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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. Amazonian shamanism meets Christianity meets West African religion meets Islam in this work of reflection and inward adventure. Knight, the “Hunter S. Thompson of Islamic literature” seeks reconciliation between his Muslim identity and his drinking of ayahuasca, a psychedelic tea that has been used in the Amazon for centuries. His experience becomes an opportunity to investigate complex issues of drugs, religion, and modernity.Though essential for readers interested in Islam or the growing popularity of ayahuasca, this book is truly about neither Islam nor ayahuasca. Tripping with Allah provides an accessible look into the construction of religion, the often artificial borders dividing these constructions, and the ways in which religion might change in an increasingly globalized world.Finally, Tripping with Allah not only explores Islam and drugs, but also Knight’s own process of creativity and discovery.

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When Michael Muhammad Knight sets out to write the definitive biography of his “Anarcho-Sufi” hero and mentor, writer Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), he makes a startling discovery that changes everything. At the same time that he grows disillusioned with his idol, Knight finds that his own books have led to American Muslim youths making a countercultural idol of him, placing him on the same pedestal that he had given Wilson.In an attempt to forge his own path, Knight pledges himself to an Iranian Sufi order that Wilson had almost joined, attempts to write the Great American Queer Islamo-Futurist Novel, and even creates his own mosque in the wilderness of West Virginia. He also employs the “cut-up” writing method of Bey’s friend, the late William S. Burroughs, to the Qur’an, subjecting Islam’s holiest scripture to literary experimentation.William S. Burroughs vs. the Qur’an is the struggle of a hero-worshiper without heroes and the meeting of religious and artistic paths, the quest of a writer as spiritual seeker.

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The Salafi are a revivalist Sunni Muslim movement misunderstood by most Americans, and even many Muslims. The New York Times’ first reference to Salafis as a distinct group appears in 1979 after a band of armed men seized control of the Great Mosque in Mecca. After 1979, there is not another mention of Salafis in the Times until 2000, in an article on links between Yemeni radicals and Osama Bin Ladin. In 2013, an article appeared in USA Today labeling Salafis as Sunni Islam’s “most radical sect” and declaring them “the most anti-Western” of any Islamist group. Today, Salafism is widely implicated in the rise of ISIS.Knight—an acclaimed writer who has explored his own evolving religious beliefs in a range of novels, memoirs and essays—uses this mislabeling as yet another opportunity to engage those corners of Islamic tradition that others might dismiss as absurd or dangerous.Why I am Salafi examines problems of interpretation, practice, and community, illustrating why terms like orthodox or progressive, Sufi or Salafi often fail to convey the reality of Muslim experience. Knight’s analysis includes examination of his own complex religious journey, having converted to Islam at sixteen, studying at a madrassa in Pakistan at seventeen, to

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