Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam

An uneven, but mostly stimulating collection of essays by Sufi heretic Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam is well worth reading at a time when it is all too easy to forget that Islam is more complex that the media—right, left, and center—ever let on. Wilson's take on Islam is, of course, unorthodox, not to say heretical, but that he, a practicing Moslem, is capable of formulating such views, demonstrates that Islam is a bigger tent than we have been lead to believe. The best essay in the collection is the one that takes us to the most marginal place, The Moorish Orthodox Church of America, an organization that still exists, and is based on an imaginative, even fanciful, version of Islam (as is much of Lamborn's thinking), and the fancy and imagination are, make no mistake, strengths. In much the same way that the American practioners of Zig Zag Zen revitalized that sclerotic sect, perhaps Lamborn and like-minded thinkers will give Islam a bit of what it needs.