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Idries Shah maintained that, for a Western audience, Sufi ideas are better presented within psychology than religion. It was a startling claim, and one that earned him both praise and condemnation during his lifetime.
In a series of articles for The Idries Shah Foundation, his daughter, Saira Shah takes a look at his work in the context of his contribution to psychology.
IDEAS THAT BELONG TO EVERYBODY
Saira Shah
On the dining room wall of my childhood home in Kent was a tribal rug, whose geometric designs resembled wings. One day my father said to me: ‘I’ve just noticed that rug describes the history of aviation – the biplane, the monoplane and the jet.’
We looked at the rug for a bit, and I saw that he was right, its pattern did bear a resemblance to a stylised chart of the different types of aeroplane wing. However, I pointed out an obvious flaw in his argument: the rug had been made at least a hundred years before aeroplanes were invented.
‘Ah,’ said my father, ‘that is because of the indivisibility of knowledge. Traces of what is true are echoed in all sorts of unexpected places.’
I believe that, rather than being guilty of deliberate mysteriousness or magical thinking, Shah was encouraging me to think around the subject. Much of his work is about connections, the role they play in our psychology and what they can bring us if we allow them.
Here are a few of the ways that his work stressed connections and their importance, along with some places in which they reflect, add to or contradict modern Western psychological theories.
MEANINGFUL COINCIDENCES: IDEAS THAT BELONG TO EVERYBODY
In a recent post, Dr Garayalde’s charming interview makes clear that the great Argentine short story writer Jorge Luis Borges did not take his ideas directly from Sufism, despite a sometimes-uncanny resonance with Shah’s work. To explain the coincidence, one may hypothesise a cultural transmission that has disseminated these ideas to all corners of the globe and/or one may infer that Borges’ and Shah’s inspiration both come from the same source.
Shah insisted that, just because one idea resembles another, it does not necessarily mean that one is derived from the other. ‘The affinity of Sufic thought with Western intuition and ideas,’ he writes in The Sufis, ‘comes about for two reasons — firstly because the bases of Sufi ways are inherent in the human mind… and again because in modern Western training of all kinds are the scattered seeds of the ideas of the Sufi transmitters from Spain, Sicily and elsewhere.’
In Tales of the Dervishes he goes further, encapsulating a Sufi philosophical concept he may have been trying to fix in my mind with his comparison of the rug with the history of aviation: ‘Truth is “trying to manifest itself” among humanity: but…it appears again and again for each man in guises which are difficult of penetration and at first sight may have no connection with each other.’
Shah’s work was certainly not derived from, but resonates with, aspects of Carl Jung's theory of synchronicity. Jung proposed that meaningful coincidences are where inner psychological states align with external events in a way that feels deeply significant. Jung went on to suggest that the psyche and the external world may be linked through a deeper, underlying order beyond cause and effect. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity].
Jung’s theory has been criticised as being unprovable one way or another. However, what if instead of debating whether it is literally true, we choose to think of it in terms Shah would have called ‘instrumental’? That is, suppose we focus on what effect a coincidence considered meaningful by an individual has upon that person and their surroundings? Now we can begin to see how Jung (and indeed Shah) made use of this sort of impact to bring about change.
For instance, Jung tells a famous story in his 1960 book Synchronicity: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity_(book)]
‘A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the windowpane from outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes… the common rose-chafer…’
It will be noticed that this was not, in fact, an actual scarab; just as the design on the rug my father showed me was not a perfect representation of aeroplane wings. In Jung’s story, both he and his patient were necessary intermediaries in creating meaning. [https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/connecting-with-coincidence/202311/psychology-influences-the-perception-of-synchronicity]
Jung goes on to describe how this coincidence brought about a profound change in the woman’s outlook, achieving a desired therapeutic outcome where three doctors, including himself, had failed. ‘Evidently something quite irrational was needed which was beyond my powers to produce. The dream alone was enough to disturb ever so slightly the rationalistic attitude of my patient. But when the "scarab" came flying in through the window in actual fact, her natural being could burst through the armour of her animus possession and the process of transformation could at last begin...’
In the next section we’ll delve inside the brain, to try to get some insight into what may have been going on.
THE BRAIN AS A SERIES OF CONNECTIONS
Shah was fascinated by what Western science had discovered about the nature of the brain, and he collaborated closely with Dr. Robert Ornstein [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Ornstein], a pioneer in consciousness research and the study of hemispheric specialization, with the right side of the brain associated with holistic processing and the left with sequential, analytical thought. To this way of thinking, Jung’s scarab example, above, suggests that the patient’s rational mind alone was not sufficient to bring about lasting change: a deeper, more holistic engagement of the whole brain was required.
In The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009), [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary] psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist argues that the brain’s hemispheres attend to the world in fundamentally different ways: the left focuses on detail and abstraction, while the right processes holistically and contextually. As he puts it: ‘thought originates in the right hemisphere, is processed for expression in speech by the left hemisphere, and the meaning integrated again by the right (which alone understands the overall meaning of a complex utterance, taking everything into account).’ McGilchrist stresses that their differing modes of attention must be balanced and connected for a coherent understanding of reality.
