Idries Shah - Darkest England
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In his best-selling Darkest England, Idries Shah asserts that the English hail from a little-known place called Hathaby, but their roots go back much farther, perhaps to the distant Asian realm of Sakasina. Once a nomadic tribe of warriors, the English fled westward, bringing with them epic tales, traditions, and an Oriental way of thought.
Shah charts the genius of the English in adopting and adapting almost anything spiritual, moral or material for their own use a faculty that has transformed them from warrior nomads into successful diplomats, businessmen, thinkers and scientists.
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As I mentally review the many grim episodes and reflect on the marvellously narrow escapes from utter destruction to which we have been subjected during our various journeys to and fro through that immense and gloomy extent of primeval forest, I feel utterly unable to attribute our salvation to any other cause than to a gracious Providence who for some purpose of His own preserved us.
H. M. Stanley: Darkest Africa, London 1890
What should they know of England
Who only England know?
Kipling: The English Flag
Darkest England:
Adventures, Facts and Fantasy in
by
Idries Shah
ISF PUBLISHING
Copyright The Estate of Idries Shah
The right of the Estate of Idries Shah to be identified as the owner of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved
Copyright throughout the world
ISBN 978-1-78479-172-8 Kindle
ISBN 978-1-78479-173-5 EPUB
First published 1987
Published in this edition 2020
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photographic, by recording or any information storage or retrieval system or method now known or to be invented or adapted, without prior permission obtained in writing from the publisher, ISF Publishing, except by a reviewer quoting brief passages in a review written for inclusion in a journal, magazine, newspaper, blog or broadcast.
Requests for permission to reprint, reproduce etc., to:
The Permissions Department
ISF Publishing
The Idries Shah Foundation
P. O. Box 71911
London NW2 9QA
United Kingdom
permissions@isf-publishing.org
In association with The Idries Shah Foundation
The Idries Shah Foundation is a registered charity in the United Kingdom
Charity No. 1150876
Some enthusiasts have even gone so far as to write foreword for preface at the beginning of their books... to write foreword is a piece of mere sentimental perversity.
Austin K. Gray, BA: A Dictionary of Synonyms
Spend time in England, and look at its people; and even without the insights of anthropology youll notice that your experiences are strangely like those which the English themselves used to report from their far-flung Empire. Youll not get malaria or easily Go Native: but you may well contract bronchitis and learn to Muddle Through.
A hundred kinds of social maneuvring replace ritual dances, found elsewhere: though totemism is rife. There is no broiling sun, but I can guarantee wind and rain aplenty. Magical potions, whether offered for alcoholic forgetfulness or instant beauty, are not lacking, either. Today, indigent beggars are uncommon: but a thousand importuning salespeople besiege you at the door, through the media, even on the telephone. Local and national chiefs? A myriad of them, in tax offices, companies, town halls, public utilities, vicarages or manors, answer well enough.
Tribal organization, native chants and war-cries, exotic regalia, strange attire: they have them all. The darkness of England is filled with superstition. On unlucky Friday the Thirteenth, millions feel the hair rising on the backs of their necks. Ladders are avoided as assiduously as any taboo objects anywhere; black cats, rabbits feet and newspaper astrology all have their devotees. And as for cults...
The magnificent dignity of a proud and remote people, cut off as surely as any Himalayan community or long-house settlement, excites our admiration, as such survivals must. Some, at least, of the amazing delicacies of the table would intrigue anyone: pie and mash, cows heel jelly, bubble and squeak, to name but a few.
The English, like all isolated peoples with archaic ways, are splendid. And they have produced endless numbers of dauntless explorers of other peoples countries. Names like Rhodes, Thesiger and Newby and hundreds more, testify to the record.
This book, however, is not written by one of their disciples, respected though these pioneers may be.
I take my inspiration from such as Ibn Battutah of Tangier, the extraordinary fourteenth-century globetrotter who still holds the record as the greatest traveler of all time. And from Ibn Khaldun of Tunisia; accepted, even in the West, as the first theoretician of human historical development the founder of sociology, in fact.
Springing from a family settled since the ninth century in the folds of the Hindu-Kush, though myself born in the Himalayas, I have trodden many a lonely path, faced many hazards, noted many a confidence, to assemble these impressions of Darkest England.
Providing youre tough, there are adequate rewards in this endeavor; as the English say, Its a Great Life if you Dont Weaken.
Idries Shah
London 1987
Englisc
No one spoke of Saxon or Sexisc, not even King Alfred himself, the great and good King of the West Saxons. From the beginning, the language was always Englisc.
Dr. Simeon Potter: Our Language
I t is the fate of travelers, an ancestor of mine, returned from an extensive journey abroad, wrote sadly, to bring back what is old news to those who know, and what is novelty and thus causes incredulity in those who do not. I think I know what he means, and what it feels like. With the present lightning diffusion of information throughout the globe, you dont even have to travel. You can sit watching a TV program bounced off a satellite and be bored or outraged in the comfort of your own home. Or read all about it in the papers.
On June 3, 1977, one could have learned that St. Alban was not English, even though the Dean of St. Albans was proposing him as Englands Patron Saint.
Mr. Andrew Breeze, writing from St. Johns College, Oxford, explained in a letter to the Editor of The Times that Alban had been born anything up to 200 years before the English first saw these islands when England was hardly more than a nest of heathen pirates somewhere near Schleswig-Holstein.
Not only that: St. Alban was indeed a Christian martyr, but he spoke British (the Celtic language ancestor of Welsh), not English, and was first mentioned by the Welsh writer Gildas. The Angles and Saxons, in contrast, even tried to destroy Christianity.
Foreigners, especially those who are still asking whether England is in Britain or Britain in England, need strong nerves to face this kind of thing, to use a common English scholarly phrase.
Since there is no English Encyclopedia, and for another reason, I turned to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (which is American). Who are the English, I interrogated it, and when does their history start?
The EB, confidently enough, starts English History off at the second half of the fifth century AD (making England some fifteen hundred years old), which is clear enough, and for which I thank it. It is when it tries to go back further that we begin to glimpse something of the essential nature of the English, something which persists, as I shall show, until the present day.
Mr. Breeze, as I believed all along, was right. The English, then called Angles, came from Schleswig, though, if we want to quibble, it was probably not known as Schleswig-Holstein at the time. The Danes called Schleswig
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