Tripping with Allah: Islam, Drugs, and Writing

by Michael Muhammad Knight

Overview

If Tripping With Allah is a road book, it's a road book in the tradition of 2001: A Space Odyssey, rather than On the Road. Knight, the "Hunter S. Thompson of Islamic literature," places his Muslim identity in conversation with his drinking of ayahuasca, a psychedelic tea used in Amazonian shamanism. Knight pursues an ecstatic, ayahuasca-fueled vision of Fatima, daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, while encountering questions of drugs, religion, modernity, and his own racialized and gendered self along the way. The journey is driven not only by Knight's search for meaning as an American Muslim, but also his treatment of writing as its own spiritual path. Between attempts at mystical drug visions, Tripping With Allah explores Knight's personal process of creativity and discovery.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781593764432
Publisher:	Soft Skull Press, Inc.
Publication date:	03/12/2013
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	436,108
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Michael Muhammad Knight is a novelist, essayist, and journalist. He converted to Islam at 16, after reading Autobiography of Malcom X, and traveled to Islamabad at age 17 to study at a madrassa. He is the author of The Taqwacores, Impossible Man, Osama Van Halen, Journey to the End of Islam, and William S. Burroughs vs. The Qur’an. Knight lives in New York and North Carolina.

Table of Contents

Cybertron Kids 1

Civilization Class 15

Wisdom Elevates Exceptional Devils 27

Islam and Equality 41

Avicenna and the Monolith 53

Vines and Veils 65

Coffee Consciousness 69

Bumblebee 83

Church Fathers and Mothers 93

Why Did Moses Have a Hard Time Civilizing the Devil? 105

Jehangir Allah 121

Scholars and Martyrs 133

Macho Madness 147

Initiation 159

Between Heads 179

Snakes of the Grafted Type 187

Al-Najm 205

Knowledge Build/Destroy 245

Knowledge Born 257

Chapel of the Chimes 261

Editorial Reviews

There are few, if any, Muslim writers like Knight (Why I Am A Five Percenter), who has been called the Hunter S. Thompson of Islamic literature. This memoir of his time with the spiritual group Santo Daime and ayahuasca, the psychedelic drug community members ingest to get closer to the divine, cements Knight's status as Islam's gonzo experimentalist. The book references 1980s wrestling and cartoons, graphic descriptions of Knight's eating disorder while he was living out of his car, and his sexual dysfunction before he ingests ayahuasca. When he finally takes the drug, it is a fascinating, odd trip, but one that transforms him for the better and seems to make him understand women with a humanity that eluded him during his misogynistic past. Knight has a gift for humor and honesty, though it's not always clear where, or if, his trip will end. Chapters about coffee, cannabis, and other drugs seem off-topic, but Knight's storytelling allows for a memorable arrival at the destination.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly

A personal quest into the intersection of Islam and mind-altering drugs. "I am a Muslim with plans with tripping with Allah, if Allah so wills, making me simultaneously a participant in two religions of high discomfort in our present America." A sentence like that, which comes early in the pages of Knight's (Osama Van Halen, 2009, etc.) memoir, isn't going to win its author points with Homeland Security or the Salafi mullahs. It is thoroughly revealing of Knight's program, however, which started off as a scholarly inquiry: He wanted to consider the effects of drug use on a modern Islamic practitioner--a "chemically enhanced Sufism," as a friend puts it--in much the same way an anthropologist might look at a drug-induced spirit journey among an Amazonian people. The author is cautiously academic in some respects; he worries, for example, that his discipline is painting with too wide a brush by applying the rubric "shamanism"--once specific to the peoples of northern Siberia--to such spirit journeys around the world. But Knight is also exuberant, sometimes to the point of channeling, directly or indirectly, the menacing drug dealer in the movie Withnail & I (1987): "I've put substances into my body that are so fuckin' condemned by society that I wouldn't even name them to you. So, from that experience, I'd say to go for it." Does Knight succeed in melding ayahuasca and Islam? It's most certainly worth reading this intelligent book to find out, for it has, beg pardon, a higher purpose than its surface gonzoism might suggest at first, with its smart meditations on consciousness and the passage of time. William James, suffice it to say, would probably be appalled at first, and then fascinated.

Kirkus Reviews