The American academic, poet, and writer Peter Lamporn Wilson was best known as "Hakim Bey," a pseudonym he chose himself to codify his anarchist ideas of "autonomous networks" that were evident in his historical reading of what he called "pirate utopia."

Shortly after Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, Hakim Bey left Columbia University, traveled from New York where he was born in 1945 to Lebanon in a unique experiment to study mysticism, and then left for India to meditate in a cave over the eastern bank of the Ganges He then left for Pakistan, where he mixed with local princes and Muslim Sufi elders, and sat in café chairs offering drugs to their patrons, in what he called "a total disregard for the existence of any government system" where people relied on family, clans and tribes to conduct their lives.

From Pakistan, Wilson moved to Iran to develop his ideas, translated a number of classic Persian texts with the French researcher Henri Corbyn, and also worked as a journalist for the "Tehran Magazine", and in 1974 he commissioned the Empress of Iran Farah Pahlavi and the third wife of Iran's former Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, her personal secretary, the researcher The well-known Iranian, Syed Hossein Nasr (now a professor in the Department of Islamic Studies at George Washington University), founding the Iranian Imperial Academy of Philosophy, Nasr offered Wilson the position of director of its publications in the English language, and he became the editor of the Academy magazine "Sophia Pyrenees" from 1975 to 1978 before the outbreak Iranian Revolution 1979.

After the Iranian revolution in 1979, Wilson returned to New York, sharing a country house in brown stone with an American writer and postmodern plastic artist William Burroughs who said that "Hakim Bey" gave him an idea of ​​the leader of the Assassin sect Hassan Al-Sabah and used it in his literary novel "The Lands" Western. "

Anarchist philosophy

"Hakim Bey" is known for his theorizing of the ideas of anarchism (anarchism), and he said recently in a comment on the Occupy Wall Street movement: "I started to feel that there will be no other American uprising, that the energy is over, and I have some reasons to believe that this may be true .. I would like to I note that the crime rate in America has been declining for a long time, because Americans no longer have enough courage to commit crimes anymore, and the creative side of crime has diminished, and as for the uprising that takes a principled stand against violence, I admire its idealism, but I do not think It will achieve much. "

In his book "Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes", Hakim tells the truth and imagination a secret island story that pirates once used to provide supplies to piracy, and according to the book, this island (settlement) adopted an anarchist regime (Anarchia) is primitive, self-governed, away from governments, regimes, and rules that restrict freedom.

A painting by the seventeenth-century Dutch artist, William Vandelda, depicting a battle between Algerian and British ships at the end of the year 1669 (Wiki Commons)

Hakim says that this island, located on the Amazigh coast near the Moroccan Sala and the country of Algeria, was a haven for pirates and rebels between the 16th and 18th centuries, and a number of Europeans who converted to Islam joined the pirates as an attempt to rebel against the ideas prevailing in Europe at the time.

Hakim believes that the joining of these rebels to the pirate community is an application of his idea of ​​social resistance, and he studied the state of the Republic of Salé or the "Republic of Abi Raqraq" that appeared in the estuary area of ​​Abi Raqraq River between the years 1627 and 1668 as a model for his theoretical idea, as it was founded by Muslims and Moriscos expelled from Andalusia. And relied on maritime piracy to build its economy, and threatened European interests southwest of the Mediterranean.

The activity of maritime piracy in this era was a regular system in Europe and the Mediterranean, and it cannot be compared to modern maritime banditry, as "mandatory piracy" was based on a special mandate and attacked ships belonging to countries that are in a state of hostility with the state that has the mandate, and taxes are paid in the interest of the delegated country.

Imaginary piracy

Hakim in his book opposes traditional historical views of "apostates" in the seventeenth century in European culture (European Christians who converted to Islam in that era), saying that these men and women had their own intentions and ideas, and their conversion to Islam could be considered at a time when it was In it most of Europe is involved in the Crusades as a revolutionary act.

The book is based on many sources, including historical writings by Muslims and Europeans, diaries of enslaved fugitives, and pirates from North Africa, including those who converted to Islam "because Islam in the sixteenth century was more democratic, appreciative of pleasure, and seeking wisdom than 16th century Christianity," as he put it.

The book also explains that there might have been what Wilson calls "the positive shadow of Islam" in Europe, and it means that while the mainstream in Europe distorted Islamic culture, there was also and there must be a counter current of positive thoughts about Islam that would inspire the "apostates" In hundreds.

Nevertheless, Hakim came under criticism from readers who saw that he had not completely succeeded in proving the existence of coherent piracy cultures of an organized revolutionary and chaotic (anarchist) nature, and that he may have arbitrarily proven his initial idea, as the book is full of detailed tales of pirate activities that he quoted from historical sources.

Hakim focuses specifically on European converts to Islam (apostates) in the hope of finding their motives, and considers the case of the Port of Salé in Morocco, which for several decades was independent of Ottoman and multicultural rule and ruled by pirates as an independent republic, one of the ideal models for pirates a messy anarchist "utopia".