alt=""/>n, which also had to speak first in response to a world of non-Muslims. But I’ve never known a Muslim who displayed confidence that the Qur’
n could speak for itself without help, without supplementary notes, commentaries, contextualizations, and rationalizations. No one simply hands you the Qur’
n and walks away, not even the Muslims who would proudly describe themselves as “Qur’
n-only.”
Critics blame the rise of Qur’n-only discourse on Protestantism’s sola scriptura (“scripture alone”) argument, which managed to cover the globe in part through European colonialism; but not even Martin Luther let the Bible speak for itself. Regarding the Bible as too unwieldy for common people, Luther appointed himself as a qualified mediator between the scripture and believers. He distilled what he decided were the Bible’s key points into pamphlet form, writing catechisms to produce a “short summary and epitome of the entire Holy Scriptures” and prevent the kinds of misinterpretation that could spawn sectarian disputes and social chaos.
The Qur’n may or may not be “true,” but as A Brief Illustrated Guide reveals (perhaps unintentionally), the rules by which it must establish itself as true are always changing. The effort of this Guide and pamphlets like it to present Islam as a closed system only expose tradition’s openness and instability. I have embarked upon a return to pamphlet Islam before knowing the frames that could determine my own pamphlet. How does the Qur’n prove itself to me, and what does this mean for the idea of a closed system? In the mosque after my ayahuasca vision, the Qur’n proved its value not for the truth of what it said, but for what it did: The Qur’n had a force with which it acted upon my body, regardless of whatever claims it made about itself. I don’t know how to translate that into a pamphlet. Mine wouldn’t be a pamphlet that satisfies the author of A Brief Illustrated Guide, for whom the Qur’n appears as a contestant on a game show, scoring points for giving right answers.
From a certain point of view, this would be the most intuitive way of engaging the Qur’n: Either its claims are objectively true or they are not. There is certainly room to argue that the Qur’n presents its own words this way. Some atheist thinkers operate by the same logic to treat all religion as ridiculous. The potentially heartbreaking part of this is that if I want to dive into the texts and engage the words but lack the kind of zero-sum, no-partial-credit stakes that drive A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam or A Summary of the Creed of As-Salaf As-Saalih, I’m not always sure what I’m doing, or why. In my DMT-powered Islam and my prayer of the morning after, this was not a question: My prayer did not need a formal statement of doctrine in order to do its work. Can my Islam find its perfect expression in a pamphlet with blank pages, or perhaps a script that I find wholly unreadable, like Aurebesh? What happens when I try to confront the Qur’n with nothing to stand between us?
3
DISCONNECTED LETTERS
I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get mixed up and lost in the course of night. — Jorge Luis Borges1
A, L, M. — The Qur’n, 2:1
DURING THE AYAHUASCA visions, I had asked about the Qur’n, and I was told—either by the Qur’n’s transcendent author, or the spirit of the sacred vine, or just the dimethyltryptamine working with my brain chemicals, a message from my own self to my own self, whatever—to leave the words alone. Returning to the reality of the sober, however, the Qur’n and its words were all that I had. In my post-ayahuasca prayer, I recited the text for a trace of what I had felt, commemorating the traumas and ecstasies of ayahuasca. The words weren’t exactly words at that point.
As time pulled me further away from the chemical mountaintop, I grew more reliant on the words, but in ways that the chemicals had enabled. Feeling as though ayahuasca had washed my insides clean and opened me to the chance at a new encounter with the divine words, I decided to reconsider the Qur’n in a serious way. The plan was to place myself in a one-on-one encounter with the Qur’n, in which I would take the time to produce my own translation, verse by verse.
My project had one guiding assumption that would seem natural for engaging any text: that the primary way for me to approach the Qur’