This bears a remarkable similarity to something Shah said his 1978 book A Perfumed Scorpion, while discussing the ‘newly-discovered’ hemispheric specialisation of the brain as a means of understanding Sufi practice (in this case, dhikr, a meditative repetition of divine names or phrases): ‘The linear item, say a phrase composed of originally semantically significant words, becomes a dirge or magical mantram, which is transferred to the mainly holistic hemisphere in the form of something not by then endowed with sequential meaning. A word becomes a form. There is a clue, perhaps, to what should really happen in the Sufi tradition that “a word must have a sound, a form and a meaning, and they must all be appreciated together”.’
What happens when both sides of the brain work together? In its original Persian language, the poetry of the great Sufi master Mawlana Jalaluddin Rumi – written in an inspired, ecstatic state – is an example of a brain in full, holistic flow. It continually makes unexpected and beautiful connections playing with words and meaning, delivering to the reader, again and again, the equivalent of Jung’s scarab.
Since Shah’s death in 1996, our scientific understanding of the brain has expanded dramatically. The emphasis has shifted from rigid left–right hemispheric roles to viewing the brain as a dynamic, integrated network. Advances in neuroimaging technologies such as fMRI have made it possible to map these connections in the living brain, revealing its extraordinary ability to change and adapt. We now know that neuronal networks are continually rewired by experience; a perspective that has revolutionized how we understand learning, memory, and transformation (see, for instance, Eagleman, Livewired). https://eagleman.com/books/livewired/].
I believe Shah had an instinctive feel for the possibilities of brain rewiring for growth, in what he called a ‘science of conscious evolution.’ He was certainly aware of another way in which the brain makes connections – its built-in tendency to seek patterns. In his book The Pattern Seekers, https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/289738/the-pattern-seekers-by-baron-cohen-simon/9780141982397 the clinical psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen argues that the uniquely human drive to identify, analyse, and manipulate patterns underpins our ability to invent and innovate. He suggests that this cognitive trait, which he calls the ‘systemizing mechanism,’ is a key evolutionary advantage, enabling everything from tool-making to scientific discovery. However, this same inclination can also lead us to perceive patterns where none exist, contributing to superstitions and the misinterpretation of coincidences.
Predating most of this research by decades, many of Shah’s stories point out aspects of this pattern-finding mechanism, including both its uses and limitations. Here’s an example from The Magic Monastery:
There was once a man named Zaky. Because of his capacities and his promise, a certain teacher – the Khaja – decided to help him. This Khaja assigned a subtle creature of special powers to attend upon Zaky and to help him whenever he could.
As the years passed, Zaky found that his material and other affairs prospered. He did not imagine that such advantages as he was receiving were entirely due to himself, and he started to notice a coincidence of events.
Whenever his affairs were about to go well, he observed, a small white dove was to be seen somewhere nearby.
The fact was that the subtle attendant, in spite of his powers, needed to be within a certain distance of Zaky to carry on his work...
But Zaky only connected doves with luck, and luck with doves.
So he started to keep doves, and to put down food for any dove which he saw, and to have doves embroidered on his clothes.
He became so interested in doves that everyone in the world thought him an authority on them. But his material and other affairs ceased to prosper, because his concentration had been diverted from intention to manifestation, and the subtle attendant in the form of a dove himself had to withdraw, to avoid becoming a cause of Zaky’s undermining of himself.
I should, perhaps add that the original Arabic meaning of Zaky is ‘intelligent’, clearly a reference to the sequential, logical part of the brain.
Since Shah died, there has been much psychological research into cognitive biases such as Zaky’s association of doves and luck. For an interesting look at things like confirmation bias (where we favour information that supports our existing beliefs) and the clustering illusion (where we see patterns in random data) take a look at The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli (2013) (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Thinking-Clearly-Rolf-Dobelli/dp/0062219693)
However, is this the end of the story? In his popular science book, The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking, [https://www.magicalthinkingbook.com] Matthew Hutson makes the case that this urge to connect unconnected things may have had evolutionary value.
As ever, Mulla Nasrudin, the traditional folk joke figure, popularised by Shah, gives us material to play with:
The omen that worked.
A thief was stealing Nasrudin’s cloak. By coincidence, at that very moment, his donkey started to bray. Nasrudin was exultant and started to shout: ‘A marvellous omen! Good news! Safety follows an ass’s braying!’
The thief was so alarmed at this noise that he dropped the cloak and fled.
The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin, New York, 1971.
Going back to our ‘instrumental’ view of coincidence in the previous section, we see in this story that the connection Nasrudin makes between luck and the donkey’s bray created the effect.
In the next section, we’ll look at what extra possibilities we may gain from approaching understanding by connection rather than division.
