By Michael Muhammad Knight
Vice.Com
The place of drugs in Islam is much more complicated than most people
recognize. Because the Qur’an only speaks specifically of wine, Muslims
have had to figure out Islamic positions on other substances. The
absence of a Qur’anic verse or authentic statement from the Prophet on
weed, for example, allowed for a number of possibilities. Some thinkers
used qiyas (analogical reasoning) to make a ruling on weed
derived from rulings on alcohol: If wine is intoxicating and forbidden
in the Qur’an, then all intoxicants belong in the category of wine.
Because wine is haram (prohibited), then so must be hashish (which, lacking our modern distinctions, included pot).
Other Muslims, based on a more literal reading of the Qur’an, argued
that no one has a right to forbid what the Qur’an itself does not. They
felt that for wine and hashish to share one quality does not mean that
they are automatically in the same class of substance. The Qur’an’s
silence on weed empowered both the herb’s opponents and defenders.
Muslims invented the coffee house as we now know it, and were
responsible for coffee finding its way into Christian Europe. But when
coffee first made its way from Ethiopia into Yemen and up the Arabian
Peninsula, some Muslims challenged its appropriateness. It was clear to
early observers that coffee had an effect on people, but legal thinkers
had to decide whether these effects qualified as intoxication. More
threatening than coffee’s impact on the body, however, was the drink’s
social consequence. Like wine drinkers, coffee drinkers tended to
assemble in groups. Could the coffee house invite the same troublesome
activities that surrounded taverns? Moreover, coffee appeared to assist
Sufis in their all-night gatherings, leading some to consider that
prohibiting coffee would also aid in the suppression of controversial
religious practices and subversive teachings.
So there have been times and places in which Islam seemed to be OK with
weed, and also contexts in which Islam condemned coffee. The Muslim
position on a given substance, therefore, is less about what “Islam”
says than the interpretive choices that Muslims make. These histories
informed my forthcoming book, Tripping with Allah, in which I attempt to place Islamic tradition in dialogue with ayahuasca, a psychoactive tea made from the Amazon’s Banisteriopsis caapi
vine. My friends who drank ayahuasca said that it had healing
qualities; the vine is supposed to pull out all the poisonous shit
that’s inside of you.
The book’s dialogue takes place within my own self, as a Muslim
drinking ayahuasca. I had no expectations for what would be said to me
by the weird insect creatures, flying jaguars, or whatever people saw on
ayahuasca, but I brought my own materials to the sacred vine. I came to
ayahuasca as a Muslim, with the scriptures, myths, ritual acts, and
historic personalities of multiple Islamic traditions in my head.
Ayahuasca worked with these things, shaking them up to be reprocessed.
Inside me, the chemicals met the texts and their mashing together gave
me some useful craziness.
I understand why the self-appointed protectors of my chosen tradition
might oppose ayahuasca. Jumbling up your consciousness can rip holes in
the fences that keep a scripture’s meanings stable. Tripping with Allah
could be the most heretical and blasphemous material that I have
produced in roughly a decade of writing crazy books, but it brought me
to an entirely different place. I drove straight for the edge of the
cliff, but I ended up flying.
The day after my ayahuasca trip, I went to the mosque and did some
regular Muslim prayers, feeling as though I had been cleansed of so much
angst and alienation that had fueled my weird and punky shit over the
years. I can even go to a Salafi mosque and just look for the good in
whatever they have. Say what you want about the Salafis, but it’s one
way—not the only one—of loving the Prophet.
I don’t know what it all means. I still hold unpopular opinions, fail
to meet many Muslims’ checklists for doctrinal “orthodoxy,” and many
would take offense that I owe much of my big Muslim reconciliation to
psychedelic shamanism. I might have been heading this way already, but
it was largely due to an unspeakable drug-induced hallucination that I
could reopen my heart to the Prophet and the sunna, his sublime
example, which I had kept at arm’s length for years. Whether or not it
makes sense, this is my new condition. For me, ayahuasca is an Islamic
drug.
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