"Tripping with Allah" is Michael Muhammad Knight's ninth offering to the adventurous reader who more than likely stumbles into his campsite drawn by hopes for wisdom on topics germane to Islam and an Amazon recommendation; or perhaps because of the edgy hipster coolness of images surrounding the book Taqwacores and the preposterous treats inside its pages that either delight the senses or pale the sensibilities with horror. Perhaps others still find their way to Knight's door because of the world of wrestling and the whole plethora of young guy stuff people of the younger generation were weaned on, or by Five Percenter lore and history. Doesn't matter. You either become addicted and eagerly await each new offering, or you find your life's new meaning: to mount an impassioned crusade to convince the world that not only isn't MMK a REAL Muslim, but that he's an absolute lunatic who should be ignored by everyone who values their eternal soul and good standing in the Ummah.
And then along comes something like "Tripping with Allah" where the central theme that slithers through the narrative like a spinal cord is Knight's forage into the sinisterly alluring jungles of the soul promised by something with the utterly delicious Lovecraftian name: Ayahuasca. That's right. Go ahead and Google it. Google it now. Okay, got that out of the way? "Tripping with Allah" is nothing short of a Coyote Road Trip where Knight is wearing the pelt and you just sit back, shut up and keep your eyes open. Knight has been called, apparently too many times to count, the Hunter S. Thompson of Islam. I was weaned on Thompson and I'd say there's something appealing and not too far off about that comparison. But instead of saying what TWA is, let Knight show you. What he has done however, is drill down and bring up a bunch of core samples, rich ores from the bedrock of his own inner narrative of mystical/magical desire and shown you how he can build something at once darkly terrifying and magnificent, and then tell you to keep your hands off. That's his soul. But you've seen how he does it so go off and dig up the soil your own guts and find out what you're supposed to be growing there that's all your own.
What separates Knight from a long list of intellectual wankers who just rattle off a bunch of their own crap on binder paper, is that, unlike them, he knows a bunch of stuff; real stuff not normally associated with one another that he manages to work into a seamless narrative that makes sense, even if it can't possible be true. Solid stuff he picked up on that old fashioned pass-time of bygone eras called a focused education on something other than an MBA. One section of the book covers an elaborate journey by the Master Farad Muhammad as he travels all over the world, through all the magico-mystical cultures and traditions of humankind and finds himself face to face with none other than the veritable Jamal al-din al-Afghani. Then before you know it, Knight is dipping down into the scholarly work of Nikki Kedde, one of the very few people who has published anything approaching thorough and credible (though questioned by Dabashi) work on al-Afghani.
Other places we're squared off between Transformer characters and Ibn Taymiyyah and you can just HEAR the serious Muslims going "Huh? What, wait a minute!" And the kids going "Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's get onto the tripping man!" And it's just too delicious. If you really want to encounter this book in either a meaningful way or just plain fun all you can do is throw your hands up and sit back and let Knight have the wheel. But have a pen and paper handy. By all means. You will most definitely want to underline some of those names for later exploration. Because Knight has a way of allowing times and places and people, as well as discrete nontemporal mythos to collapse into an eternal now that often reveals the workings of history and its impact on current events in unique and interesting ways that are rock solid dead on. What Knight is doing you see, is leaving you crumbs in the dust. And if you stop thinking about it with your brain and trying to make sense of it, there's a good chance you'll shake lose the girders that keep us from seeing more than what we expect to see at any moment. "Tripping with Allah" is a delightful and at times hilarious read where I was slapping my knee with laughter one moment and thinking, damn, this book is a hell of a ride, and then at the next moment feeling that interior blush that says Aha! So you know, you Blue-Eyed Devil you, you know. His exquisitely powerful description of his encounters with Fatima and Ali, courtesy of Allah via the vine, are right up there with the likes of Jami, Abil Khayr, and Ibn ata'Illah.
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