The Sufis by Idries Shah
The Nature of the Sufi Path
Sufism is described as an ancient spiritual freemasonry, a secret teaching that lies within every religion rather than being a sect of Islam. While Islam is considered its "shell," Sufism itself is bound by no specific dogma, possessing no regular places of worship or monastic orders. Its followers, who call themselves "friends" rather than "Sufis," recognize one another by innate qualities of thought and habit, not by any formal hierarchy. The Sufi ideal is to be "in the world, but not of it"—free from ambition, greed, and intellectual pride. They respect religious rituals for fostering social harmony but seek to interpret myths and doctrines in a higher sense; for example, angels are seen as representations of humanity’s higher faculties.
The path of the Sufi is one of conscious evolution for the individual, a journey driven not by asceticism or intellect, but by a profound and dynamic love. This is a poetic devotion, as expressed by the great Spanish Arab Sufi, Ibn El-Arabi: "I follow the religion of Love." This theme of transcendent love later influenced the ecstatic cult of the Virgin Mary in Europe. The core of Sufi teaching, however, cannot be understood through books or academic study alone. It is a living tradition that requires the presence of a teacher and a real teaching situation, a path of direct experience. As the pioneer of the scientific method, Roger Bacon, learned from the Sufis, there is a profound difference between collecting information through argument or experiment and knowing things through full, inner participation.
Sufi literature is designed to act as a bridge between the world of the intellect and the world of direct experience. Its goal is not to accumulate facts but to open a line of communication with ultimate knowledge. This teaching is a "nutrient" for society, transmitted through the human exemplar—the teacher—and is meant to be a living, evolving organism, not a set of static rituals.
The Human Condition: A Fable of Exile and Forgetting
Sufi teachers often use fables to present a picture of life that bypasses the limitations of ordinary thinking. The human situation is likened to that of an exiled community. Originally, humanity lived in an ideal homeland (El Ar, or "Real") with richer perceptions and a clear sense of purpose. When this homeland was destined to become uninhabitable for a vast period, its people were moved to a refuge, an "island" that was only a coarse reflection of their true home. To survive, their finer faculties were dulled, and to lessen the pain of this loss, their memory of the past was almost entirely erased.
The purpose of life on the island is to evolve—to gradually reacclimatize through a succession of further islands on the journey back home. This requires a special science of navigation, guarded by instructors. However, a revolutionary figure, a failed candidate for this training, offered the islanders an easier gospel. He preached that there was no burden and no need for the difficult work of building ships or learning to swim; the island, he declared, was their rightful and only home. The people embraced this message of ease ("Please," or "Asleep") and, when the revolutionary challenged the instructors to show ships that had returned—an impossibility, as those who succeed do not come back in a recognizable form—the mob turned on the shipbuilders and killed them.
A new society was built on this illusion of comfort. "Rational" came to mean anything that harmonized with the idea that the island was the totality of existence, and the thought of leaving became a source of terror. The island became an invisible cage, its literature and science reinforcing its own limited assumptions. Yet, hidden from view, the instructors continued their work. From time to time, candidates would appear, but most were unable to proceed because they were unwilling to let go of their preconceived necessities—their "ton of cabbage," which they insisted on taking with them, making it impossible to swim.
The Limits of Partial Understanding
The human tendency to generalize from partial evidence is a primary barrier to understanding total reality. This is illustrated by the fable of the elephant in the dark. Several citizens, having never seen an elephant before, went to investigate it in a dark stable. One touched its trunk and declared it a hosepipe; another felt an ear and called it a fan; a third touched a leg and described it as a living pillar; the last felt its back and insisted it was a throne. Each described a part in terms of what he already knew, and none could form a complete picture of the whole.
This is the problem faced by those who try to study Sufism from the outside. Scholars attribute its origins to a variety of single sources—Hinduism, Neoplatonism, Christian aberration—each grasping only a fragment of the truth. To those who have experienced it, however, Sufism is the sea from which all these waves come. It is a living adventure, a practical system for consciously evolving the human mind, developing latent "organs" of perception. Many concepts that Western psychology considers modern, such as those of Freud and Jung, were articulated by Sufi masters centuries ago. This path must be experienced directly; its watchword remains: "He who tastes not, knows not."
