GRAND SHEIKH OF

THE SUFIS
By Edwin Kiester, Jr.
Human Behavior, August 1977
Idries Shah, a worldly descendant of Mohammed, doesn’t mind being known as
the leading

peddler of Sufism in the West. But please don’t call him a guru. Idries
Shah and I are sitting in the village pub near his country estate south of
London, elbows resting on the gleaming varnished table top. After a morning
of weightier subjects, we are engaged in the middle-age man lunchtime talk –
exchanging military reminiscences (his of the

Afghan army, mine of the American) and discussing his forthcoming trip to A
merica. Now the waiter places before each of us a plate of cold roast
beef and a pint of bitter.
In the same idle-chatter vein, I ask the man who has almost single-handedly
reawakened Western interest in the ancient tradition of Sufism whether Sufis
follow a special diet. Three hours of talking with Shah and a generous
sample of this writing should have taught me that Sufis concern themselves
with internal matters, not external ones, and

that a prime Sufi objective is to rid people of just the kind of preconceived

notions and limited thinking I had just displayed. I should also know that
ill-informed questions make Shah’s beard bristle. “A Sufi lifestyle, is
it?” he asks, spacing the words out evenly for emphasis. “No, my friend,
not a bit of it. That’s what people crave. That’s what they demand.
Recently another man came to interview me,

and his first question was, ‘What do Sufis eat? You’re vegetarians, of
course.’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘You amaze me!’ he said. “I said to him,
‘Now if
I can be of any use to you, write that down and see what it means. What it
means is that you have been able to elicit from me a reaction which helps you
to describe yourself. ‘You amaze me.’ Why do I

amaze you? I amaze because you think that all metaphysicians must be
vegetarians. Does that tell you anything about me? It tells you things
about yourself! Now when are you going to get out of that, and learn things
about yourself, and not think that you’re

learning things about other people?” Shah leans forward, gesturing with the
knife and fork. “We are not totemists who eat brown rice and consult the I
Ching. That is not the Sufi at all, my friend. We have other things to do
than have a lifestyle. We are getting on with our thing. And our thing does
not impose on us the sort of restrictions which other people use as a
substitute for getting on with their thing. You can either do

something, or you can pretend to be doing something. “Western society seems
to have exhausted all its investigative potential. It is largely composed of
cul-de-sacs. One cul-de-sac is marked Lifestyle; one is marked Vegetarianism,
and so on. People want to know about the Sufis in terms of what limitations
they observe. ‘What do you eat for breakfast?’ ‘How many pairs of socks
do
you wear?’ “What is the relevance of such questions? Why don’t they ask
something about what I am doing? One of our traditional functions has been
to point out the limitations other people have been putting on themselves,
not to impose limitations on other people. That’s what the gurus do. We seek
to expand, increase vision, deepen perception. You don’t live by decreasing
these qualities. “That’s why you don’t find any lifestyle with us,
brother. There’s no

eating of brown rice, and no muttering of Sanskrit mantras in our way.”
With that, Shah turns back to the beef and the beer.

Over the past 15 years, Sayyed Idries Shah, 53, the grand sheikh of the Sufis
and a lineal descendant of the prophet Mohammed, has had myriad opportunities
to learn how little the West knows about Sufism – and how much it yearns to
know. Since his book The Sufis was published in 1963, the lean, intense,
Afghan-born prince has been propelled into international celebrity, sought on
lecture platforms all over the world. Twenty more books have followed the
first, and all have been bought up eagerly; Sufi “study circles” have
proliferated (often without Shah’s blessing) across the United States and
Europe; courses in Sufism are the “in” thing at colleges and universities;
Sufi theories of learning have influenced educational institutions
everywhere. Shah himself has won a host of literary prizes and recently was
the subject of a festschrift, a collection of published commentaries by 24
renowned scholars discussing his work – an honor usually reserved for a
professor emeritus of 70 who has been tending his scholarly vineyard for 50
years. One small sample of Shah’s impact can be seen in his recent
appearance at a U.S. seminar sponsored by the Institute for the Study of
Human Knowledge. Twelve

hundred persons turned out to hear him, at $65 a pop. Ironically, the
“product” Shah is

“peddling” – to use his term – is anything but new. The Sufis are often
called “Muslim mystics,” but their roots go much deeper than Islam. In that
cradle of the world’s great religions, the Middle East, Sufi influence has
been traced back to the second century B.C. and is said to have
cross-fertilized Hinduism, Christianity and Judaism along with the followers
of Mohammed. In the golden days of the caliphs, from A.D. 800 to 1800, many
of the world’s great writers and thinkers were Sufis. They included Omar
Khayyam and Jala ed-Din Rumi, considered one of the titans of the world
literature; long before

Einstein and Darwin, Sufis theorized that time and space were identical and

that humans had ascended from lower animals. One of the West’s own great
minds was a Sufi. The Franciscan Roger Bacon, considered the originator of
modern

scientific thought, studied with the Sufis in Saracen Spain. It was for
learning their “black arts” that he ran afoul of ecclesiastical authority.
Explaining Sufism to a

word-oriented, linear-thinking Westerner is difficult even for an articulate

and insightful man such as Shah. “He who tastes not, knows not,” he says,
quoting Jala ed-Din Rumi. Although there are said to be five million

Sufis, mostly affiliated with established sects, Shah says that Sufism is “not

a religion but a body of knowledge”; the sects represent a “deterioration”
or

“cultural elaboration of the original internal teaching.” Sufism has no
rituals, no holy city and no ecclesiastical hierarchy. Although Shah carries
the title grand sheikh, all Sufis are considered equal. Poet Robert Graves,
a Shah admirer, compares him to a “fugleman,” which Graves defines as an old
army term for the soldier who stood before a company on the parade ground and
served as the exemplar in arms drill. Sufis do not even call themselves
Sufis, which is a nickname akin to Quakers. They use the terms We friends
or Our people.

