Sufi Thought

by Imdad Hussein al-Qadiri


For untold centuries Sufi thinkers have claimed (and they continue to emphasize) that Sufism is not, as others imagine with zealous facility, a religious cult as normally understood. Sufis have repeatedly referred to their operations as a science: "the science of man" and "the science of certainty" are among the names they have given to this pursuit.


But in an atmosphere where the concept of science as a necessary and specific method of investigation and a tool for the betterment of man was almost wholly eclipsed-- in the East largely and until very recently in the West-- the interest called "the science of man" could find acceptance and fair hearing only in small groups.


Indeed, until almost "the other day," if we speak in historical terms, the study of anything that was not avowedly devoted to the service of the state or the prevailing ideological commitment (generally a theological one) was regarded as odd. Sometimes such a study was feared, as it tends to be feared in all closed systems, and easily labeled subversive.


Sufis responded to this oppressive environment by cloaking their teachings and their activities in the outward garb of religion, which they saw as largely a diluted, imitative form of a branch of Sufism itself. They also adopted cultural pursuits which in totalitarian societies afforded the nearest approach possible to free activity and which provided a means of maintaining communication with people at all levels of society. It is for the latter-reason that the Persian-speaking Sufis as good as monopolized the classics. Almost every Persian classics, valued for its beauty and originality, is a Sufi textbook as well as a work of art.


The prestige gained by the Sufis, in spite of the enormous obstacles imposed by dogmatism, fanaticism and sterile scholasticism, caused them to have to endure imitators-- so many imitators, indeed, that the only forms of Sufism publicly known in many areas are the imitative ones. These groups often took the form of collections of people, attracted by the reputations of Sufism who operated as mere therapeutic entities or social circles and who found in their "Sufism" outlets for their emotional needs and psychological fantasies.


The true Sufis, however, maintained their centers of learning through the centuries and continued to develop organs of communication with the community at large which sometimes outwardly appeared to be based on principles acceptable to the current intellectual and dogmatic climate.


Setting up institutions for cultural research and development, imitated in this form of expression, and then turning to another, caused great furor and confusion among the uninitiated students and the "specialist" but ignorant pedants, as well as in the ranks of the public, entrenched interests, and mawkishly emotional imitators. First of all, in the East, scholars did not know what to make of the imitation Sufis who abounded. Then the imitators, themselves now wedded to the idea that they were Sufis indeed, did not know what to make of the proliferation of Sufi groups that were genuine but that used the puzzling symbolism of, say, alchemy, beauty, or even physical and mental exercises.


At a later stage the confusion of the Eastern scholars was transmitted-- by their commentaries and by the inevitable reproduction of mistakes that accompanies partial understanding-- to the European and finally the American Orientalists. Many of these optimistic academics, who now have Eastern pupils of their own, are at a stage where they cannot decide exactly what Sufism is, how it should be studied, and why the Sufis-- who should by definition be "seeking God" if they are mystics-- should be engaged in so many apparently diverse activities.


The main difficulty is that these experts of the past and present, of the East and West, judge everything according to criteria of their own invention. Little wonder that they are baffled-- like the child who cried when he found a cat with a tail because he had seen only tailless cats before. He is reported to have sobbed inconsolably, "It has no right to have a tail!"


With the passage of time and the ordinary flow of knowledge and practice from one place to another, Sufim in both the legitimate and imitative forms moved westward. In the period known in Europe as the Middle Ages, Spain was a flourishing center of Sufi activity. From here both brands of Sufism were imported by the West, whose scholars were as omnivorously hungry for advanced knowledge and as undiscriminating as today's ambitious would-be scholars in the East.


In later years imitation Sufi cults and well-meaning emotionalists offering release from tensions, giving assurance and comfort and ease, carried what they imagined to be Sufism to the confines of Western Europe, Britain, and both the Americas, as well as to many other places. Many of their followers, in defiance of traditional Sufi teaching and in the absence of local spiritual teachers who gave them what they wanted, remained centered around the memory and works of their "masters". Such cults are, of course, heavily influenced by primitive religious-social groups.


Meanwhile, after a number of false starts, Orientalism was developing into an accepted discipline in the West, and scholars encountered similar problems-- when trying to deal within arbitrary limitations with Sufi materials-- as had their academic predecessors in the Saracen lands.


At the time of this writing [1969], the propaganda of the cultists and the efforts of the scholars provide the main body of literature of Sufism available in the West, and even in large areas of the East. Not only has the false coin all but driven out the true, but the false has come to be regarded as true by sheer pressure of quantity and the incessant litanies of the adherents.


Yet Sufism continued. In the West and elsewhere, especially in those cultures currently styling themselves as "open societies", the climate exists wherein Sufi studies can be presented in a form intelligible to the ordinary man or woman. This is largely because there are comparatively few barriers to the dissemination of ideas and thoughts, and because the people in general are thirsty for knowledge. They no longer care where they get it, because of the the collapse of the dominating sources of learning which until today claimed, overtly or by implication, to be the regular, canonical, perfect, efficient, necessary, and correctly formed sources.


When public interest was aroused in the roots of psychology and the study of man, as a result of the failure of established institutions to give the people what they had been promising, it was inevitable that educated and interested people would study the claims of the Sufis to be possessed of a special science and the tools with which to develop and impart it. This stage, which preceded the present widespread interest, was reached just after the First World War in Europe.


