Why I Am a Salafi. Michael Muhammad Knight
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Ayahuasca, like the Qur’
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 Mu
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