Download PDF | Mark Sedgwick - Western Sufism_ From the Abbasids to the New Age-Oxford University Press (2016).
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Most American and European bookstores have a selection of books on Sufism. Sometimes these are in the religion section and sometimes in the spirituality section; they are usually separate from books on Islam, which are normally found in religion, not spirituality. This is in contrast to arrangements at Western universities, where Sufism is generally taught by someone in the Islamic Studies program—not, it might seem, very successfully, if bookstores and their customers remain convinced that Sufism is one thing and Islam is another. But the idea of Sufism and Islam as distinct and separate entities is also found in many of the books on sale, especially in books by such bestselling Sufi authors as Inayat Khan and Idries Shah.
There is a gap, then, between what Sufism is according to Islamic Studies scholars, and the role that Sufism plays in the lives of contemporary Westerners. According to the literature scholar Nancy Shields Hardin, writing on the work of Doris Lessing, the Nobel prize winner who often described herself as a Sufi, “for a non-Sufi to understand what it means to be a Sufi is perhaps impossible,” as Sufism “is a composite of anomalies.”1 The Oxford English Dictionary, however, does attempt to define Sufism, and states that it is “a sect of Muslim ascetic mystics.”2 This is close to how Sufism is generally understood in university departments of Islamic Studies. It is not how it is understood by many bestselling Western Sufis or their readers, however.
The first Sufis whom I myself met, shortly after I moved to Cairo in the mid-1980s, were definitely Muslim, and did not seem especially anomalous. Neither did they seem especially ascetic, or even especially mystical (though I was not then very sure what it was to be mystical, or how to recognize a mystic if I met one). As I got to know more Sufis and began to work on my PhD thesis, which dealt with the history of one particular group of Sufi orders, or tariqas, 3 in the Arab world and in Southeast Asia, it began to seem relatively easy to say what it means to be a Sufi. Being a Sufi seemed to be about belonging to a tariqa and following a spiritual guide or shaykh, and involved developing Islamic practice from an obligation into an art. Some Sufis did follow some ascetic practices, and there was some talk of mystical states. So it seemed the Oxford English Dictionary had got it more or less right, and Hardin had got it wrong, as had Idries Shah, Doris Lessing, the managers of many Western bookstores, and their customers. After I finished my PhD, I became more curious about Western understandings of Sufism.
One branch of one tariqa I had been studying for my PhD was located in Milan, and the Italian shaykh of that branch introduced me to the work of an early twentiethcentury French Sufi, René Guénon. That introduction led to many other discoveries, and finally to a book I wrote on the Traditionalist movement that derived from Guénon’s work, Against the Modern World. 4 My work on the Traditionalist movement led to an invitation to write an entry on “Neo-Sufism” for a Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, and to give a conference paper on “European Neo-Sufi Movements in the Interwar Period.”5 Guénon and the Traditionalist Sufis, it seemed, were examples of something called “Neo-Sufism,” and people were interested in the other Neo-Sufis as well. This led me to look into Inayat Khan, one of the bestselling Western writers on Sufism whom I, like my academic colleagues, had until then ignored. It also led me to look into George Gurdjieff, an even more widely read writer whom some, apparently unaccountably, took for a Sufi. Inayat Khan and Gurdjieff were contemporaries of Guénon, and in the mid-1920s all three men lived in Paris, though it seems none of them ever met.