Unity and Method: The Travelers and the Grapes
The fundamental human urge for a deeper reality is universal, though it is often misunderstood and given different names. A Sufi teacher illustrated this with the story of four travelers—a Persian, a Turk, an Arab, and a Greek—who argued over how to spend their single coin. The Persian wanted angur, the Turk uzum, the Arab inab, and the Greek stafil. A passing linguist, who was a Sufi, took their coin and returned with a bunch of grapes, satisfying all of them, as they discovered they had all desired the same thing but had called it by different names.
In this parable, the travelers represent ordinary people, who know they need something but call it religion, ambition, or some other name, and struggle against one another. The Sufi is the one who understands the underlying unity of their desire. The grapes symbolize formal religion, which the Sufi uses as a starting point to show the fundamental identity of all faiths. The "wine" made from the grapes represents the real essence, or mysticism, which can be imparted once this initial unity is understood. Sufism is thus a universal and adaptive path whose teachings are often veiled in coded language and parables, designed to slip through the conditioning of one's environment and guide the seeker toward this unified essence.
The Wisdom of Mulla Nasrudin
Mulla Nasrudin is a classical figure created by dervishes to challenge conditioned thinking and make certain states of mind clear. The thousands of Nasrudin tales, known throughout the Middle East, are a unique system of metaphysics disguised as humor. Each story can be understood on multiple levels: as a simple joke, a moral lesson, and an inner teaching that can bring a potential mystic closer to realization. Humor is used as a vehicle that can slip past the rigid patterns of thought imposed by habit.
The tales consistently challenge the formal intellect and ordinary assumptions about logic and reality. When a man falls from a roof onto Nasrudin, breaking Nasrudin’s neck while the man is unharmed, Nasrudin warns against belief in inevitability. He exposes the human tendency to miss the obvious by telling of how he smuggled donkeys across a border for years while guards meticulously searched the straw in their panniers. He demonstrates the relativity of truth with a paradox: when asked where he is going on pain of being hanged for a lie, he replies, "I am going to be hanged," forcing the guards to realize that either action they take will contradict their own rule.
Nasrudin’s stories are a mirror in which one sees oneself. They show people looking for enlightenment where the light is better, not where the answer actually lies. They illustrate that teachings repeated without a fresh source become like the "soup of the soup of the soup of the duck." They are a composite impact, designed not to be preached but to be experienced, preparing the mind for a reality that is beyond words. A story is like a peach: one can appreciate its beautiful exterior, gain nourishment from its flesh, or crack the stone to find the hidden kernel within.
The Great Masters and Their Teachings
Sheikh Saadi of Shiraz
Through his timeless classics, the Gulistan (Rose Garden) and Bustan (Orchard), Sheikh Saadi provided the ethical and moral foundation for Sufi study. His tales, which influenced Western literature through works like the Gesta Romanorum, operate on multiple levels. On the surface, they are didactic stories of morality and right conduct. At a deeper level, they are preparatory material for the Sufi path, embedding teachings about the necessity of self-examination, sincerity, right timing, and the capacity of the student to receive knowledge.
Fariduddin Attar, the Chemist
Attar, a pivotal master who blessed the young Rumi, conveyed the allegorical journey of human consciousness in his epic poem, The Parliament of the Birds. In the story, the birds of the world (humanity) are led by the hoopoe (the teacher) on a quest to find their king, the Simurgh. The journey requires them to traverse seven valleys—Quest, Love, Intuitive Knowledge, Detachment, Unification, Astonishment, and finally, Death, where the individual self merges with the whole. For Attar, love is not an indulgence but a purifying fire that transmutes the individual into a "Perfected Man."
Jalaluddin Rumi
Rumi, founder of the Whirling Dervishes, is one of history’s greatest mystical poets. His masterwork, the Mathnawi, is a vast collection of poems and fables designed to infuse the Sufi message directly into the mind. He taught that true religion is a matter of personal experience, not dogma, and that the self-righteousness of the pious is a greater barrier to truth than vice. For Rumi, love is the central force that carries humanity to its fulfillment, and the path requires a guide to help the seeker see reality as a whole. He used poetry, music, and dance as artistic channels to convey a truth that was ultimately beyond words.
