but also had to smile at what seemed like a private joke between Creator and created. It was at the edge of the desert, far beyond the limits of proper Muslims, that my Islam looked anything like the aqq, the Absolute Reality. It was Out There, viewing the center from the outermost edge, that I found my sweetness for the center. For all the erotic disturbances and throw-stones-at-his-head levels of blasphemy, ayahuasca had put me in the right condition for visiting a mosque.
Eyad drove us to one of the big ones in the city. We made slow steps in, still feeling clumsy from what we had been through, and found the restrooms. Sitting on the wudh bench in front of a faucet, I pulled off my socks and rolled up my pant legs and my sleeves and formalized the intention to myself. My mind wasn’t exactly running at full capacity, but I wasn’t “intoxicated” on any level that could have invalidated my prayers. Moving at about a third of my normal speed, I turned on the water and put my right hand under it, washing the hand up to the wrist three times. Then I washed my left hand three times. I scooped up water in my right hand, pushed it into my mouth, and immediately spit it out, three times. Then I brought a handful of water to my nose, sniffed the water in and then snorted it out, three times. Using both hands, I splashed water into my face and made sure that my entire face had been touched. Three times. Then I washed my arms up to the elbows, each three times, starting with the right arm, and wiped my wet hands once over my head. Three times, I wiped the inner and outer parts of my ears with my wet index fingers and thumbs. I wiped my wet hands over the back of my neck. The final act was to wash my feet up to the ankles, three times each, starting with the right.
I had no decoder ring that could tell me what secret messages were hiding within this performance. I washed for the immediacy of my washing itself, the secret knowledge that my arms and feet expressed no secret at all, being symbols of nothing beyond themselves. Even if the visions had expired hours ago, my brain remained wary of having to exert much effort. Being Muslim, doing Islam, worked in moments like this as procedural memory, like riding a bike. I didn’t have to think about it. After washing, I sat, lingering on empty details such as the color of the tiles, the sensation of my arms dripping wet, my face still wet, my bare feet wet, the feeling of the floor. I could at least register the fact that I was now in a state of ritual purity, my body ready for prayer, and that I should guard myself against farting. Did I need to urinate? Briefly focusing attention on my anus and penis, I found no agitations. All systems go. After sitting there long enough to mostly drip-dry, I put my socks back on and stepped out of the restroom with my right foot first.
The prayer hall, the mualla, was constructed in such a way that walking through the door meant that my body already faced the direction of Mecca. I found a spot that felt right and made the intention to myself. Raising my hands to my ears entered me into the state of worship. Allhu Akbar, I mouthed in silence, my gaze lowered to the spot on the floor that my forehead would touch.
Prayer was not only the private voicing of a conviction or wish to a transcendent mystery god outside myself, but an act of my body, a thing that my arms and legs and face did. Like the washing, this embodied act could not be reduced to a single meaning. I did it because I did it. My body performed the standing and bending and prostrating that Muslim bodies were supposed to do, but I prayed without a theology beyond the post-dimethyltryptamine bliss. In this condition, religion had no chance of functioning as an organized package of truth claims. There were no rational arguments or efforts at scriptural legitimation and no institutions to provide them. I possessed nothing that Muslim scholars might recognize as a systematized ‘aqda, no coherent idea of Allh that I could articulate to a community of believers. Perhaps the movements of my external form worked toward the achievement of an inner condition—my arms and legs and spine pulling the right triggers to produce meaning in my brain—or rather expressed a condition that was already there, a devotion that could never be captured in mere text. Either way, prayer after ayahuasca could be only bodywork. What I needed most was a prayer that I could touch and feel, a prayer of my face and hands on soft carpeted floors that might restore my grounding in the world.
During the standing position, I breathed in and with my exhalation recited short excerpts from the Qur’n, which presents itself as a collection of statements from the Lord of All the Worlds. The recitation was silent, but I moved my mouth to make the words. Years ago, I had memorized the short excerpts for this ritual use. Programming the visual, auditory, and semiotic information into my brain, processing the words in my hippocampus and then consolidating and storing them in my neocortex, I made the Qur’n part of myself, something that I retrieve from within myself to fulfill the act of prayer, my prayer as a repetition of something. At this point, were they words? My mouth moved, but my prayer’s power was almost nonlinguistic, neither a speech to myself nor to the mystery god.
Twenty feet away from my prayer, an elderly woman was teaching the same short sras to children, and their recitations of the Qur’n’s introductory sra made it difficult to focus on my own. I did not know if the Allh of my post-ayahuasca prayer matched up at all to the Allh in this old woman’s heart, or the Allh whose words these children memorized; but apart from our inner secrets, we could at least have a shared Allh through our movements and words in this space. Their loud recitations and my silent ones blended into each other. My prayer was spacey, taking much longer than normal, and I loved the stillness between positions. In the prayer’s final seated position, after extending my index finger as a physical testimony to the oneness of Allh, followed by testimony to the messengership of Mu
but also had to smile at what seemed like a private joke between Creator and created. It was at the edge of the desert, far beyond the limits of proper Muslims, that my Islam looked anything like the 