Sufi Thought and Action

280 Pages·2016·11.67 MB·English

by  Idries Shah

SUFI THOUGHT
AND ACTION
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Материал за лишенный авторским правом
SUFI THOUGHT
AND ACTION
assembled by
Idries Shah
THE OCTAGON PRESS
LONDON
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Copyright © 1990 The Octagon Press
The right of Octagon Press Ltd to be identified as the owners of this
work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
ЛИ rights reserved
Copyright throughout the world
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical or photographic, by recording or any information
storage or retrieval system or method now known or to be invented or adapted,
without prior permission obtained in writing from the publishers, The Octagon Press Ltd.,
except by a reviewer quoting brief passages in a review written for inclusion in a
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Requests for permission to reprint, reproduce, etc., to:
Permissions Department, The Octagon Press Ltd.,
P.O. Box 227, London N6 4EW, England.
ISBN 0 863040 51 9
Published with the aid of a subvention
from The Sufi Trust
Opinions expressed in the papers reproduced herein
are to be taken as those of their authors
First published 1990
Reprinted 1993
Photoset, printed and bound in Great Britain by
Redwood Press Limited, MeJksham, Wiltshire
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CONTENTS
1. SUFI SPIRITUAL RITUALS AND BELIEFS
by IDRIES SHAH 1
г SUFI PRINCIPLES AND LEARNING METHODS
Seven papers by HUMAYUN ABBAS and Others 55
Trust- Humayun Abbas 37
Sufi Activity — Emir Ali Khan 43
Sufi Learning Methods - Benjamin Ellis Fourd 48
The Sufis on the Scholars- Mohandis el A Ionite 58
The Sufi Meeting Place - Ferrucio Amadeo (Faruq Ahmad) 62
Avoiding Imitators - Gashim Mirzoeff 66
Through Eastern Eyes - Alirida Ghulam Sarwar 7Q
3. CURRENT SUFI ACTIVITY: WORK, LITERATURE,
GROUPS AND TECHNIQUES
by CHA WAN THURLNAS 25
Their Work Enterprises
Sufi Use of Literature
Controlling Oneself'
Discouraging Potential Recruits: ‘Deflection’
The Idea of Organic Enterprises
Entry into a Sufi Group
The Sufis as a Cult
Religion, Evolution and Intervention
Representative Writings: Tradition and Potentiality
4. RITUAL, INITIATION AND SECRETS IN SUFI
CIRCLES
by FRANZ HEIDELBERGER and Others 1Ш
Time Spent among Sufis - Franz Heidelberger 103
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The Sufi Adept and the Projection of the Mind
Priest, Magician and Sufi
The Learner's and the Teacher’s Viewpoints
The Three Major Lessons
The Sufis in Current Idiom
Sufi Orders -_____________________Rosalie Marsham 112
Ritual and Perception
Exercises, Movements, Costumes
The Ineffable Secret
The Chain of Initiation
Founders and Early Masters
Special Selection for Teachings and Students
Effect of Hierarchy and Tradition
Observation of a Sufi School -_________ Hoda Azizian 123
Primary, Secondary and Deteriorated Schools
Materials, Attunement, Energy and Focus
Extra-sensory Perception
Worldly and Spiritual Progress
Tests: True and False Sufis - Judging the Teacher
The Path of Blame and Other Technicalities
Other Books
5. THEORIES, PRACTICES AND TRAINING SYSTEMS
OF A SC FI SCHOOL
by Canon W.H.T. GAIRDNER__________________________139
6. KEY CONCEPTS IN SUFI UNDERSTANDING
edited by Professor HAFIZ JAMAL______________________165
Those Astonishing Sufis -___________Adilbai Kkarkovli 167
The General Principles of Sufism - Sirdar Ikbal AH Shah 178
Sufism and the Indian Philosophies -
Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah___Ш
7. VISITS TO SUFI CENTRES: SOME RECENT
RESEARCH PAPERS ON SUFIS AND SUFISM
by DJALEDDIN ANSARI and Others_____________________201
Basic Teachings of the Sufis -________Djaleddin Ansari 203
The Dinner-meeting and Other Topics-
Abdul-Wahab T. Tiryaqi 211
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Making Sense of Sufi Literature. Experts, Paradox-
Andrew C.C. Ellis 214
Aphorisms of a Sufi Teacher - Hilmi Abbas Jamil 220
