The Sufis
About This Book
Idries Shah's The Sufis is the book that introduced the inner dimension of Islam to the modern Western world in a form that could be genuinely understood rather than merely admired from outside. Drawing on his position as a hereditary Master of a Sufi order and his extraordinary range of cultural reference, Shah demonstrates that Sufism is not a sect or a doctrine but a living science of the development of higher human capacities — one that has shaped Western literature, philosophy, chivalry, alchemy, and Freemasonry far more profoundly than historians have acknowledged. The book reads both as a work of scholarship and as itself a teaching instrument.
Shah's approach is distinctive: rather than presenting Sufism as an Eastern curiosity or a Muslim mysticism, he shows it operating at the intersection of all the major spiritual and intellectual currents of the world. The figures he examines — from Rumi and Al-Ghazali to Roger Bacon and Dante — are shown to have been transmitters of a perennial wisdom whose vehicle is human experience itself rather than any particular cultural or religious form. The Sufis launched a decades-long body of work by Shah that changed how many Western thinkers understood both spirituality and the nature of human learning.
What You'll Learn
• Understand Sufism not as a religious sect but as a science of human development with its own precise methods for cultivating higher consciousness — methods that have operated across and through many different cultural containers
• Recognise Sufi influence on the Western intellectual and artistic tradition: in troubadour poetry, Dante's Divine Comedy, Roger Bacon's empiricism, and the symbolism of Freemasonry and alchemy
• Grasp the Sufi understanding of baraka — the transmission of real spiritual influence — as distinct from mere teaching: why the personal presence of someone in a genuine state of development transmits something that books and lectures cannot
• Learn why Shah insists that the outer forms of all traditions — rituals, doctrines, practices — are vehicles for a content that may or may not be present at any given time, and that confusing the vehicle with the content is the primary error of religious thinking
• Appreciate the concept of the 'real work' as distinct from spiritual entertainment: the difference between genuine inner development and the emotional or intellectual satisfaction that most spiritual activity actually provides
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