Ibn el-Arabi: The Greatest Sheikh
The Spanish master Ibn el-Arabi is known as "the Greatest Master" for his profound metaphysical influence. His work is designed with multiple layers of meaning to engage people from diverse backgrounds. He taught of the "Perfected Man," an eternal, universal principle that manifests in different prophets at different times. His controversial collection of love poems, the Interpreter of Desires, used the language of human love for a beautiful maiden as a vehicle to express the mystic’s path toward divine reality. His creed, "My heart is capable of every form... Love is the creed I hold," points to a comprehensive reality of which ordinary love and formal religion are but partial reflections.
El-Ghazali of Persia
Known as the "Authority of Islam," El-Ghazali rescued Islamic theology from intellectual decay by grounding it in the experiential method of the Sufis. A brilliant scholar, he abandoned his prestigious career to spend twelve years as a wandering dervish, realizing that the intellect alone was an insufficient basis for reality. His work, such as The Alchemy of Happiness, charts the path of transmuting the "Commanding Self" (the ego) and explains that the Perfected Man must operate in different dimensions simultaneously, adapting his teaching to the capacity of his audience while maintaining his own inner experience.
Omar Khayyam
The popular image of Omar Khayyam as an epicurean skeptic is a profound misinterpretation, largely due to literalist translations like that of Edward FitzGerald. Khayyam was a Sufi teacher, and his Rubaiyat is a multi-layered initiatory tool. Its verses function on several levels: as surface poetry, as recitations to induce specific states of consciousness, and as coded texts for initiates. The poems are designed to challenge fixed ideas and provoke a deeper understanding of reality, serving as a diagnostic instrument to assess a student's potential and train the mind to perceive beyond the obvious.
The Secret Language and Its Influence
To protect their ideas and connect mundane thinking with a multi-dimensional reality, Sufis employ a "secret language" based on numerical ciphers and wordplay.
The Coalmen: The primary cipher is the Abjad system, where each letter of the Semitic alphabet has a numerical value. This allows words to be decoded into new conceptual clusters. This system reveals the Sufi origins of Western secret societies like the Italian Carbonari ("charcoal burners"), whose name is a direct play on the Arabic word for "coalman" (FeHM), a homonym for the word for "understand" (FeHM), the root of the name of their parent Sufi circle, the Fehmia ("the Perceivers").
The Builders: Freemasonry is revealed to be a direct descendant of a Sufi society known as the Builders (al-Banna). Key Masonic symbols, passwords, numbers, and legends are direct transpositions of Sufi codes. The legend of Solomon's Temple is an allegory for the building of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem by Sufi architects, and the mysterious "Mason's mark" found on medieval buildings is a stylized rendering of the sacred dervish chant, hoo.
The Philosopher’s Stone: Alchemy was introduced to the West from the Arab world as a primary vehicle for Sufi teaching. It uses the language of metallurgy as a rich allegory for the spiritual transmutation of the human soul. The "Philosopher's Stone" is a code for the hidden essence within man that can transmute the "base metal" of the ordinary self into the "gold" of the perfected being. Key alchemical terms like sulphur, mercury, and salt are homonyms for spiritual qualities like nobility, goodness, and the power to break through barriers.
Sufi Currents in Western Mysticism
The secret language of the Sufis reveals deep, often hidden connections that profoundly shaped Western culture and esoteric traditions.
The Witch Cult: The terminology and rituals of the medieval European witch cult have specific roots in the practices of a dervish group from the Aniza tribe of Arabia. Words like bruja (witch), Athame (ritual knife), and Sabat derive from Arabic roots connected to this group, whose symbols included the goat (from the tribal name Aniza) and a brand that became the "goosefoot" mark for their meeting places.
The Order of the Garter: England’s premier chivalric order shows striking parallels to a Sufi order dedicated to the mysterious figure Khidr (equated with St. George). The Garter’s name, motto (Honi soit qui mal y pense), colors (blue and gold), and structure are direct transpositions of Sufi symbols and linguistic codes transmitted from the Saracen world.
