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My father loved to cook Afghan food. One day, as we were making a pilau together, we fell to chatting about his work. At that time – the early 1980s – he was at the height of his fame, author of more than 30 books on Sufism, attracting a great deal of attention and admired by literary figures such as Doris Lessing, Robert Graves and Ted Hughes. He had come to prominence writing about a phenomenon which he insisted was too subtle for words and which had to be experienced to be understood. So, I wondered, why did he write books?
He pulled out a packet of dehydrated onion. ‘See this? Dry powder. What use is it?’ Gradually he added hot water. ‘Now you have something else – it isn’t quite onion, but you can get some nourishment from it and it may even help you recognise fresh onion when you come across it.’
I’ve often thought back on that moment. For a start, it perfectly illustrates the way my father taught – both in person and in his books. He rarely answered a question directly. Instead, he would find a metaphor for the thing he was trying to communicate and would allow his listener’s mind to get used to the shape of the idea. He always left a gap, an exercise – just as here he tacitly invited me to ask myself what is the hot water that might turn the dried onion of his books into nourishment. His illustrations were so striking they remained in the mind, working away, and often brought results many years later when conditions were right. Needless to say, his stories and metaphors were not didactic, there was never just one correct answer.
The dried onion demonstration, in my view, throws light on the way he saw his role. Although he came from a traditional Sufi family, he was certainly no traditional Sufi teacher. He collected and made use of a vast corpus of dervish stories, yet he had no regard whatsoever for tradition itself, ruthlessly stripping his material down, reframing it for a contemporary, Western audience.
Sufism is generally referred to as the mystical, spiritual stream of Islam. Shah, however, felt it contained ideas that belong to all peoples, whose bases are in every human mind already: knowledge of the possibility of connecting to something ‘other’ (you might call it ‘love’), which is the underlying reality of what we, collectively, are. These ideas have accompanied us since the dawn of time and have helped to shape us into human beings – an evolutionary process which, incidentally, he felt is still in progress.
In his view, organised religion has been used as a Trojan horse, an external container for spiritual experience too subtle and elusive to be put into words. In this way, its essence has been preserved and disseminated. Within Islam, it gained the name Sufi. Shah’s own background was from a long line of Sufis of the Naqshbandi tradition, including his father, the prolific writer Sayed Ikbal Ali Shah.
However, Idries Shah broke with the tradition of the Sufism he had grown up with. He saw his life’s work as helping to seed, encourage and reawaken Sufi ideas in the West. He cast off what he saw as their outward religious cloak, putting them into a form that would be accessible to Westerners. Shah believed in the concept of ‘time, place and people’. While the essence of what is called Sufism is immutable and universal, he said its outward vehicle must always be adapted to the receiving time and culture.
In a secular society, he believed, Sufi ideas fitted better with psychology than religion. He called them ‘practical psychology’ since this psychology included an element of self-work. As he put it in The Way of the Sufi: ‘Sufism is the science of stilling what has to be stilled and alerting what can be alerted’.
Despite the howls of fury, both from Western academics and from religious traditionalists in the Islamic world, there is precedent for this sort of iconoclasm. Historically, Sufis – those willing to let go of everything that does not lead towards the elusive ‘other’ – seem to have gone out of their way to challenge the externalist belief systems of literal-minded religionists. I’m personally fond of the story told in Learning How to Learn of the ninth century saint Bayazid Bistami who, leaving the house with two hundred dinars to go on the Muslim pilgrimage, encountered a beggar who said: ‘Circumambulate me seven times, and let that be your pilgrimage.’ So, Bayazid did what the man asked, gave him the money and returned to his own house.
Shah maintained that this kind of behaviour had several purposes. One was to shock individuals out of their rigid thought patterns. Another was to shock the systems of thought themselves, including religious or even Sufi schools, which had become ‘fossilised’ – attached to the outwardness of tradition and ritual rather than the inner reality of what they sought.
Shah suggested that we are surrounded by what, for want of a better word, might be called a spiritual force. We have an impulse to unite with it. However, we are like fish that do not perceive the water in which they swim. Self-work is necessary to ‘polish the mirror of your self’ in order to become aware of who you really are.
He linked several Sufi principles with corresponding psychological concepts. For example, regarding the nature of consciousness, he taught that the ego, the person we believe ourselves to be, is an illusion. Shah was credited by several contemporary Western academic researchers (such as Robert Ornstein, Charles Tart, Jay Einhorn and Arthur Deikman) for deepening their understanding of consciousness.
However, it’s only in recent years that modern neuroscience has developed technology to support the view that the ego and personal identity are dynamic constructs shaped by brain networks rather than fixed entities. (For instance see Synaptic Self). In common with other spiritual traditions, Shah went further than modern neuroscience: he believed that human beings have infinitely perfectible potential.
Shah pointed to excessive emotionalism as one of the ‘material attributes’ that stand between people and their spiritual goals, as explored in Sufi Thought and Action.
At the other end of the spectrum, intellect is a ‘friendly enemy’, incapable of accessing Sufi experience. As he puts it in Sufi Thought and Action: ‘You are better than anything your intellect has understood and you are higher than any place your understanding has reached.’ And, in The Sufis: ‘The union of mind and intuition which brings about illumination and the development which the Sufis seek is based upon love, always love’.