Genuine Sufism is inward, concerning itself with “true reality – what
exists beyond what is observed.” Like peeling an onion, Sufism tries to strip
away the outer

layers of limited thinking, misconception and social conditioning to disclose

the kernel that lies beneath – that unity of existence that Shah calls “the

essence of all religion.” Sufism’s goal is to reorganize human mentation so
that it is more sensitive to things that are there anyway – “We say in
Sufism that exclusion is just as important as inclusion,” Shah says. You can
gain Sufi truths from other people and by intuition, insight, folk wisdom and
experience. Long before the work on

brain hemispheres of Dr. Robert E. Ornstein, the Sufis knew that part of the

brain learned through words arranged in sequence and the other part by hunches

and seeing the whole situation at once. Of course, over the past two

decades, literally dozens of mystical, quasi-mystical and semimystical Eastern

sects have invaded the West. If you really want to see Shah’s beard bristle,
suggest that Sufism is part of the yoga-and-transcendental-meditation craze.
“That gray area of mumbo jumbo and gurus and mantras,” he says, bitingly.
“It has little connection

with any tradition except the circus. In Eastern countries like India that
is fairly well understood. Only the ‘new boys’ profess to see anything
significant in the phenomenon. But here the carnival has taken over. We have
a grotesque of the true Indian guru.” He

also has a few disparaging words for Zen. “No Sufi would ever think it
important to think of a phrase like, “What is the sound of one hand
clapping?’ He would regard it as training for automatism. You could obsess
people with one hand.” The Sufi has nothing in common, either, with groups
that seek to withdraw from the world. “Be in the

world, but not of it,” is the Sufi watchword.
When I first met Shah, he struck me as anything but the stereotype of the
Eastern holy man. He greeted me in a red turtleneck sweater, glen-plaid
slacks, magenta socks and calfskin sandals. He speaks Oxford-accented English
with a

rich vocabulary and a range of expression that is stunning in its scope; he is

the only man I ever heard use the world phantasmagoria in casual

conversation. As his books show, he is a gifted storyteller; but in person,
his tales are even more compelling, because he acts out all the parts and
mimics all the voices. Once, telling of an encounter with a Nubian student
from the Sudan during a lecture, he leaped to his feet, put his hand on top
of his head to represent a Nubian topknot and dropped his voice a full octave
to impersonate the man’s basso.
He also leads the life of a country squire. The Shah home, Langton House at

Langton Green, a tiny hamlet nestled into the Kentish countryside southeast of

Tunbridge Wells, once belonged to Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scout

movement. A rambling, whitewashed, green-shuttered mansion, it is surrounded
by 50 acres of gardens and pastureland and by the village green. Inside, like
Shah himself, it is a subtle blend of East and West. Oriental carpets,
hammered brass trays and a

children’s peacock swing designed by Shah’s wife contrast with a massive
desk

Shah picked up in a junk shop and an IBM Selectric typewriter.


When asked how long he had kept a

foot in both Eastern and Western worlds, he said, “All my life." Although a
resident of Britain for many years and a British subject, he was born in the
East and groomed from boyhood for his eventual role of building bridges
between cultures. The eldest son of the late Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, one of
the legendary figures of contemporary Middle Eastern history, he was born
near Simla in the Himalayas and was raised in Afghanistan, India and

Saudi Arabia, “thus being exposed to three of the five main cultural
traditions

of the Middle East.” (The other two are Persian and Turkish.) He never
attended

school in the formal sense. “I was educated by the old oriental tradition
that if I needed to learn something, someone was procured to teach it to me,”
he recalls. However, his father insisted that he learn firsthand about the
world. The young prince worked a year

as a laborer on a farm and served a hitch in the Afghan army. As descendants
of Mohammed through the prophet’s eldest son, the family carries considerable
prestige through the Middle East. Their influence transcends national
boundaries and mere sectarian lines. Shah’s father served as an unofficial
adviser to several Middle Eastern

countries, and often carried out diplomatic missions between East and West.

Often the young Shah accompanied him, gaining access to the highest ruling
and spiritual levels in his part of the world. The experience stood him in
good stead. Today, one of the

little-known and little-discussed aspects of his life is to serve as adviser
to several African and Asian governments. As Shah was growing up, he also
adhered

to the Sufi stricture that every Sufi must earn his own way. “We have a sense
of priorities,” Shah says “To belong to the human community is essential.
We say, ‘If you cannot earn your livelihood, go out and learn how and then
become a Sufi.’” Shah’s education had given him a thorough grounding in
literature, history and economics but no profession; he chose to enter the
world of business and finance. He established three successful electronics
firms, a carpet factory and a publishing house and still serves as
chairperson of each. This record also gave him entrée to London financial and
social circles. “Many of my sober business acquaintances would never believe
I am to be bracketed with what they consider the guru phenomenon,” he says,
laughing. “They know me too well to believe that.”