? If not that, what is it people are looking for when they try for these visions? They must feel like something is lacking if they are so desperate to talk to god they’re going to put themselves through any of these ordeals.

It was with all this in mind I read Michael Muhammad Knight’s book about drugs, Islam, and his continued attempts to define his place in the world, Tripping with Allah: Islam, Drugs, and Writing, published by Soft Skull Press and distributed by Publishers Group Canada. Knight writes about himself with an honesty that borders on public flagellation. However, unlike most of those who write about themselves, it’s never his intent to either garner followers or his reader’s sympathy. If he ever ended up on Oprah, instead of her audience of repressed middle-class housewives feeling all warm and cuddly from hearing about someone else’s suffering, their world view would be so shattered they’d probably wind up trashing the studio before heading home to castrate their husbands.

Okay maybe that’s a little over the top, but you get the idea. Not only do his books expose things about himself most people wouldn’t admit even to their shrinks for fear of being strapped in a jacket whose sleeves face the wrong way, he also has a nasty habit of reminding white Europeans that most of what’s happening in the world is as a direct result of actions carried out in their names. Whether it be our colonial history coming back to haunt us or our current form of colonial oppression in the form of global markets and the exploitation of developing nation’s natural resources. What’s even scarier about Knight is now he that has a Harvard education, he can map out the patterns clearly enough with examples so anybody can understand them. He can then cite sources confirming what he’s talking about. Examples in this book range from how the desire for sugar cane in Europe led to decimating the population of West Africa via the slave trade to how the colonial powers in Rwanda sowed the seeds of discontent between peoples which resulted in genocide.

So what the hell does any of this have to with drugs and Allah? Well, Knight looks at the world in terms similar to that of chaos theory. What are the ripple effects of him, and others like him, ingesting a drug. What’s the history behind a drug’s availability in the West and what’s had to happen in order for this drug to end up in his hand? Then there’s also the whole question of the cultural implications of a white guy taking a drug whose origins lie somewhere in the depths of the Amazon rain forest and the indigenous people of the region. Doesn’t this just make him another one of those New Agers with more money than sense? Take some indigenous people’s tribal rite and, by turning into a commercial commodity (pay X amount of money for a weekend retreat with shaman and drug and see god), make it impossible for them to afford it any more.

Of course there’s also the whole question of whether or not there’s a role for drugs to play in Islam. In spite of the myths about assassins, hash eating, and tales told by the Beat generation of ingesting drugs in Muslim countries, much of mainstream Islam takes the lines in the Quran prohibiting prayer while intoxicated as the final word on the matter. The good scholar he is, Knight collects and compares all the arguments for and against using drugs to aid in receiving messages from Allah. While there appears to be some wriggle room depending on interpretations and traditions followed, its really only the mystical Sufis who talk openly about utilizing drugs to achieve enlightenment.

Of course all these arguments and discussions are presented in Knight’s own unique style. He flips between scholarly dissertation and free association/stream of consciousness without skipping a beat or losing his thread. He circles around his primary subject matter of drugs like a bird of prey hovering over its target until he finally drops out of the sky and brings us smack dab into a moment. However, just as we settle into what are expectations have caused us to anticipate, as he brings us through his experience and their impact on his life, he slams on the brakes and begins to deconstruct the book your holding in your hands.

He had set out to write a book about drugs and Islam in the style of his early novels, but Harvard University and academia wouldn’t allow it. He worries aloud about how and what his university education and studies have done to him. What happened to the wild and crazy voice which spoke to a generation of disenfranchised young Muslims? Has schooling doomed him to the world of footnotes and cited sources? Yet when he looks back on the days when he was the anarchist/punk author, describing the physical, mental, and emotional abuse he put himself through, you wonder what he’s missing.

Yet in the midst of this furious retracing of his path, he also has what I think is the most important revelation of the book. His drug of choice, his addiction if you like, is writing. He talks of those he’s met who say they are writers, yet have somehow never managed to put pen to paper. While he, on the other hand, can’t stop writing. He’s stayed up late into the night abusing his body writing, he has a variety of incomplete manuscripts stored in his desktop computer and he has his clearest visions through the spilling out of words on paper or into his keyboard. Other drugs have proven to be hit and miss in their effectiveness, but writing is the one he always comes back to and the one which always seems to deliver.

