Book Review: The Sufis

By Idries Shah
Anchor Books, New York, NY; 451 pp., 2007

Reviewed by Mark Biskeborn

The Sufis resemble the Freemasons of western Europe. They developed a spiritual philosophy or approach to life within various religions and cultures. They use allegory, parables, metaphors and symbols to communicate various messages. The mystery swirls around the when and where the Sufis first took their steps to evolve this ancient spiritual freemasonry.


Idries Shah has written over thirty books about the Sufis, imparting a comprehensive experience of their view of life and beyond. Hundreds of books by non-Sufis appear often and disappear as quickly. Shah represents the authentic mystic tradition, despite the many imitators.

The whole of Shah’s work, classics on the subject, adds up to a many faceted whole. There are people, many renowned poets, thinkers, writers, who have walked through the process, book by book just to approach the sense of what Sufi means. In The Sufis Shah delivers a comprehensive commentary on the major minds in “sufism,” as an anthology tour over the centuries. While each of his other books approach the subject from a different angle. The Commanding Self sums up the philosophy of all his books and offers a practical psychological journey toward self realization.

The Sufis provides an overview of the great Sufi poets and story tellers from as early as undated stories and parables through the Middles Ages to the Enlightenment in Europe. Although the major Sufis usually wrote in Middle Eastern languages such as Arabic or Farsi, they have greatly influenced the super stars of European literature from Hugues de Payns (who founded the Knights Templar – 1070) to Chaucer, Rabelais, and Cervantes to Goethe and even on to modern political leaders such as President de Gaule.

Mysticism

Do you want to live happily? Do you want to live an angry biting life? The questions remind me of the simple logical approach to thinking that Socrates brings to us. Socrates, like many other ancient thinkers, often draw their inspiration from a metaphysical or spiritual realm. When you read a Socratic dialogue like Symposium, you discover that Plato was platonic in character because of Socrates who drew his source of insight from divine waters or, more precisely, from Goddesses like Diotama. In our western, technologically oriented culture, our education focuses on the logic and salaried profession.

Recognizing the value of clear, logical thinking is only one step in what the Sufis call an initiation process to a higher level of living. They emphasize a practical way of thinking and learning through experiencing with all the senses. Their contention is that we are all products of our ideas put into us by our parents, our culture, the Zeitgeist we live in, and what is authentic in us represents a small and precious seed that we should cultivate. Unfortunately, we too often leave that seed of authenticity to blow away into the winds of conformity.

One need only look at the dogmas of any church, Catholic, Muslim, or otherwise. One need only study within the paradigm thinking in schools of science. In these places and elsewhere, we find the desolation of limited thinking, conformity, and the use of ideology for ulterior, political, or financial purposes.

Jean Paul Satre called this conformist approach to life “mauvaise fois.” Millineum ago the Sufis called it “the commanding self.” A very old philosophy or way of life has been openly introduced into our Western culture, partly thanks to Shah. Nevertheless, until the last forty years, Sufism has had little overt contact or exposure in the West. Although as a way of thinking, Sufism has influenced many of the greatest Western writers. Sufis bring a clear and intelligent form of mysticism to the West. As Shah demonstrates in his book, the Sufis use various forms of storytelling to formulate and teach their special mysticism.

All our associations with the word mysticism are biased – and probably for good reason. Hearing the mere mention of the word “mysticism,” highly educated Westerners respond by saying they have no time for séances with ghosts, card or palm readings, or mediums, or long-haired, bearded gurus.

Training or learning about mysticism has not been part of our requirements for graduation. Perhaps for this very reason, people with 20 years of Western schooling all too often fall victim to a spiritual charlatan or a cult: we are often highly developed in one area, a profession, but left ignorant about and longing for broader understanding of ourselves.

Shah stresses that “Sufism” is not an “ism.” For the Sufis “isms” are foreign to the nature of their spiritual development. “Sufism” is a term coined by a German academic. The Sufis originally refer to themselves as ‘We friends’ or ‘people like us.’

A main difficulty in teaching is to prevent the material from becoming a system or, heaven forbid, a catechism or dogma —- yet another church, cult or rigid framework of ideas. Sufis say it took a good 800 years of using metaphors and subtle expressions in order for Islam to allow sufists to live in a Muslim culture.

Then Islam claimed the Sufis as part of their cultural heritage, their property, even though the Sufis preceded Mohammad. The prophet Muhammad himself said “He who hears the voice of the Sufi people and does not say ‘Amen’ is recorded in God’s presence as one of the heedless.” Sufists might characterize Islam as a ‘shell’ that has enveloped, at times embraced and at times destroyed them.

Unlike fundamentalists, Sufis express themselves in metaphor and symbols which others can interpret for more than a literal meaning. Imagination is given full reign as well as living spirit. Like Jesus Christ, Sufis also take full advantage of parables. In some ways learning ‘sufism’ might be similar to learning the Socratic method. It’s a liberal and liberating Way of thinking.

For many Sufis, as for Socrates and for Christ, enlightenment comes from love. An insecure person, one who seeks simple, clear answers to life’s big questions, would first have to breath deep, relax, and enjoy uncertainties before taking steps toward creative, innovative living.

The theme of love plays a central role in all the Sufis that Shah reviews in this book. This love theme gave rise to the romantic Western tradition of love poetry and song that grow out of the Dark Ages and blossomed in the chivalric tradition of nobility, knighthood, and the later ideals of humanism that characterized the Renaissance.

This love theme was later used in an ecstatic cult of the Virgin Mary, who until the Crusades had occupied only a small role in the Christian religion. Her greatest veneration today is precisely in those parts of Europe that fell under the Sufic influence.

The 12th century Sufi poet Ibn El-Arabi captures much of this:

I follow the religion of Love. Now I am sometimes called A Shepherd of gazelles [divine wisdom] And now a Christian monk, And now a Persian sage. My beloved is Three— Three yet only one; Many things appear as three, Which are no more than one. Giver her no name, As if to limit one At sight of whom All limitation is confounded.

Poets, Druids, Language

Through the first half of Shah’s book, he comments on over seven poets and storytellers who were the chief disseminators of Sufi thought. They earned the same reverence as did the ollamhs, or master poets of early medieval Ireland, the Druids, and used a similar secret language of metaphorical reference and verbal cipher.