Idries Shah - The Way of the Sufi

Books by Idries Shah

Sufi Studies and Middle Eastern Literature

The Sufis

Caravan of Dreams

The Way of the Sufi

Tales of the Dervishes: Teaching-stories Over a Thousand Years

Sufi Thought and Action

Traditional Psychology, Teaching Encounters and Narratives

Thinkers of the East: Studies in Experientialism

Wisdom of the Idiots

The Dermis Probe

Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way

Knowing How to Know

The Magic Monastery: Analogical and Action Philosophy

Seeker After Truth

Observations

Evenings with Idries Shah

The Commanding Self

University Lectures

A Perfumed Scorpion (Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge and California University)

Special Problems in the Study of Sufi Ideas (Sussex University)

The Elephant in the Dark: Christianity, Islam and the Sufis (Geneva University)

Neglected Aspects of Sufi Study: Beginning to Begin

(The New School for Social Research)

Letters and Lectures of Idries Shah

Current and Traditional Ideas

Reflections

The Book of the Book

A Veiled Gazelle: Seeing How to See

Special Illumination: The Sufi Use of Humour

The Mulla Nasrudin Corpus

The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin

The Subtleties of the Inimitable Mulla Nasrudin

The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin

The World of Nasrudin

Travel and Exploration

Destination Mecca

Studies in Minority Beliefs

The Secret Lore of Magic

Oriental Magic

Selected Folktales and Their Background

World Tales

A Novel

Kara Kush

Sociological Works

Darkest England

The Natives Are Restless

The Englishmans Handbook

Translated by Idries Shah

The Hundred Tales of Wisdom (Aflakis Munaqib)

Idries Shah

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

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 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

ISBN 978-1-78479-026-4 (ePub)

First published 1968

Published in this edition 2015

In association with The Idries Shah Foundation

To be a Sufi is to detach from fixed ideas and from preconceptions; and not to try to avoid what is your lot.

Abu-Said, son of Abi-Khair

Do not look at my outward shape,
But take what is in my hand.

Jalaludin Rumi

The Sufi is one who does what others do when it is necessary. He is also one who does what others cannot do when it is indicated.

Nuri Mojudi

SO many people profess themselves bewildered by Sufi lore that one is forced to the conclusion that they want to be bewildered. Others, for more obvious reasons, simplify things to such an extent that their Sufism is just a cult of love, or of meditations, or of something equally selective.

But a person with a portion of uncommitted interest who looks at the variety of Sufi action can see the common characteristic staring him in the face.

The Sufi sages, schools, writers, teachings, humour, mysticism, formulations are all connected with the social and psychological relevance of certain human ideas.

Being a man of timelessness and placelessness, the Sufi brings his experience into operation within the culture, the country, the climate in which he is living.

The study of Sufic activity in distant cultures alone is of value only to those working in the narrow field of scholasticism. Considering Sufi activities as merely religious, literary or philosophical phenomena will produce only garbled renditions of the Sufi way. To try to extract theory or system and to attempt the study of it in isolation is just as comparatively profitless.

This book is designed to present Sufi ideas, actions and report: not for the microscope or as museum-pieces, but in their relevance to a current community what we call the contemporary world.

IDRIES SHAH

Let us presume no background of Sufi ideas on the part of an imaginary student who has recently heard of Sufism. He has three possible choices of source-material. The first would be reference books and works written by people who have made this subject their special province. The second might be organizations purporting to teach or practise Sufism, or using its terminology. The third could be individuals and perhaps groups of people, not always in Middle Eastern countries, who are reputedly Sufis. He may not yet have been induced to believe that Sufism is to be labelled Muhammadan mysticism, or the cult of the dervishes.

What does this man learn, and what are his problems?

One of the first things that he could discover is that the very word Sufism is a new one, a German coinage of 1821.[]

No Sufi ignorant of Western languages would be likely to recognise it on sight. Instead of Sufism, our student would have to deal with terms such as the Qadiris, named after the founder of a certain rule who died in 1166. Or he might come across references to the People of Truth, the Masters, or perhaps the Near Ones. Another possibility is the Arabic phrase Mutassawif: he who strives to be a Sufi. There are organizations called the Builders, the Blameworthy, which in constitution and sometimes even minor symbolism closely resemble Western cults and societies like Freemasonry.[]

These names can ring oddly, and not always felicitously, in the contemporary Western ear. This fact alone is a real psychological problem, though a concealed one.

As there is no standard appellation for Sufism, the inquirer may turn to the word Sufi itself, and discover that it suddenly became current about a thousand years ago,[] and it is still in general use to describe particularly the best product of certain ideas and practices, by no means confined to what people would conventionally call religious. He will find plenty of definitions for the word, but his problem is now reversed: instead of coming up against a mere label of no great age, he gets so many descriptions of Sufi that he might as well have none at all.

According to some authors, and they are in the majority, Sufi is traceable to the Arabic word, pronounced