As one of what we hope to be many new collaborations with other distributors of Idries Shah’s work, ISF has supplied Shah’s children’s books to head teachers from several UNESCO registered UK schools.
A hundred years ago – on 16th June 1924 – Sayed Idries Shah was born in Shimla, India.
Sufi Studies: East and West contains a wealth of information about Sufis and their special practices from a diversity of cultures and viewpoints. In 1973, a major symposium was held in honor of Idries Shah’s work in the area of Sufi studies. This corresponded with the 700th anniversary of the death of the Persian Sufi … Read More
Find out how you can continue to support and partner with ISF as we continue our mission to grow a worldwide readership for Idries Shah’s works.
ISF is incredibly proud to announce the publication of six new children’s books featuring teaching-stories selected from the works of Idries Shah. Edited by Safia Shah, these titles are illustrated in fresh, contemporary styles by award-winning illustrators from around the world, including Prashant Miranda and Zainab Faidhi. You can own all six titles in hardback … Read More
El-Ghazali’s ‘Alchemy of Happiness’ In 1980, Octagon Press, the publishing predecessor of ISF, first printed a short English translation of one of Abu Hamid el-Ghazali’s many writings entitled The Alchemy of Happiness (Kimiya’e Saadat). El-Ghazali wrote Alchemy as an abridgement for ordinary readers of his colossal masterwork, The Revival of Religious Sciences (Ihya Ulum al-Din). … Read More
El-Ghazali: The Practical Mystic The twelfth-century philosopher and Sufi el-Ghazali quotes in his Book of Knowledge this line from el-Mutanabbi: ‘To the sick man, sweet water tastes bitter in the mouth.’ This could very well be taken as Ghazali’s motto. Eight hundred years before Pavlov, he pointed out and hammered home (often in engaging parables, … Read More
Ibn El-Arabi: A Classical Sufi Master by Peter Brent Born into a Sufi family almost exactly a hundred years after El-Ghazali, almost exactly forty years before Rumi, Ibn el-Arabi, like them, displayed great gifts even in childhood. Brought up in the heyday of Arabic Spain (paradoxically, one of the most civilised societies in European history) … Read More
The following excerpt is from a lecture by Idries Shah about the Sufi use of stories. It is a good example of how he used stories in context, in this case to explain something of the role of stories themselves – Saira Shah, Editor, The Idries Shah Anthology THE TEACHING STORY by Idries Shah I … Read More
The Meaning of Rumi’s Work by Peter Brent
Jalaluddin Rumi, whom Sufis call ‘The Master’ and Professor Fatemi entitles ‘The Light of Sufism’, was born in Balkh, now in Afghanistan, in 1207. His father was a famous scholar and theologian, so that Rumi’s early training was in the rigorously classical and logical modes.
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