Wisdom of the Idiots
About This Book
Wisdom of the Idiots is one of Idries Shah's most celebrated collections — assembling a wide range of Sufi teaching materials under the theme of apparent foolishness revealing genuine wisdom, a theme that recurs throughout the tradition in figures from Nasrudin to the 'sacred idiot' (majzub) who appears in many classical stories as the person whom conventional wisdom dismisses as mad but whose apparently senseless actions are revealed to express a perception of reality that is more complete than the 'sensible' person's.
Shah's use of the 'idiot' theme is not romantic or anti-intellectual: he is not celebrating foolishness as such but using the figure of the apparent fool to illustrate the specific ways in which conventional wisdom — the accumulated assumptions, categories, and judgements of ordinary educated consciousness — systematically prevents the perception of realities that are available but incompatible with the established framework. The 'idiot' in these stories is wise not because ignorance is wisdom but because their freedom from the specific constraints of conventional wisdom allows them to perceive what conventional wisdom cannot.
What You'll Learn
• Understand the majzub figure in the Sufi tradition: the 'sacred idiot' or 'holy fool' who appears across many spiritual traditions — what specific quality of freedom from conventional constraints this figure represents, and how the Sufi tradition has used this figure both as a teaching tool and, in some cases, as a legitimate (if demanding) form of actual spiritual development
• Grasp the epistemological argument: how Shah uses the wisdom-of-idiots theme to make a specific point about the relationship between accumulated knowledge (which can blind as well as illuminate) and genuine understanding (which requires a different kind of relationship to knowledge than conventional education develops)
• Recognise the cross-cultural resonance: how the Sufi 'idiot-sage' tradition relates to comparable figures in other traditions (the Zen master who responds to sophisticated questions with apparently absurd answers, the Hassidic rebbe who behaves in ways that confound scholarly expectations, the Taoist sage who embodies wu-wei in apparently improvident behaviour)
• Learn the specific teaching function of the stories: how different Wisdom of the Idiots stories address different aspects of the conventional wisdom that most needs disrupting — academic pretension, spiritual pride, social conformity, the confusion of cultural form with spiritual substance — and what each story's specific disruption is designed to reveal
• Appreciate the book's place in Shah's larger project: how Wisdom of the Idiots, read alongside The Commanding Self, contributes to a complete picture of the commanding self's most effective disguise — the commanding self that has appropriated wisdom, learning, and spiritual seriousness as new forms of its self-assertion — and of the specific forms of apparent foolishness that, paradoxically, are most likely to slip past its defences
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