Peter Lamborn Wilson (October 20, 1945 – May 22, 2022) was an American anarchist author and poet, primarily known for his concept of Temporary Autonomous Zones, short-lived spaces which elude formal structures of control.

[5] While undertaking a classics major at Columbia University, Wilson met Warren Tartaglia, then introducing Islam to students as the leader of a group called the Noble Moors.

Appalled by the social and political climate, Wilson decided to leave the United States, and shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., in 1968 he flew to Lebanon, later reaching India with the intention of studying Sufism, but became fascinated by Tantra, tracking down Ganesh Baba.

In 1974, Farah Pahlavi Empress of Iran commissioned her personal secretary, scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr, to establish the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy.

... His mailouts were immediately popular, and regarded as copyright-free syndicated columns ready for anyone to paste into their photocopied 'zines'..."[14] Wilson's occasional pen name of Hakim Bey was derived from il-Hakim, the alchemist-king, with 'Bey' a further nod to Moorish Science.

"[17] According to Gavin Grindon, in the 1990s, the British group Reclaim the Streets was heavily influenced by the ideas put forward in Hakim Bey's The Temporary Autonomous Zone.

Their adoption of the carnivalesque into their form of protest evolved eventually into the first "global street party" held in cities across the world on May 16, 1998, the day of a G8 summit meeting in Birmingham.

These "parties", explained Grindon, in turn developed into the Carnivals Against Capitalism, in London on June 18, 1999, organized by Reclaim the Streets in coordination with worldwide antiglobalization protests called by the international network Peoples' Global Action during the 25th G8 summit meeting in Cologne, Germany.

[18] In 2013, Wilson commented on the Occupy Movement in an interview with David Levi Strauss of The Brooklyn Rail: I was beginning to feel that there would never be another American uprising, that the energy was gone, and I have some reasons to think that might be true.

[19]In another interview with David Levi Strauss and Christopher Bamford in The Brooklyn Rail, Bey discussed his views on what he called "Green Hermeticism": We all agreed that there is not a sufficient spiritual focus for the environmental movement.

Regarding his concept of TAZ, he said in an interview: ... the real genesis was my connection to the communal movement in America, my experiences in the 1960s in places like Timothy Leary's commune in Millbrook ... Usually only the religious ones last longer than a generation—and usually at the expense of becoming quite authoritarian, and probably dismal and boring as well.

As Hakim Bey, Peter creates a child molester's liberation theology and then publishes it for an audience of potential offenders"[26] and disavowed his former mentor.

[4] Raymond Foye called him "discreet and courteous, and in all the years I knew him I never heard him gossip or say an ill word against anyone" and reported that Wilson was a literary provocateur who "regretted things he had written".