Sufi Studies - Idries Shah

Idries Shah

Professor Reza Arasteh M.D.(remembered for his correspondence with Thomas Merton) wrote in honour of Sayyid Idries Shah, whose stature as a scholar was as fiercely disputed as his communication to a general public was successful. Nevertheless Sayyid Idries Shah caused the English feed of the watershed to be explored – through his own accessible style of writing, by providing affordable publications of great classical texts, and rebelliously askew on the niceties of an Oxford/Cambridge kind of rivalry over Pr. Nicholson and Pr. Arberry – and to exactly what extent can now easily be verified by the student willing to compare for himself the eleven Naqshbandi rules or exercise-aims listed by Sayyid Idries Shah in chapter VII of Oriental Magic in 1957 with those presently divulged through the proper channel . They are indeed the same.

"Oriental Magic" was read as a comparative study at the London Ethnological Institute. Sufi studies in general are directed as comparative studies of human understanding, and can be read as essays in psychosociology (see: Albert Hourani on "Marshall Hodgson and the Venture of Islam" in Islam in European Thought – Cambridge University Press 1991).