APPROACHING KNOWLEDGE BY CONNECTION RATHER THAN DIVISION
Much of Western culture today runs on competition and division. For instance, most academic effort is arranged this way, with students taught to pit theories against each other, to assess, evaluate and refine each other’s arguments. Another area of division concerns emotions – for example, when people are ready to fight others for their beliefs (Shah often pointed out that people rarely fight with the same emotional charge for something they actually know – they are more likely to say, with Galileo ‘and yet it moves’.) Division is not a bad thing in itself: much information can be gained and tested by thrashing things out, by insisting on the literal, by establishing hierarchies and by defining our terms.
Shah, however, felt that our cognitive armoury should include not just the ability to dissect but to connect, in a transcendent way. Of course, the realm in which these sorts of meaningful juxtapositions happen every day is that of story and art: whether folk tales, history, popular culture, poetry or the ‘real-life’ extraordinary events of the media. In his work, Shah used all these forms and more.
The cognitive neuroscientist Tali Sharot discusses the importance of stories in her book The Influential Mind, [https://tiagorodrigos.medium.com/the-influential-mind-2017-by-tali-sharot-book-review-ab9f73e6e80a] citing them as a powerful tool for conveying complex ideas and emotions in a way that is easy to understand and remember – and of course, to persuade. Yet, on the whole, this area remains under-researched. Shah used tales to make unexpected connections in much the same way as his comment about aviation and the rug. By making a statement that was clearly impossible in a literal sense, he was allowing unexpected connection to produce a holistic result – a tiny spark in the brain.
In his Thinkers of the East, he suggests that the type of connection made is important. Here he talks of ‘an alternative to the choice between emotions and intellect: namely intuition’. However, this delicate option ‘could be overcome or blurred by either of these.’
He continues: ‘There are two kinds of “habit”: one derived from mere repetition, the other from intuition harnessed both to the emotions and to the intellect’.
By ‘habit’ linked to intuition, he may be referring to the Sufi practice of dhikr, remembrance. Although rarely mentioned in Shah’s work (since it would certainly be an activity for which he considered it necessary to have a teacher deliver personalised instruction), it involves – in neurological terms – the forming of new pathways and connections through repetition and is a universal Sufi technique.
In traditional Sufism (and Shah’s Sufism was anything but traditional) dhikr may take place individually or with others. There is some interesting new research on the biofeedback of ritual. In his book, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, [https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/british-academy-book-prize/2023-british-academy-book-prize/ritual-how-seemingly-senseless-acts-make-life-worth-living.]
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001wq51 cognitive anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas describes how his team of researchers wired spectators and participants at a fire-walking ceremony with heart rate monitors. They found fire-walkers and their close family or friends (the ‘related spectators’) showed similar heart rate patterns during the ritual, even though the spectators weren’t walking on the fire themselves. To further explore how rituals generate physiological and emotional synchrony, he describes the ‘collective effervescence’ that runs through large crowds at a football game.
And the now-substantial research that this synchronisation also happens in our brains includes a 2024 study that used mobile EEG to record the brain activity of audience members during live dance performances. Participants’ brains showed similar activity patterns at the same point during the performance, even though some enjoyed the performance and others did not – and synchronization patterns varied on different nights, suggesting that each live show creates a unique collective brain state.
As the great thirteenth century classical Persian poet and Sufi master, Sheikh Sa’adi of Shiraz put it, ‘the sons of Adam are limbs of one body.’ And it seems that our bodies, as well as our minds, remember this.
In common with Sufis and teachers of other mystical traditions, Shah suggests that as human beings we feel the need for, and we sense the existence of, connection.
CONCLUSION
I have remembered my father’s conversation about the aviation-rug for years – matching it to situation after situation, not because it was factually accurate, but because it helped suggest a different way of seeing that can exist alongside, not in opposition to, intellectual and emotional approaches.
As we’ve discussed, associative pattern-seeking is not just a quirk of perception but a fundamental part of how our brains are wired. Shah understood this well. Through stories and much more, he invited his readers to engage with knowledge not just by division, through analysis and critique, but by connection.
Shah’s work resonates with and often prefigures developments in Western psychology: from Jung’s concept of synchronicity to Ornstein and McGilchrist’s work on the divided brain, from cognitive biases to neuroplasticity and the embodied synchrony of ritual. He consistently urged a shift from passive consumption of ideas to active, experiential engagement – a ‘science of conscious evolution’.
Read Shah looking for division, excitement, intellectual exercise or internal contradictions, and you will find them. Read him only for literal meaning, to be mystified or to try to tease out ‘lessons’, and you will miss half the point. As with the rug, the ‘pattern’ doesn’t always make logical sense. As Rumi said of his table-talk Fihi ma fihi: ‘in it is what is in it.’
These ideas do not belong to any one system or culture; as Shah suggested, they belong to everybody.
If this article has sparked comments, thoughts or questions, we would love to hear from you. Please send your messages to: comments@idriesshahfoundation.org. We won’t be able to reply individually, however all comments will be read and may help inform future articles. Saira Shah, The Idries Shah Foundation.