From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, poets, physicians, historians, and jurists writing in Arabic devoted literary efforts to the new psychoactive drug, cannabis. In these texts, the Sufis, orders of Islamic mystics, are closely associated with weed, both in its origin story and in its spread westward. Their enthusiasm for eating cannabis – it wasn’t yet typically smoked – was contagious, and out from Khorasan it becomes a well-known mind-altering edible.
In this paper, part of a larger project on weed texts in Arabic, I will draw on texts in both prose and verse, for the most part never translated before, to offer a survey of Sufis and weed in these texts. I will investigate questions such as the role of Sufis in the discovery of weed as a psychoactive drug, the characterization of weed as a Sufi drug, and weed’s effect on dhikr (remembrance of God).