Sufi Literature

What Looks Like an Egg and Is An Egg? 
by Doris Lessing (1972)


There were the mice who, having learned not only to eat the poison put down for them, but to like it, ignoring the cheese in the traps, were caught because people learned to coat the cheese in the traps with poison. - Reported in The London Daily Mail, Feb. 2, 1967. 

"Do you imagine that fables exist only to amuse or to instruct and are based upon fiction ? The best ones are delineations of what happens in real life in the community, and in the individual's mental processes."- From "Reflections," by Idries Shah. 


Islamic mysticism, generally called Sufism, has a very large literature, covering several epochs in the past 1,400 years, and contained in the various cultures - Persian, Arab, Turkish and Indo-Islamic, not to mention Indonesian - in which Islam has been manifested. This literature may seem more accessible to us than other aspects of Sufism: but this is because of assumptions bred into us by our culture about "mysticism." Sufism has always been something of a mystery to Eastern scholars and Western orientalists alike. Why has it so many manifestations? How can so many people of apparently irreconcilable views belong to it? How can it be "Islamic" at all if so many apparent heretics, apostates even, have belonged to it? How can it be "mysticism" when it expresses itself so variously, in science, philosophy, literature, social organization? 


Each student or school of thought has attempted to answer these problems by finding a " thread." Each attempt has been unsatisfactory because it has involved leaving out certain material to make what is left in fit: when you are looking at Sufism you must look at who is telling you about it. Many modern commentators have tried to show that Sufism is "borrowed" from neo-Platonism, or Christianity, or Hinduism: this happens because they want to answer the question they have themselves framed: What is this derived from? 


It is in fact the variety and lack of coherence - looked at from restricted points of view - which give the clue to the nature of Sufism. The answer is that each individual manifestation of Sufism is planned. It takes the shape and follows the pattern laid down by whoever is planning it. It is not an ideology, in which one starts with objectives, and then has to convince people of the need for them, and for rigid methods. Instead, it offers "social" contexts for local activity, creating hordes of apparent anomalies that most students will not face: for instance, the Naqshbandi Sufis are said to abhor music in ritual - the Chishtis employ hardly anything else. How then can it have happened that important Sufi teachers have been initiated into both orders and several others as well? People have been amazed that Rumi had disciples from all local religions and did not convert them to the ideology in which he was supposedly rooted: Islam. But this could easily be seen to be because he did not need to do so in order to offer the action of Sufis'. People find it impossible to explain how Hallaj (executed for apostasy for saying "I am God! " ) could be revered as one of the great Sufis by devout Moslems down the centuries. 


Both in science and in logical human thought in the "soft" sciences the principle is universally accepted that the most likely explanation based on the facts is the hypothesis that should be taken as the probable truth about the matter being studied. This principle holds good in the study of Sufism. If Haji Bektash, a descendant of Mohammed and a Shiah (believer in the divine right to rule subsisting in the House of Ali), and Abdul-Qadir of Gilan, a descendant of Mohammed and a Sunni (believer in rulership subsisting in majority opinion of the whole body of believers), could both found Sufi systems and both be regarded as eminent Sufis -although Shiahs and Sunnis have regularly shed one another's blood - the basic connection is not in ideology at all, but in method. 


The Sufis themselves seldom conceal that they are concerned with presentation and effectiveness, not indoctrination. Hence their writings are littered with phrases like "The color of the wine is the same as the color of the bottle," or, "Right time, right place, right people are necessary." 


The importance of realizing these characteristics of Sufism is that otherwise local expressions of Sufism suited to one time or place might be taken as unalterable dogma ; failure to observe the temporary nature of Sufi formulation forces scholars to choose arbitrary categories and hence label certain Sufis as genuine and others as less so. Even more important, the mere imitation of Sufi organization and activity promotes the growth of false cults...


... But what are the "teachings" of Sufism, if they are not what we have been led to expect? "Wisdom is not in books - only some of the ways to search for it," is a dictum. 


But, while Sufis can teach and have taught without words, using gestures, atmospheres, decorations on carpets and ceramics, for us the "vehicle" is words, since that is how our brains are programmed; it is hard for us, indeed impossible, to think in any other way. 


Books must not be made into "idols" - but we can approach Sufism remembering that the teachings are partly contained in the lessons, the story-structures, the reports of human interchanges, which are part of this body of literature...


Perhaps the best introduction to the body of  [Idries] Shah's work is his first book - his first about Sufism: he has written on many subjects, from travel to magic, anthropology, music, geology. "The Sufis" remains the most comprehensively informative. And one is immediately forced to use one's mind in a new way, because it is not written within our formulas for exegetics. It unfolds like a branch, and to accumulate factual information, let alone the deeper ranges of the material, means to expand one's attention, to abandon the if-and-therefore, a, b, c, d, way of thinking that is the way we have all been trained. There is no index; this demonstrates a good many different things about our memory, and certain dependencies of the mind. 


"The Way of the Sufi" also sets out to cover ground; it contains everything from the use of contemplating materials to classical Persian literature chosen to compare its surface meaning with its deeper levels. I wish I could have the experience of reading this book again for the first time: it was like a door opening where one least expects it. 


But perhaps the most shocking to our assumptions about "mysticism" is "The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin," the corpus of Nasrudin "jokes," deliberately created to inculcate Sufic thinking, to outwit The Old Villain, which is a name for the patterns of conditioned thinking which form the prison in which we all live. 

A wag met Nasrudin. In his pocket he had an egg. 

"Tell me, Nasrudin, are you any good at guessing games?" 

"Not bad." 

"Very well then, tell me what I have in my pocket." 

"Give me a clue then." 

"It is shaped like an egg, it is yellow and white inside, and it looks like an egg." 

"Oh I know," said Nasrudin, " it is some kind of cake..."


(Continue reading the full article at the Idries Shah Foundation.)