The Sufi Work of Idries Shah

News from The Idries Shah Foundation:


In collaboration with The Octagon Press and the Estate of Idries Shah, The Foundation will be making all the published works of Idries Shah available online as eBooks.

In addition, an archive devoted to Shah's work and life will be put online, including video and audio material.

A further project will continue to ensure that Idries Shah's corpus of work is published in both Oriental and Occidental languages.


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We are planning to put online material of interest to readers of Shah’s work.

Before his death in November 1996, Shah made it known that the large body of work he published during his lifetime formed a course within itself.

This work, he said, was to be regarded as his successor. 


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Idries Shah devoted his life to collecting, selecting and translating key works of Eastern Sufi classical literature, adapting them to the needs of the West and disseminating them in the Occident.

Called by some ‘practical philosophy’, by others ‘templates in straight thinking’ – these works represent centuries of Sufi thought aimed at the development of human potential to its fullest extent.

They stress virtues such as commonsense, clear-thinking and humour to counter cant and religious dogma.

As such they may be viewed as an antidote to radicalism and fanaticism much needed in the world today.

The Idries Shah Foundation exists to make sure that these works remain available to the public – both in the East and in the West.

Visit http://www.idriesshahfoundation.org/






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"We have done all we can to embody as much of the teachership function as we can in the literature itself which we have published, largely we have been able to do this by excluding a lot of extraneous and external accretions ...

"We have been able to reconstitute the emphasis of the stories, so instead of their being instruments only to make you think how great the spiritual master is and how nothing you are, and how wonderful the possibilities of the situation are, we have retrieved the dynamic of the stories in order to show aside from those things what is possible ... what is called in some disciplines enlightenment, can be in the Sufi process, the result of the falling into place of a large number of small impacts and perceptions (from these stories and one's own experiences) producing insights when the individual is ready for them.

"We view Sufism not as an ideology that molds people to the right way of belief or action, but as an art or science that can exert a beneficial influence on individuals and societies, in accordance with the needs of those individuals and societies ... Sufi study and development gives one capacities one did not have before."

-- Idries Shah, 1976, from the lecture entitled 'Learning from Stories.'