Idries Shah - The Sufis

THE SUFIS

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:

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The Idries Shah Foundation

P. O. Box 71911

London NW2 9QA

United Kingdom

ISBN 978-1-78479-000-4

ePUB ISBN 978-1-78479-002-8

Mobi ISBN 978-1-78479-001-1

First Published 1964

Published in this edition 2015

In association with The Idries Shah Foundation

The Islanders. Sufi illustrative calligraphy, in the hand of Mohamed son of Shafiq, 1291, of the Mevlevi (Dancing) Dervishes. To view the illustration properly, turn the book on its side. The image of the ship and the people standing in it should become clearer.

Humanity is asleep, concerned only with what is useless, living in a wrong world. Believing that one can excel this is only habit and usage, not religion. This religion is inept

Do not prattle before the People of the Path, rather consume yourself. You have an inverted knowledge and religion if you are upside down in relation to Reality.

Man is wrapping his net around himself. A lion (the man of the Way) bursts his cage asunder.

(The Sufi master Sanai of Afghanistan, teacher of Rumi, in The Walled Garden of Truth, written in 1131 A.D.)

The last thing that is intended in the writing of this book is that it should be considered inimical to scholasticism or to the academic method. Scholars of the East and the West have heroically consecrated their whole working lives to making available, by means of their own disciplines, Sufi literary and philosophical material to the world at large. In many cases they have faithfully recorded the Sufis own reiteration that the Way of the Sufis cannot be understood by means of the intellect or by ordinary book learning. That this fundamental has not prevented them from trying to bring Sufism within the compass of their own understanding is a tribute to their intellectual honesty and their faith in their own system of examination.

It would, however, be false to Sufism not to affirm that it cannot be appreciated beyond a certain point except within the real teaching situation, which requires the physical presence of a Sufi teacher. For the Sufi, it is no accident that the secret doctrine whose existence has for uncounted time been suspected and sought proves so elusive to the seeker. If, say, communism is a religion without a god, academic study of Sufism without being to any extent a working Sufi is Sufism without its essential factor. If this assertion militates against the rational tradition that an individual can find truth merely through the exercise of the faculties with which he finds himself endowed, there is only one answer. Sufism, the secret tradition, is not available on the basis of assumptions which belong to another world, the world of intellect. If it is felt that truth about extraphysical fact must be sought only through a certain way of thinking, the rational and scientific one, there can be no contact between the Sufi and the supposedly objective seeker.

Sufi literature and preparatory teaching is designed to help bridge the gap between these two worlds of thought. Were it not possible to provide any bridge at all, this book would be worthless, and should not have been attempted.

Sufism, considered as a nutrient for society, is not intended to subsist within society in an unaltered form. That is to say, the Sufis do not erect systems as one would build an edifice, for succeeding generations to examine and learn from. Sufism is transmitted by means of the human exemplar, the teacher. Because he is an unfamiliar figure to the world at large, or because he has imitators, does not mean that he does not exist.

We find traces of Sufism in derelict organisations from which this element of human transmission of baraka has ceased; where the form alone remains. Since it is this outer shell which is most easily perceptible to the ordinary man, we have to use it to point to something deeper. Unlike him, we cannot say that such and such a ritual, such and such a book, incarnates Sufism. We start with human, social, literary material that is both incomplete (because now unaccompanied by the impact of the living exemplar, the teacher) and secondary, in that it is only partially absorbed. Historical facts, such as religious and social organisation, when they persist, are secondary, external phenomena which depend upon organisation, emotion and outward show for their survival. These factors, so essential for the continuation of familiar systems, are, Sufistically speaking, only the substitute for the vitality of organism, as distinct from appearance and sentiment.