Sufi teachings continued to penetrate into the West, but Sufis did not compete in the Press and in public lectures with the cultists All Sufi activity, for practical purposes, was private.


Sufi experience showed that few people paid any attention to non-cultist Sufis like Colonel Wilberforce Clarke, or Sir Richard Burton, and that only the imitation cults really thrived.


It fell to the lot of the Russo-Armenian philosopher Gurdjieff to emphasize the existence of a "dervish science" located by him somewhere in Central Asia, and having links with ancient forms of Christianity and even earlier systems.


This personage, indeed, appears to have tried to create a "school" somewhat on the lines of Sufi enterprises in certain tekkias. Various circumstances inhibited its development. His foremost disciple, the Russian philosopher Ouspensky, made an attempt to transmit Sufic ideas through lectures and books.


Following these psychologically-oriented philosophers certain other figures (including Dr. Maurice Nicoll and Dr. Kenneth Walker in Britain) tried to expand, explain, describe, systematise and impart what they could of the Russian's materials.


Parallel with this development, followers of Sufi thought, who were actually devotees of the outward expression of the thought, collected around various authority figures or organised themselves to study translations or derivations of genuine Sufic literature.


The result of all this effort-- including bizarre expeditions to the East, watched with amusement by Sufis there-- was the cause of the formation of collections of people who were united only by custom and habit, and whose Sufic potential was largely untouched. This was inevitable, given the absence of any discrimination in the culture between emotional feelings of an undifferentiated kind and the characteristic experiences of Sufi progress.


The next major development in the story of Sufic study was the operation under the direction of Hadrat Sayed Idries Shah. In private conversations and through his monumental book The Sufis, he offered the rationale which connected the lingering rumours of a knowledge still lingering in the East, the connection with other religions, the use of inner exercises, and the blunders of the scholars, to mention but a few points.


The importance of the revelations which were made by this book and its succeeding volumes can hardly be exaggerated. The object of the operation was plainly nothing less than that of showing that a legitimate Sufi tradition continued to function, illustrating the stages of degeneration of scientific knowledge into folklore, and making available certain means of taking up the study again in a coherent, purposeful and effective form.


But whereas the expectations of the members of the followers of Sufi thought were by now focused upon the possible appearance of a messianic figure who would adapt their studies slightly or transform them with a talisman, leading them forward into a new era of glory, the Sufic objective soon became visibly otherwise.


Idries Shah steadfastly decline to accept the leadership and direction of groups as already constituted, stating that his task was initially to communicate with those who might be interested in understanding what Sufism had to offer. He would not confine himself to working within what was in effect a closed society imagining itself to have a monopoly of materials or destiny. He went so far as to state that such materials as were generally being used were inoperable in the culture in which they were so greedily practiced and hoarded.


The result of Idries Shah's writings can only be described in superlatives. Every single one of his books published in English (and not all of them on Sufism) as if by some magic spell, rapidly became accepted as a significant work in the field with which he dealt. Poets, scientists, professors of physics and literature, anthropologists, each in his own area claimed that here was something of undoubted value.


Orientalists and other scholars, who had until then regarded the study of Sufism as their peculiar preserve, were amazed to find that Idries Shah's books, unlike those of the "specialists" were being reviewed with enthusiasm in the mass-circulation Press. But this was not all. Solemnly serious sociological journals averred that this material, formerly supposed to belong to a vanishing cult, was of prime importance in solving current human problems in advanced societies. In book after book, Idries Shah revealed Sufic facets and theories which were seized upon by the most unlikely variety of readers, both specialist and otherwise, as being of  significance to social, scientific and other fields today.


Finally, stressing that Sufic knowledge was basically of importance to everyone, and that it had a vital place in educational matters, Idries Shah collaborated in the setting up of a learned Foundation for the study and dissemination of human ideas. This body, whose basic document of formation was approved by the British Department of Education and Science, linked a number of distinguished thinkers and organisations.


In spite of some initial confusion as to the aims of the Society, due entirely to the misplaced enthusiasm of cultists hoping for a new form of an old pastime, it rapidly became evident , through the official recognition and the organisation's power to attract the attention of individuals of the highest calibre throughout the world, that here was a completely new and unsuspected discipline, capable of forming a legitimate part of contemporary life in its own right. In other words, the Foundation was not just another eminently respectable scholastic institution. It was more: one which possessed tools, theories and testing procedures which could operate as effectively and constructively in modern society as any trumpeted academic discipline of the older sort.


The present position is that Sufi study, interpretation and analysis of the human condition is now as good as established as a real and continuing part of the apparatus of the social, educational and psychological working of a modern society. Sufism is imagined to be "declining" or to be studied through pedantic works only by the few hidebound scholars whose attitudes have been overtaken by events.


Sufism has thrown off its Oriental and cultist accretions. Only those who want primitive thought are unlikely to be able to welcome back into the fold a science which offers, as the sociological journal New Society put it, "real possibilities and practical alternatives to our present ways of operating... relevant, fruitful and urgent for our present society."



from the Introduction to Mahmud Shabistari's The Secret Garden trans. Johnson Pasha (Octagon Press, 1969).