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Idries Shah often approached the question What is Sufism? by answering with Jalaludin Rumi’s story, the Elephant in the Dark, represented above
Sufis say that we are being constantly bombarded by the ‘spiritual impulse’, the ‘source of being’ – that without this permeating us, we would simply not exist. It is an influence on all our lives, part of the fabric of existence, and it may be recognized by everybody at times as ‘something other’.
Sufism is concerned with the attunement of the individual to perceive this impulse.
To hear this subtle whisper, they say, we need to still the babble of what Sufis term our secondary selves, the bundle of conditioned impulses and instilled beliefs that we think of as our personalities, but are very far from being so.
According to Shah: ‘Sufism has two main technical objectives 1) to show the man himself as he really is; and 2) to help him develop his real, inner self, his permanent part.’ (Thinkers of the East)
In his writing about Sufism, Idries Shah did some revolutionary things. Critically, and almost alone, he said that it was possible to divorce the essence of Sufi philosophy from what he insisted were secondary accretions of Islamic culture and religion. Moreover, he said, in making this material available to the West, you not only could do this, you must do it. This is because, he believed, you can only absorb materials that are designed for your own time and place. Sufism as an essence may be ‘truth without form’ but, in order to penetrate into the human mind, it must be delivered in a package shaped to fit the receiving culture.
Sufism, he said, has existed over the millennia within a number of hosts. It originally resided within all religions and great philosophical systems. But it is so delicate and indefinable that it invariably becomes fossilised – mere mimetic ritual. Its worn out accretions litter the world: the whirling dervishes of Turkey, traditionalist Sufi schools, and so on. This is the point when somebody who has made the Sufi journey must excavate it and present it to a new generation. In a secular age, some aspects of Sufism may slot better into psychology than religion.
Shah’s insistence that ‘he who tastes knows’, and that therefore Sufism may only really be studied from within, earned him the enmity of many.
His approach also brought him followers yet these over-excited devotees appeared not to have read his warnings that people often claim they want spiritual learning when they really only want emotional stimulus, attention or reassurance.
He argued that most human beings, while capable of the most sublime capacities, choose to live on a plane far below their potential. Chained by the commanding self – a mixture of laziness, greed, fear and prejudice – they are driven on, harnessed and shackled by their own lower nature, fleeing from truth, from the exaltation and beauty that should be theirs.
Yet, his was no gloom-ridden moralising. He held an optimistic message that it is possible for humans to develop, to reach our destiny. He turned morality on its head; vices, he argued, are not morally loaded, but are veils that conceal our potential. Virtues are not remote wonders to be aspired to, but practical prescriptions for human progress.
The virtues he emphasised were: generosity, humour, kindness, clear-thinking and common sense, to name but a few. While insisting that the human tendency to emote, to feel special, to yearn for ritual or hierarchy has nothing to do with Sufism, he did not demand an obsessive denial of any of these things. They are necessary for the smooth running of society, and anybody wishing to approach Sufism should get them elsewhere.
Shah spent much of his time trying to help people ‘learn how to learn’: how to put away the part of themselves that prevents them from learning. For instance, he pointed out that most approaches to spirituality are actually disguised consumerism, like the man who wrote to the mail order fitness programme: ‘I’ve done the exercises, now send me the muscles!’
The Islanders. Sufi illustrative calligraphy, in the hand of ‘Mohamed son of Shafiq, 1291’, of the Mevlevi (‘Dancing’) Dervishes.
Doris Lessing, who regarded Idries Shah as her ‘good friend and teacher’
Sufism believes itself to be the substance of that current which can develop man to a higher stage in his evolution. Sufis claim that Sufism, in its reality, not necessarily under the name, is continuously in operation in every culture. But the inability to believe in the combination of the mystic and the practical is not only of our time.
During well over 1,000 years of connected literary and psychological tradition, embracing Spain, North Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East, Sufis have almost invariably clashed with narrow thinkers.
Some past patterns are unfamiliar to us; others can still be instructive, for in one form or another they repeat themselves.
Hallaj was dismembered in Baghdad, AD 922, for blasphemy. The evidence against him included the dread indictment that he was the grandson of a Zoroastrian, and that he was ‘ignorant of the Koran and its ancillary sciences of jurisprudence, traditions, etc. and of poetry and Arabic philology’. Searches of the houses of some of his followers showed that they actually possessed books inscribed in gold on Chinese paper. In case you didn’t know it, this was taken to suggest that the writings must be heretical, since Manichees used gold ink and Chinese paper...[1] Suhrawardi was killed in 1191, the charge including ‘atheism, heresy and believing in ancient philosophers’.
Ibn El Arabi of Spain was hauled before an inquisition of scholars in the 12th century, for immodesty in pretending that love-poetry could be spiritual, when it was pornographic.
Jalaluddin Rumi was accused of publishing trivial folktales in the guise of spiritual writings.
There were sometimes difficulties in attacking the Sufis, once they had established a name for literature, or could not be shown to be vicious. One such case is the frame-up of Nasimi. Unable to fault Nasimi in argument, certain scholars sent him a pair of shoes as a gift, from another country. Into the sole they had sewn a chapter from the Koran. Then they sent word to the Governor of Aleppo that Nasimi was defiling the Koran. The Governor had his shoe slit open. On the production of the paper Nasimi made no answer to the charge, knowing that he was going to be killed. He was flayed alive, reciting verses.
The first of Idries Shah’s books, The Sufis, was accepted for review by the conventional literary establishment for the most part because of pressure from poets and other literary people; it was overlooked by academics in the field.
This is a small example of the multi-sidedness of every Sufi activity and artefact. ‘We are economical in our functioning,’ say the Sufis. ‘If you like, even parsimonious: everything we say, each thing we do, has many different functions and results.’ A newer book, The Magic Monastery, [2] continues a theme. People who may ask: ‘Right then, what is Sufism?’ will find Sufism’s ‘taste’ here. But it is also a textbook for students, if the word textbook is an appropriate word for activity which is not like anything that we have been taught to regard as study.
Sufism is a study which is not scholastic. Its materials are taken from almost every form of human experience. Its books and pens are in the environment and resemble nothing that the scholastic or the enthusiast even dream about.
As, for instance, this: a famous 19th century Sufi Teacher, Jan Fishan Khan, of Afghanistan, heard that a certain scholar was viciously attacking a neighbour. He invited both men to a feast, and, having asked the neighbour to react to nothing that might happen, when the feast was at its height he began to berate him as the scholar had done for iniquities and shortcomings of all sorts. The man kept silent, until the scholar cried, ‘Please stop. I saw my own behaviour in you, and I cannot bear the sight.’
Jan Fishan Khan said: ‘In being here tonight we all took a chance. You that our friend here would not sit patiently but would attack you, I that you might be further inflamed by my vituperation instead of being shamed by it, and he that he might start to believe that I was really against him. Now we have solved the problem. The risk remains that the account of this interchange, passed from mouth to ear by those who do not know what we are doing, will represent our friend as weak, you as easily influenced, and me as easily angered.’