Knight is at his self-analytical best in this book. For all his apparent flailing in different thematic directions, he is carefully guiding us through his personal process. He has travelled the byways and highways of North America, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia visiting shrines, holy sites, mosques, mosh pits, 7-11s, punk clubs, gyms and wrestling rings looking for his truth. He has read the work of Islamic scholars dating back to the early days of the religion, the writings of Elijah Muhammad and listened to the wisdom of Clarence 13X, the founder of the Five Percenters, via the words of those in the movement today.

The voice he is so worried about losing is strong and clear. It is the culmination of all his experiences. He is a reflection of everything he has seen, been, experienced, and prayed for and this book is both a summarization and conclusion to the journey he set out on when, at the age of 17 after reading the autobiography of Malcolm X, he converted to Islam. Out of the chaos that has been his life, highlights of which are included in this book, he has come to the calm of acceptance. He’s dealt with his personal demons and is now ready to move on to whatever awaits him as an artist, an academic, and a Muslim.

Tripping with Allah may not be the great Islamic drug book he set out to write. Instead, Knight has treated us to a kind of postmodern Portrait Of an Artist as a Young Man. It now seems he’s ready, as James Joyce put it, “to go forth to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his people”. Don’t come looking to this book for the answers to your own questions. What you will find is one of the more vivid descriptions of the artistic soul taking the next steps on its long road of creativity and one man coming to terms with himself and his beliefs written with passion and truth. It might not always be a pretty picture, but it’s always thought provoking and intelligent.

About Richard Marcus

Richard Marcus is the author of three books commissioned by Ulysses Press, "What Will Happen In Eragon IV?" (2009) and "The Unofficial Heroes Of Olympus Companion" and "Introduction to Greek Mythology For Kids". Aside from Blogcritics he contributes to Qantara.de and his work has appeared in the German edition of Rolling Stone Magazine and has been translated into numerous languages in multiple publications.

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7 comments

  1. You ask why would people seek to speak to God unless dissatisfied with their own life. Vedanta philosophy would answer that we take psychedelic drugs to return us to the source of the universe and dissolve our material egos. Whilst using our worldly senses, the ego attaches itself to the idea that there is an object and someone perceiving that object. This convinces us that we are separate beings inside bags of flesh when in reality there is just one energy and we are all it. What psychedelics show us is that the doors of perception should be cleansed of the ego as the language/cognition it uses imply individualism and not Oneness. Once you dissolve language as being harmful to human beings, you experience pure bliss and synchronicity. It’s telling that human beings must reset themselves daily with a dimethyltryptamine dose in order to feel ‘human’ again. Ask an insomniac what going without REM sleep is like.

    • Why make up a god to answer these questions?

      • God comes in as a result of philosophy; the philosophy is informed by the experience. Not every mystical philosophy posits the existence of God. For instance, the difference between the Vedanta philosophy and Buddhist philosophy is exactly that; the Vedanta posits the existence of Brahman, or God, and Buddhism rejects such a notion. Buddhism and Jainism are the only known non-theistic and active philosophies. What separates Buddhism and Jainism is, the Jains posit the existence of an absolute soul but Buddhists reject this as well. In fact, Buddhists reject even the notion of an objective reality; their philosophy is based on the concept of Emptiness. This is a very subtle concept and difficult to properly understand without a mature practice . . .

  2. Michael Muhammad Knight has insufferable, unsupported and juvenile opinions/insults regarding Henry Corbin which are intolerably weak and undefended. MMK engages in ad hominem against Corbin, and merely jeers with no substance at all to his claims. What Henry Corbin has to say is unique and urgent for the modern world (and goes far beyond Islam/Islamic philosophy in its scope) ; MMK displays only crude ignorance in his empty dismissals of the vast work of Corbin, against which the work of MMK is finger painting at best. Michael Muhammad Knight needs to focus fully on his wrestling career, and stop his puerile attacks against intellectuals who tower above him in rank of scholar and genius. Michael, you simply aren’t cut out for the world of thought. Work on your wrestling moves and your masturbation technique, you seem much more suited for those pursuits than the world of thought and philosophy.