The Templars and the Head of Wisdom: The mysterious "Baphomet" head allegedly worshipped by the Knights Templar was not an idol but a symbol. The name derives from the Arabic abufihamat ("father of understanding"). It represented the "Head of Wisdom"—the transmuted consciousness of the perfected man. This same symbol appears in coded form as the "Moor's head" in European heraldry and in the legend of the magical "brazen head."
St. Francis of Assisi: The life and teachings of St. Francis show profound connections to the Sufi tradition. His background as a troubadour (a tradition with Saracen Sufi origins), his parables using distinctly Sufi imagery (like the palm tree), and the dervish-like structure of his Franciscan order all point to a direct transmission of mysticism from the East into medieval Europe.
The Secret Doctrine: The West inherited a rich but incomplete version of Saracen learning, adopting its intellectual and scientific forms while largely ignoring the essential role of the living teacher. This resulted in a "secret doctrine," a hidden current of Sufi illuminist thought that persisted in Europe and profoundly shaped Western mysticism, philosophy, and figures from Dante to Roger Bacon and the Jewish Cabala.
The Framework of Dervish Life and Thought
A Sufi group is a Tariqa (a Way), which is a living, evolutionary school, not a static institution like a monastic order. Its central work is the balanced development of the individual.
The path requires a Sheikh, or Guide, whose function is to "remove the rust" from the disciple's mind and make objective reality accessible. The disciple, in turn, must place complete faith in the Guide, aligning his will with the teacher's. Life in a dervish community is structured in stages, from serving the community to deep contemplation. The core doctrine is that "he who knows his essential self, knows his God." This is achieved by removing the ten "veils"—blameable qualities like greed and hypocrisy—that obscure the human essence.
This development centers on the activation of the lataif, or "subtleties," which are incipient organs of spiritual perception. A master guides the student so these centers awaken harmoniously. The complete path is described as Four Journeys, leading the seeker from unification with objective reality to permanency in that knowledge, and finally to becoming a universal guide, a Perfected Man who can help others through all stages of life and death.
The Living Path: Encounters and Concepts
The Sufi path is one of direct interaction and experience, where core concepts must be lived rather than simply studied.
A central lesson is that preconceived ideas and reliance on the intellect are the primary barriers to learning. As one master explained to an intellectual Western seeker, one cannot use the tools of carpentry for watchmaking. The seeker must be willing to abandon the "crutch" of his intellect to learn how to walk on his own.
Love is a key vehicle on this path. The Western tradition of romantic love, epitomized by the troubadours, is a partial inheritance of the Sufi "creed of love." For the Sufi, love is not an end in itself but a means of transformation, a universal force that, when understood, allows the perfected individual to return to the world and guide humanity toward its evolutionary destiny.
Miracles and magic are understood functionally. Miracles are a "food of impressions," events whose effect is more important than their cause, designed to assess and influence an individual's inner state. Magic is viewed as a deteriorated fragment of a complete Sufic system. This knowledge was transmitted to the West through groups like the Brethren of Sincerity, whose teachings became the direct source for the Jewish mystical tradition of the Cabala.
Ultimately, the Sufi path is an indivisible unity of the teacher, the teaching, and the taught. The teacher’s function is not just to instruct but to be a living example. The teaching is not something that can be learned from books, but something that must be "caught," like a passion, through direct participation.
Universal Currents
The mystical stream of humanity is one, and Sufism has been a profound influence on traditions far beyond the Middle East. The great religious movements in South India, the love-mysticism of the bhakti type, the Sikh religion founded by Guru Nanak, and even Zen Buddhism show strong parallels in terminology, method, and aim. For the Sufi, this points to a universal truth inherent in the human mind everywhere, which can be rekindled through contact with the living stream of the teaching. This unity is reflected in the Sufi’s esoteric interpretation of scripture, such as the Qur’an, which is seen as a multi-layered document whose inner meaning transcends dogmatic conflict and points toward an incomparable, ultimate reality.