Three Forms of Knowledge, according to
the Naqshbandi School - Gustav Schneck 224
8. THE SUFIS OF TODAY
by SEYYED F. H OSS A IN 227
Summary 229
The Sufis of Today 231
Reviews and Comments on Sufi Affairs 24?
9. IN A SUFI MONASTERY and Other Papers 245
In a Sufi Monastery - Najib Siddiqi 247
Vanity and Imitation - Fares de Logres 250
Sufis over Two Centuries - Valentino de Mesquita, Sr 253
What the Sufis do not Want Us to Know -Edwin Clitherne 255
Two Sufi Lectures- Hafiz.Jamal
Religion as Repetition or Experience 260
Outer and Inner Activity and Knowledge 264
Conversation with a Sufi Master - Aziza Al-Akbari 267
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Sufi Spiritual Rituals and Beliefs
OBJECT OF SUFI teaching:
The object of Sufi spiritual teaching can be expressed as: to help
to refine the individual’s consciousness so that it may reach the
Radiances of Truth, from which one is cut off by ordinary activi­
ties of the world. The term used for illuminations or radiances is
Anwar.
mysticism is not magic:
It is a misunderstanding, as - for instance - the book Zia al Qulub
(among many others) emphasises, to think that a mystic either
desires, or can achieve, identification with God in the sense of
acquiring divine attributes or powers. Such a concept belongs to
magical, not mystical, thinking.
In common parlance, as well as in the minds of many who
should know better, ‘mystical’ is bracketted with mystery and
mystification in the senses of something confusing or difficult to
understand. These secondary meanings, of course, are only due to
‘unconscious illiteracy’.
Sufis require the reduction of the effects of‘material attributes’,
those things which stand in the way of higher understanding.
Many things which repetitious or over-simplified religion pre­
sents as spiritual are, when examined, found to be simply aspects
of materiality. One example is emotionalism.
1
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2 SUFI SPIRITUAL RITUALS AND BELIEFS
COMMON DISTORTIONS IN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT:
However widespread and familiar they may be, many presen­
tations of religion are abbreviated and distorted versions of
something of which the original is not known to current prac­
titioners. The outlines can be discerned, more often than not, and
examples of some parts of these are given later.
A regression to primitive thinking, and the desire for order,
never far from the human mind and often (not always) useful, are
the chief culprits.
Where the primitive feeling is allied to equally primitive logic,
we get a familiar distortion: the belief that if things material are
obstacles, then ‘killing or suppressing the material’ should lead to
enlightenment. Yet this, far from being useful, is essentially magi­
cal thinking.
Omar Khayyam has pointed out this fallacy, when (echoing the
foolish) he writes: ‘If wine is the enemy of religion, I shall devour
the enemy of religion’. Quite understandably, this phrase has
been misinterpreted, due to the narrow mentality of literalists.
They have imagined that Khayyam is himself deriding religion!
The poet is a humorist: literalists often, perhaps always, lack this
capacity.
Self-mortification, far from producing liberation from material
things, is far more likely to cause either an unhinged mind,
delusions or a masochistic taste for more suffering, experienced, of
course, as joy.
ESCAPE FROM THE INSULATION FROM TRUTH:
‘Polishing the mirror’, or ‘removing the dust’ are terms in Sufic
use, referring to the process of liberation from those elements,
natural and acquired, with which ‘the world’ insulates humanity
from the greater Truth.
Sufis, far from being able to build on the mentality of con­
ditioned beliefs, generally have to help ‘detoxify’ the mind from
harmful, deadening or other imaginedly important illusions, fixa­
tions or emotion-based ideas.
That which is capable of perceiving objective reality is, in
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