Before Idries Shah, English-speaking readers who wanted to understand Sufism had three kinds of books available to them. They had the nineteenth-century Orientalist studies, written by British colonial scholars who approached the subject as an exotic branch of Islamic heresy and filed their findings in the imperial archive. They had the early-twentieth-century mystical-synthesis books, written by Theosophists and Gurdjieffian hybridizers and occasional Catholic priests, which flattened Sufism into a chapter of a universal perennial philosophy. And they had the rigorous academic Arabic and Persian scholarship of people like Nicholson, Arberry, and Schimmel — precise, valuable, and for most general readers unapproachable. None of these kinds of book allowed a non-Muslim English reader to understand what Sufism, as a living tradition, actually was.
Idries Shah published The Sufis in 1964. It is the book that changed the conversation. A reader needs to understand what the book was doing in 1964 in order to read it correctly in 2026, and most contemporary readers do not have this context, which is why I want to give it to them.
The context. Shah was a London-based writer of Afghan-Indian heritage — his family traced to the Paghman valley near Kabul — who had spent his young adulthood traveling in the Muslim world and studying with Sufi teachers in the traditional way. He was also, and this is the friction in every discussion of him, not a credentialed academic. He had no university chair. He did not publish in scholarly journals. His books were produced by major trade publishers and aimed at a general English-reading public. Robert Graves, the poet, wrote the introduction to The Sufis, which gave the book immediate literary standing and simultaneously positioned it outside the academic establishment. The establishment did not like the book. The establishment has never liked the book. Some of the critique was legitimate — Shah’s historical claims about Sufi influence on European alchemy, courtly love poetry, and the Knights Templar were often more assertive than the evidence supported, and he was not always careful about sources. Some of the critique was institutional defensiveness at having its gatekeeping function bypassed by a trade book that reached more readers than the whole corpus of academic Sufi studies had reached in the preceding century.
The claim of The Sufis — the claim that the academic establishment found most galling and that general readers found most liberating — was that Sufism is not primarily a branch of Islamic mysticism. Shah argued that Sufism is a psychological technology that precedes and exceeds its Islamic container — that the Islamic framing is the vehicle Sufism happens to be driving through history at the moment, but that the underlying teaching transmission is older, broader, and structurally independent of the religion that currently houses it. He argued that Sufism had shaped, sometimes visibly and sometimes covertly, the development of medieval European mysticism, troubadour poetry, Dante’s Commedia, the alchemical tradition, Francis of Assisi’s movement, and through these channels the eventual formation of Western science itself. These are big claims. They are not all sustained by the evidence. Shah made them anyway, because the book is not primarily a history. The book is primarily an introduction — a device designed to give a Western reader enough of a framework that the reader might continue to engage with Sufi material beyond the book.
The framework is the part that worked. Shah’s core contribution, across The Sufis and his fifteen subsequent books, was to present Sufi teaching stories — the Mullah Nasrudin tales, the stories from the Masnavi of Rumi, the teaching parables of Attar and Sa’di — as working psychological instruments rather than as exotic cultural artifacts. A Nasrudin story, in Shah’s presentation, is not a quaint Middle Eastern joke. It is a diagnostic. It is designed to produce a specific cognitive shift in a receptive reader, and the shift is the teaching, and no amount of analysis of the story produces the shift. Shah repeated this point in different forms across every one of his books. The point is correct. It is the point the academic Sufi scholarship has mostly not made, because the academic scholarship has been concerned with sources and chronologies and doctrinal history rather than with how the material is used. Shah’s concern was use. The concern was his real contribution.
A practical note for a first-time reader. The Sufis is not a comfortable book. It is long. It is discursive. It jumps across seven centuries of Islamic history, European literature, alchemy, chess, and folk tales in a way that can feel like Shah is constructing a secret-history conspiracy narrative. He is, in effect — but the conspiracy is a pedagogical fiction, not a claim of literal hidden influence. Shah is using the structure of a secret-history book to produce a particular effect in a particular reader at a particular stage of encounter with the material. Read the book with that in mind. Do not treat every historical claim as a scholarly assertion. Treat them as provocations designed to shake loose a Western reader’s assumptions about where mystical knowledge came from and how it travels.
After The Sufis, read his Nasrudin collections — The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin, The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin, The Subtleties of the Inimitable Mulla Nasrudin. They are the books that do the pedagogical work The Sufis promises. They are short. They are funny. They operate at the level Shah meant his project to operate at. The Sufis is the overture. The Nasrudin books are the symphony.
What the book did historically. Shah’s project fed directly into the spiritual infrastructure of the English-speaking counterculture of the 1960s and 70s and into the serious esoteric scene that continued into the 1980s — Doris Lessing was his friend and his student, Robert Ornstein incorporated his material into the cognitive psychology curriculum at Stanford, and a generation of Western seekers who would otherwise have fallen into the Gurdjieff work or the Theosophical Society or one of the then-emerging new religious movements found, through Shah, a tradition with deeper roots and more honest teaching methods. Shah died in 1996. The apparatus he built continues to operate. The books remain in print. The material is still doing what he designed it to do, which is to produce, in a small percentage of readers, a cognitive shift that those readers would not have produced on their own.
The Sufis is the entry point. Read it with the context. Read it for the framework. Read what comes after it for the actual teaching. The framework is necessary. The teaching is the point. Shah would have said the same. He said it many times, in many books. It is still true.
A related vagobond.com piece: On Translation and Survival.
The philosophy I have been drawing out from this kind of reading I call Baoism. Bao Ji — Bring Your Own. Shah would have called it by a different word. The underlying motion is the same.
Readers and fans of The Sufis will really enjoy Hasan i-Sabah and the Garden at Alamut — my novel set inside the medieval Islamic esoteric tradition Shah was writing about, at the moment the tradition bent hard into political violence. Different mountain. Same lineage. Different question. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
