I had a really strange experience while reading William S Burroughs vs. The Qur’an, the latest book by Michael Muhammad Knight, published by the Counterpoint Press imprint Soft Skull Press. I was almost finished with the book and all of a sudden came across my own words staring back at me from the page. It was surreal to find myself being quoted in somebody else’s work to begin with, but even weirder to see how the words dovetailed with Knight’s theme.
The quote was from my review of his book Journey To The End Of Islam and I had said something along the lines of how if more people were as brave and honest as Knight was in discussing their religion the world would be better off. He freaked out. “The brave and honest porkshit is artistic and spiritual sabotage. When someone puts that psychic poison on you how can you ever write a word?” That might sound like he’s being ungrateful, even petulant, but in the context of the book it actually makes perfect sense and I get where he’s coming from. For while his books have been all about telling people all about his quest to find himself within his religion, people have started looking to him as if he’s the answer to that question for themselves.
In William S Burroughs Vs The Qur’an Knight details how his search for his place in Islam inevitably led him to an earlier generation of white Western converts to Islam. In particular he tells of his attempt at writing the definitive biography of his Anarcho-Sufi hero and mentor Peter Lamborn Wilson, also known as Hakim Bey. The first part of the book is taken up with his recounting his times spent with Wilson and excerpts from the biography he’s destined never to finish. We learn that Wilson’s Islam has its sources in both the experiences of Burroughs and other Beats (Paul Bowles, Alan Ginsberg and the rest) in Tangiers during the years of the International Zone and the Moorish Science Temple of America founded by Noble Drew Ali of Chicago.
While I can understand Knight’s attraction to the idea of an Islamic lineage with white American roots, the more he begins to detail Wilson’s life and experiences the more I began to wonder whether he was clutching at straws looking to this guy as any sort of spiritual guide. From his experiences with LSD guru Timothy Leary to his wanderings through India he seemed more intent on discovering his capacity for ingesting drugs than any sort of spiritual advancement. It isn’t until he ends up in Iran in the 1970s that he even settles to any sort of apparently serious spiritual advancement. Even that is tainted by the fact that the group he joins, The Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, is described by Knight as “a politically ambitious mystico-fascist cult” whose purpose seems to be give the then Shah of Iran the veneer of spirituality.
However, while his association The Academy raises some doubts in Knight’s mind, it’s not where or who Wilson studied with that’s important. It’s how he studied and his experiments with various sects and forms of Islam that Knight identifies with. Then there is the whole issue of lineage. In Islam a spiritual teacher’s credibility is increased by those he sites from previous generations as being the sources for his wisdom. Wilson traces his lineage back to Medieval times and the leader of the alleged drug crazed sect notorious in the West known as the Assassins, Hassa-i Sabbah, via William S Burroughs. The sect was famous for their doctrine of Qiyamat which cancelled all religious laws that, according to Wilson, was a call for all Muslims to realize the “Imam of his own being”.
For Knight this more or less says each of us our are own god, the basic tenet of the African American Islamic group the Five Percenters with whom he identifies. However, there’s a twisted secret buried at the heart of Wilson’s Islam that makes it impossible for Knight to see him in the same light anymore. Although a good part of William S Burroughs Vs. The Qur’an shows us his attempts to find a way that Wilson’s writings endorsing pedophilia are merely some sort of shock tactic or an allegory of some kind (after all, the great mystic Rumi wrote a poem about two women who had sex with a donkey), he can’t escape the fact that his mentor sees nothing wrong with an adult man having sex with a child. Knight even goes to the extent of writing his own homo/erotic Islamic science fiction story (of which excerpts are included) in an attempt to see if he can see a way of justifying his mentor’s disturbing writings.