Idries Shah
I have been thinking recently about the extreme pro and anti views Shah engendered. Both camps are really quite amusing.
On the one hand you have James Moore, Gurdjeffian extraordinaire and his ‘definitive last word on the matter’ Neo Sufism, (half of which can still be perused at the preceding link) and on the other, there is the ‘Shah fan club’ who may, or may not, represent a genuine Sufi manifestation.
With regards to Moore there is really not much to say. I am certainly not an apologist for Shah and have no ‘turf’ to defend as Moore obviously does but his arguments against Shah are, to my mind, ridiculous. Principally the majority of Moore’s points center around charges of dishonesty - from quoting descriptions of Shah’s father as a ‘swindler’ to suggestions that Shah himself was appearing to be other than he in fact was.
But that surely is not an argument at all in relation to Sufism - it is essentially a religious or moral argument (although to be fair, many present-day Gurdjieffians and Sufists ARE actually religious rather than esoteric) and is valid only within those contexts. Gurdjieff himself was described as ‘a shark’ by Bennett who had examined his police files which were ‘bulging with illegal activity of all kinds’. Strangely this does not seem to disqualify Gurdjieff’s ‘spirituality’ in Moore’s eyes as it does in Shah’s but there is worse to come.
With Gurdjieff, Sufism and Shah, regardless of any ‘genuiness’ (to coin a phrase), we are not talking about the moral issue as we are with religious teachers but rather with a developmental one. This has two very important aspects in the current regard: firstly esotericism states explicitly (as do Gurdjieff, Shah and Sufism time and time again) that man does not percieve reality and that this rather than sin, is his primary problem. Both Shah and Gurdjieff are categorical that ordinary man sees things incorrectly and that this is the distinction between ‘orthodox’ and ‘esoteric’ thought. How then can Moore (or anyone else) judge the actions of a master unless he himself is capable of this perception ? Of course Moore would dispute that Shah was a master (and Shah never claimed to be one anywhere) but again, how is he to know this ? How am I to know it ? Or anyone unless they are endowed with perception ?
The fact is that we cannot know unless we can percieve such things. And we cannot. The whole ‘point’ of Gurdjieff and Shah was to enable people to gain this perception which they didn’t originally have. Of course Moore may have travelled this road and his opinions may derive from such a perception - one that I don’t have. Or they may just be ‘religious belief’, certainly they take no account of the foregoing which seems odd as it is intrinsic to the teaching of both Shah and Gurdjieff and fundamental to Sufism in general.
The second point is perhaps more baffling. In Sufism there is a teaching called malamati which basically involves the practitioner making himself out to be undesirable to others for reasons of his own personal development. Such a person may spread rumours about himself to his detriment or act in such a way as to cause others to assume he is undesirable in some way if not actually evil. Gurdjieff made frequent reference to this technique (and Shah has described it also) and there are many suggestions amongst the Gurdjieff literature that he himself was practising such. In any event, it is indisputably established as a Sufi practice so why should the possibilty that a putative Sufi (Shah in this case - although again, he never claimed to be a Sufi) was in fact a malamati not even be considered ?
And then there are ‘the converts’. I was told recently by a friend that ‘Shah was the teacher for the next 500 years’. I would like to see what that is based on actually but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. I never considered that Shah ever was a teacher until the x-hundredth person said he was but as I say, what do I know ?
In any event, it is all irrelevant now. Shah is no longer with us and if there is someone else who has ‘assumed the mantle’ then they are not obvious and will be harder to track down. Some people address this problem by looking to Shah’s family or by assuming that Shah is ‘still the teacher’ but really the problem is the same as it was while he was alive and essentially the same problem as outlined above: can I recognise a Sufi teacher and if not how do I develop the capacity to do so ?
That capacity isn’t really going to the local bookshop and looking for authors of ‘Sufi books’ or locating the nearest ‘Sufi center’. If one has the capacity then one doesn’t need the labels - in fact the labels may be there to identify those who don’t have the capacity. And of course Shah himself claims that this was the purpose of the Sufi tales he published (not his own btw but from traditional Sufi sources) - to develop such a capacity, to ‘learn how to learn’.
When I was younger I had a friend who was also quite close to Shah. He has passed on now but I remember I asked him once about how to make contact with the new phase of the teaching. This was while Shah was still alive btw, shortly after the start of what people like to call the ‘interegnum’ . He was quite specific in his answer and basically said that he knew nothing about Sufism and that the teaching did not use that name. He implied that recognising it might be the ‘price of admission’.
I’m still trying to do that and Shah’s books seem the best tool I’ve so far found for the job. Finding ‘the new phase’ (or not) won’t make any difference to that. The ppreliminary work still has to be done no matter what. In a obscure sort of way sense perhaps Shah is a teacher - maybe my friend is right too, 500 years in the kindergarten doesn’t seem unreasonable in my case.
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