The Pluriverse of Intoxication: Words, Lives, Worlds in Islamicate History

This article establishes a conceptual framework for decolonial drug histories and, at the same time, moves beyond decolonization. It brings back the radical alterity of historical figures of intoxication in the Islamicate world and introduces them as paradigms with potential to go beyond decolonization. This approach refers to the urgency of not comfortably relying on decolonial critique as moral indignation toward the past but rather showing that drug histories subsume radically different epistemologies and ontologies from those enunciated by coloniality/modernity. The article studies the Islamicate world through a decolonized nomenclature based on everyday historical approaches, beyond the myths of quintessential intoxicated Orient or as the inherent space of religious prohibitions. By introducing alternative epistemologies on mind-altering substances and their radical ontologies, this experiment in writing history as world-building shows how non-Western knowledge and practice can make other realities—and histories—possible.