His ideas on intuition as a third way between emotion and intellect helped inspire the work of psychologist Robert Ornstein, one of the pioneers of the concept of left and right brain hemispheric specialisation. Shah contributed extensive material highlighting both the holistic and sequential capacity of human minds, stressing that each of these mental tools has its appropriate uses. He used humour as a key teaching aid to dismantle pomposity and detach people from their preconceptions, while the sudden flip from the sequential to the holistic produced by many of his jokes could almost be considered a mini illumination in itself.
Shah made extensive use of stories and metaphor to get ideas past the ego’s blockade. In this, his work mirrors that of the renowned American psychiatrist and psychologist Milton Erickson (best known for revolutionising the field of clinical hypnosis and psychotherapy) who used metaphors as indirect therapeutic tools to bypass resistance and engage the unconscious mind. Like Erickson, Shah was an expert in the use of therapeutic states.
Shah observed that our hopes, fears, and habits often control us, making us slaves to automatic thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. This closely parallels the central principle of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which recognises that automatic thoughts – frequently negative and unconscious – exert a powerful influence over our emotions and actions. While Shah engaged in considerable therapeutic work throughout his life, he maintained that therapy was not his primary focus. However, he insisted that before seeking higher spiritual aims, individuals should first work to achieve balance in their everyday lives.
Shah’s techniques were designed to help people break free of their prisons of hope, fear, habit and assumption, enabling them to stabilise, reintegrate into their communities, and lead more productive and fulfilled lives. Modern therapeutic approaches, such as the Human Givens method – which, according to a recent study published by the British Psychological Society, demonstrated a greater effect size than CBT, particularly for anxiety and depression – acknowledge their debt to Shah’s insights.
Beyond integrating Sufi ideas into a psychological framework that supports everyday well-being, Shah also provided preparatory material to help individuals become more receptive to deeper learning. In societies where formal religion is dominant, Sufi orders use religious moral frameworks to foster self-discipline – discouraging traits like greed, anger, pride, and envy, and encouraging generosity, kindness, service, and humour. However, in more secular societies, this kind of self-development must be cultivated through other means. Shah’s material offers practical guidance on reducing anger, letting go of envy, and shedding the layers of conditioning that keep us bound to automatic behaviours. In this way, his teachings help people become freer, more content and more adaptable in their outlook – regardless of whether they choose to pursue a spiritual path.
Shah has been criticised because he did not preach and rarely used the word ‘God’. However, a careful reading of his materials will reveal them to be imbued with traditional Sufi concepts such as submission (acceptance of things you cannot change), diligence in helping others and exercising compassion. He pointed out the need to be able to detach from one’s hopes and fears and in his own life was a model of the impact of extending unconditional love.
Defining a Sufi for a secular Western environment, he says in The Sufis that: ‘The Sufi is an individual who believes that by practicing alternate detachment and identification with life, he becomes free. He is a mystic because he believes that he can become attuned to the purpose of all life. He is a practical man because he believes that this process must take place within normal society. And he must serve humanity because he is a part of it’.
The iconoclastic nature of Sufis, both historical and contemporary, points to something fundamental. They must be prepared to let go of the thing they hold most tightly – all their beliefs and prejudices – up to and including their ego, the false self that we are all led to believe ourselves to be. This idea is considerably less attractive to the West than the modern iterations of ‘self-development’ and ‘spirituality’, which have been metamorphosed by a wellness industry into a vehicle for turning people’s egotistical hopes and fears into a money-spinning scheme.
This brings us to another part of Shah’s task, which might be called ‘enriching the soil’. This could be seen as changing the psychological outlook of culture as a whole. People in the West are constantly bombarded by messages telling them to chase individualistic goals of money, success and power. At the same time, they lack a corpus of material which helps to prepare the cultural ground for more collective, less selfish ideas.
In the Islamic world to this day folktales, such as the stories of the cunning fool Mulla Nasrudin (Joha in the Arab world), snippets of myth and legend, the dazzling poetry and witticisms of thirteenth and fourteenth century figures like Jalaluddin Rumi, Sa’adi of Shiraz and Hafiz, all help shape the pattern of people’s thoughts. Shah contributed stories and metaphors that act like memes, outwardly attractive enough to be passed on as entertainment, even by people with no interest in their ‘nutritional’ value. Thus, they can reproduce themselves and have a continuing influence on the culture in the West.
This material can be helpful therapeutically, some of it contains obvious moral messages and it is also highly entertaining. However this corpus will not reach its full potential unless conditions are right. These include a willingness by the individual to let go of their expectations, including their hopes and desires – in effect, their greed. Trying to tease mysteries from Shah’s work will only increase bafflement and will result in years of empty frustration. In Shah’s memorable phrase: ‘greed for spirituality is still greed.’
Shah maintained that his writings – some of which people may find difficult, disconcerting or puzzling – in their entirety form a sort of exercise course, encouraging a way of using the brain that is neither emotional nor intellectual. This is why the Idries Shah Foundation keeps all his work freely available in its unedited form. Readers are invited to study it.
This brings us to the end of a brief introduction to a vast topic. In future articles I’ll look in more detail at various aspects of Shah’s work in relation to Western psychology.
As we've seen, Shah engaged with psychology in at least three significant ways: first, as a framework or vehicle – a kind of Trojan horse – for Sufi ideas and methods of thought; second, as a tool to expose and diminish the influence of what Sufis call the ‘commanding self’, the web of ingrained habits, assumptions, and negative traits like greed, anger, pride, and envy that often secretly shape our thoughts and behaviour; and third, as a means to plant a rich body of material into Western culture – material designed to lie dormant, like the dehydrated onion in his demonstration to me, until the right conditions allow its full content to be accessed and absorbed.
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.