Green Tea With Imam of the Age

By Michael Muhammad Knight

New York State has come under an arctic blast and I’m driving four hundred miles to meet a brilliant writer who, while not Muslim per se, goes a long way in exposing the real richness and depth of Islam.

No, it’s not John Esposito.

Peter Lamborn Wilson has been described somewhere as an “Anarcho-Sufi.” I don’t know what that means but it sure as hell sounds cooler than “Progressive.” In 1965 a “brilliant junky 350-pound jazz saxophonist poet” named Walid al-Taha introduced him to the Moorish Orthodox Church, after which he disappeared into far-flung wanderings across the Muslim world soaking in all the classical texts and tattered heretics and local scenes he could find. In Iran he applied for a two-week visa and stayed for seven years, leaving when the Revolution came. He has become something of a living myth, an Old Man on the Mountain for numerous intellectual circles. Peter has written scores of books and articles (sometimes going by Hakim Bey), hosted his own radio show, “Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade,” and was a founding member of the Ibn ‘Arabi Society (he remains an honorary fellow).

I get off I-87 and stop at a bar on the margins of the Catskill Mountains to find five or six middle-aged men and one of their wives watching the Carolina-St. Louis game on a small TV. They stare at me like tough guys but can’t hold eye contact when I give it back to them. I belly up to the bar and order something for courtesy. On TV the play-by-play man mentions Carolina receiver Muhsin Muhammad, prompting the townie on my left to look up from his beer.

“Muhsin Muhammad,” he says with a tone like his dog had just pooped on the rug and he couldn’t help but find it amusing. No need to describe the man’s physical appearance; he looks like every hick you’ve ever seen.

I sleep poorly in a grocer’s parking lot, turning the car on every hour to blast the heat. I wake up for the last time around five or so, turn the ignition and put it in drive. As the sun comes up my horizon is walled off by Catskills on every side, enclosing the land like a sanctified holy place. I’d feel like I’m in Masshad or something if it wasn’t for the blinding bright snow.
It’s a decent drive passing small-town cemeteries with snow-topped tombstones and old churches left half-naked by peeling paint. My eyes hurt. I call when I reach his town. He asks if I can get a quart of milk on the way.

As I pull up on his quiet side-street he’s standing in the front door, sporting a flannel shirt and Johnny Legend beard.

“As-salaamu alaikum,” he says. I return it. We shake hands and he holds the door for me. I follow him up a narrow flight of stairs to his kitchen/living room past shelves stocked with books and manuscripts. We sit on opposite sides of a cluttered table and he begins on a string of stories reaching from North Africa to Java starring hashish-den sayyeds, scraggly-haired opium Sufis, Muharram self-mutilators and the Drooling Moron of Quetta. I open a book on the table, something about Ahlul-Bayt Sufis, and find a personalized note on the inside cover: “To Peter Lamborn Wilson: you are the Imam of the Age.” Peter makes me green tea and serves it in what looks more like a bowl than a cup, but it’s beautifully patterned.

The Imam of the Age talks about Islam’s history on this Turtle Island. There may be a weird secret to Chicago, he says. Noble Drew Ali left New Jersey in 1925 believing that the Windy City was somehow "closer to Islam.” Facing a power struggle after W.D. Fard’s disappearance, Elijah Muhammad also moved his base to Chicago. Incidentally, ISNA holds their convention there every year. The historical root for all of this is probably lost forever but Peter says it might have something to do with a community of runaway slaves, white indentured servants and Pawnee Indians known as the Ishmaels, who in 1785 settled in what is now Indianopolis (incidentally again, home of ISNA’s headquarters) and traveled a triangle from the Indiana towns of Morocco and Mecca to Mahomet, Illinois.

I tell him about the three times I have been to Chicago, starting with the two-hour layover on my flight to Pakistan. Six years later I’d go back for the amazing week of Wesley Willis’ memorial service and the ISNA Convention, when Earth was closer to Mars than it had been in 59,619 years. During my most recent trip I met Elijah Muhammad’s grandson at a cemetery and learned the real story of W.D. Fard.

So we talk about Fard and how Elijah’s grandson said he was really a Pakistani Sunni. And we talk about the Ansaru Allah’s corrupt leader who claimed that Fard was a Communist until the NOI allegedly told him “get out of the Islam game or else,” after which the man fled to Georgia and built a giant pyramid in the woods. Then we talk about the callous on Wesley’s forehead with all its holy ramifications; there’s a special term for it among Sufis or Shias or somebody, they call it the Gatta. Then Peter compares the Prophet’s Night Journey to Siberian Shamanism and follows with the tale of a Moorish Muslim pirate who was among the first settlers of Brooklyn and whose descendents married into all the prominent New York families. Our dialogue goes everywhere and makes sharp turns on tangents—but to participate in the oral transmission of knowledge with somebody like Peter Lamborn Wilson connects you to secret chains of lineage going back to holy men in both hemispheres. At least that’s how it feels, sitting in this man’s kitchen. He has been everywhere and knows his books but more importantly—at least to me—he knows characters, whether you’re talking about a Persian alchemist with stacks of gold bars in his closet or Prince-A-Cuba from the Nation of Gods and Earths.

I tell him my Rochester imams’ old line, “there are no sects in Islam” and we both have a hearty laugh. Of course there are sects in Islam. There’s a sect of Islamic Satanists in Iran! And there’s a wealth of personality to be found in the fringe: Hafiz who poured wine on his prayer-rug, Ibn ‘Arabi who wrote love poems to a fourteen-year old girl until they chased him out of Cairo, al-Ghazali who gazed at boys, Rabeya who crossed out an ayat because there was “no room for hate” in her Quran and Haydar whose disciples spread cannabis leaves around his grave.

In Iran Peter practiced Islam like a Shia; “it made no sense not to,” he says. Then he tells me that in Java they used to play the adhan on drums because it traveled better through forests (“the voice is for the desert”), but the Wahhabis took over and now every mosque there has loudspeakers atop its minarets just like every mosque everywhere else in the world.

But that’s how it always goes.

According to Peter, Islam has followed the same patterns on this continent as many religions when they arrive in new societies; entering first as heresy mingled with native culture (i.e., the Nation of Islam), followed by a phase of strict orthodoxy as converts struggle to learn the proper traditions. I don’t think to ask him what comes after that. On my drive home I wish I had.

Michael Muhammad Knight is author of The Taqwacores, a novel available through the legendary punk label Alternative Tentacles.