Thinkers and teachers

Idries Shah

1924 to 1996

Who was Idries Shah, and what is truly known of them?

What is known

Writer on Sufism, born at Simla in British India to an Afghan-Indian father, the author Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, and a Scottish mother, and brought up mainly in England. His first books were on magic: Oriental Magic (1956) and The Secret Lore of Magic (1957). About 1960 he was secretary to Gerald Gardner, the founder of modern Wicca, whose authorised biography, printed under another man’s name, is generally held to be his work. The Sufis (1964), with an introduction by the poet Robert Graves, offered Sufism as a timeless wisdom not bound to Islam, and was followed by some three dozen books, among them collections of teaching stories and of the tales of Mulla Nasrudin. He founded the Institute for Cultural Research in London in 1965. The novelist Doris Lessing was his pupil and advocate.

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all The Sufis (1964), Tales of the Dervishes (1967) and Learning How to Learn (1978).

A way, not a creed

Idries Shah teaches that Sufism is not a creed to be believed but a way of developing a capacity of perception, gained by experience under a teacher who knows what each student needs. The Sufi is in the world but not of it. Shah presents the way as older than its Islamic dress and bound to no one religion, which is his own claim. Its outward forms, the dances, the music, the repeated phrases and the exercises, were tools fitted to a particular people at a particular time; copied elsewhere, as ritual or as fashion, they become empty shells, and the student who collects them has the husk without the fruit.

Time, place and people

Teaching, he holds, depends on three conditions: the right time, the right place and the right people. What helps one group at one moment may be useless or harmful to another, so the teacher gives what is needed, not what is asked for, and may refuse what the student most wants. The student's first lesson is that they are not the best judge of what they need.

The commanding self

Much of what passes for spiritual seeking, in his teaching, is the commanding self, the demanding ego of Sufi psychology, in disguise. It wants emotional stimulation, attention and marvels, the warmth of belonging to a group and the flattery of being chosen, and it takes the satisfying of these wants for progress. Real learning begins when the student sees this greed and sets it aside. Humility, sincerity and patience are not virtues added later; they are the conditions of learning at all, and learning how to learn is the first thing to be learned.

The teaching story

His chief instrument is the teaching story. Such a story works on several levels at once: it entertains, it carries a moral, and, read and reread over time, it builds in the mind a pattern that lets the reader recognise in life what the story showed. It is not to be explained away by a single meaning, nor read once and filed. The student lives with it, as with a tool not yet fully understood.

In the Tale of the Sands a stream, coming down from far mountains, reaches a desert and cannot cross it: whenever it pours itself into the sand, it disappears. A voice from the sand tells it that the wind crosses the desert, and that the stream can too, if it lets itself be taken up into the wind and carried over as vapour, to fall as rain beyond. The stream fears to lose itself, until something in it remembers having been carried so before; it rises into the wind, and its essence crosses.

In When the Waters Were Changed, Khidr, the guide of the Sufis, warns a man that on a certain day all the water in the world will be replaced by new water that drives people mad. The man stores water and drinks only his own, and when the day comes everyone else goes mad and takes him for the madman. Lonely past bearing, he drinks the new water, joins the rest, and forgets that he was ever different.

Nasrudin

The Mulla Nasrudin is the Sufis' comic figure, a fool who is sometimes a sage, and his jokes are teaching in disguise, meant to jolt the mind out of its habits. A friend finds Nasrudin searching under a street lamp for a key he lost inside his house; he looks there, he explains, because there is more light. People seek the truth where it is comfortable to look, not where they lost it. For years a customs officer searches the bundles of straw on Nasrudin's donkeys, sure that he is smuggling, and never finds anything; long afterwards the officer asks him what he was smuggling, and Nasrudin answers: donkeys. What is in plain sight is the thing least examined.

The elephant in the dark

An elephant is brought to a town whose people have never seen one, and kept in a dark house. They go in to find out what it is, each feeling one part: the one who touches the ear says it is like a fan, the one who touches the leg says a pillar, the one who touches the trunk a pipe. Each knows a part and takes it for the whole. Shah uses the old story, told by the poets Sanai and Rumi, to show what partial knowledge does: it is not false, but held as complete it becomes a quarrel.

Orders and memberships

He claimed descent from the Prophet and authority in the Naqshbandi tradition of Sufism; no order in the Muslim world is recorded as having appointed him. In the mid-1960s the followers of J. G. Bennett, a pupil of Gurdjieff, accepted him as the envoy of a hidden source of that teaching and made over their house at Coombe Springs to him, which he sold.

The legend

That he spoke for an ancient hidden brotherhood, the “Guardians of the Tradition”, a claim made in papers passed round in the early 1960s. Scholars of Sufism, L. P. Elwell-Sutton the most severe among them, judged his account of it unhistorical.

What was forged, or is false

The twelfth-century manuscript of Omar Khayyam, said to have been in his family for eight hundred years, from which his brother Omar Ali-Shah and Robert Graves published a new translation in 1967. It was never produced, and scholars showed that the translation followed a Victorian study of the poem.

Their works

The SufisBook, 1964
His book presenting Sufism as a timeless teaching not bound to Islam, with an introduction by Robert Graves. It was widely read in the West. Scholars of Sufism judged his account unhistorical.
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The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla NasrudinCollection, 1966
A collection of the comic tales of Mulla Nasrudin, presented as teaching stories. It brought the tales to many Western readers. It is among his most loved books.
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Oriental MagicBook, 1956
His first book, a survey of magic as practised and believed in across the East, from charms and amulets to the lore of the learned. It is drawn from reading and from travel. It shows his early interest in magic before he turned to Sufism.
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The Secret Lore of MagicBook, 1957
An anthology of passages from old books of magic, the grimoires. It was one of the first such collections for general readers. It is a gathering of texts, not a guide.
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Gerald Gardner, WitchBiography, 1960
The authorised life of Gerald Gardner, printed under the name of Jack Bracelin. It tells Gardner’s story as he wished it told. It is generally held to be Shah’s work.
It was printed under another man’s name, and Shah’s authorship is inferred, not stated.
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Tales of the DervishesCollection, 1967
A collection of teaching stories drawn from Sufi and other sources across many centuries, each with a short note on where he found it. It was widely read in the West. Scholars questioned some of his sources and his readings of them.
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The Rubaiyat of Omar KhayyamTranslation, 1967
A new version of the quatrains by his brother Omar and Robert Graves, said to come from a manuscript held in the family for eight hundred years. The manuscript was never produced. Scholars showed that the translation followed a Victorian study of the poem.
The version is by his brother Omar Ali-Shah and Robert Graves; his own part was to vouch for the family manuscript, which was never shown and is not believed to exist.
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Learning How to LearnBook, 1978
A book of questions and answers, drawn from his letters, talks and interviews, on the Sufi way of teaching and on why people so often seek the wrong things from it. It sets out his own views on how people learn. It is among his later books.
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How the house tells a life

This life is told from the record, with what is documented, what is legend and what was forged kept apart. A membership in an order is stated only where documents show it. A person’s chart explains none of their deeds.

The arts it feeds

The mystics Magic and protection

Lives near it in time