If they had, they would certainly have disagreed with each other. And yet, somehow, different though they were, their writings did all seem to have something in common. What was being called Neo-Sufism—and what in this book I prefer to call “Western Sufism”—was evidently a significant phenomenon. As well as people buying books by Inayat Khan, Guénon, and Gurdjieff, there were also people participating in groups inspired by them. I already knew how influential Guénonian Traditionalism was. Gurdjieff seemed important, too, with a network of Gurdjieff groups covering the US and many other countries, and with the nine-pointed Enneagram’s system of personality analysis becoming ever more popular. While I was working on Inayat Khan and Gurdjieff, I was teaching history at the American University in Cairo. A new department chair asked us to think of new courses that might attract more students, and I proposed courses on the two topics that our students were discussing more than any other during the early 2000s: terrorism and Zionism. To my slight surprise, neither proposal was deemed too sensitive, and both courses were accepted. My Zionism course started, as most such courses do, with the history of the Jews in Europe, with oppression, emancipation, and Haskala (Jewish Enlightenment). Emancipation and Haskala led me to Moses Mendelssohn and his German friend Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, whose play Nathan the Wise, performed in 1783, is often taken to represent the change in European attitudes to Jews that led to emancipation. I read Nathan, and found not so much a plea for Jewish emancipation as an argument for religious universalism—an argument for an approach to religion similar to that I had found in Guénon and Inayat Khan.
The background to their thought, it seemed, was a trend in European intellectual history going back to at least 1783, not merely a fashion of the 1920s. I soon found myself in the seventeenth century, with the controversy attending the translation of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, a twelfth-century Sufi tale that is still found in Western bookstores today; it is usually described as philosophy, but perhaps shelved in spirituality. In the same century I also encountered the works of John Toland, an Irish journalist one of whose books was ceremonially burnt by order of the Irish parliament. Toland led me to his own, even more controversial inspiration: Baruch Spinoza. Neither Spinoza nor Toland had been interested in Sufism, but their views on religion explained the reception of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, and also explained some understandings of Sufism I had found in the eighteenth century, notably in the writings of “Oriental Jones”—that is, Sir William Jones, the founding president of the Asiatic Society and also the founder of the modern discipline of comparative linguistics. Jones and Toland are little known today, certainly in comparison to Spinoza, but they were major figures in their own time. Toland rejected the established religions that Spinoza had attacked so effectively, and saw them as instruments of oppression (one and a half centuries before Marx condemned them as the opium of the people).
He also went further than Spinoza in one important way. As well as oppressive (and untrue) established religion, he suggested, there was esoteric truth, above and beyond and before exoteric religion. Jones agreed, and proposed that Sufism was, contrary to appearances, precisely that: esoteric truth, above and beyond and before any exoteric religion, including Islam. He was led to this conclusion partly by the Western intellectual movement that Toland was part of, and partly also by an unusual Persian-language work from the previous century, the Dabistan-i madhahib or School of Sects, an early forerunner to Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions. The author of the Dabistan is unknown, and his ideas radical.
Toland’s esotericism and Jones’s Sufism provided much of the common ground on which, more than a century later, Guénon, Inayat Khan, and Gurdjieff all stood. Tracing these ideas over the intervening century, however, was complicated by the fact that the century in question was the nineteenth century, a century in which so much was going on. Many nineteenth-century understandings of Sufism proved to be largely or entirely frivolous, and I ended with less respect for Goethe than I had started with. Here and there, however, were exceptions to the general frivolity: Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, and some less famous Americans, including a failed theology student, Carl Henrik Bjerregaard, who had ended up as one of the first librarians at the New York Public Library, and a popular lecturer in “advanced” circles in New England. Bjerregaard did not entirely complete the picture, however. Toland’s conception of esoteric truth was not new, though his use of the adjective “esoteric” to describe it was. I found that universalist understandings of religion went further back, to the sixteenth-century French scholar Guillaume Postel and the fifteenth-century Italian scholars Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino. I also found that European understandings of Sufism likewise went back to the fifteenth century, to the writings of George of Hungary, the first Westerner known to have become a Sufi. Pico della Mirandola and Ficino are best known for their role in the revival of the study of Platonic philosophy during the Renaissance, and Platonic philosophy turned out to be the final stop in my exploration of Guénon, Inayat Khan, and Gurdjieff.
Of course, Platonic philosophy really starts with Socrates, and not a lot is known about what preceded Socrates, so in some ways Platonic philosophy was the end of the line, anyhow. It turned out that the key philosopher for my purposes was not Plato himself, but his later interpreter and developer, Plotinus. Plotinus is nowadays not as famous as Plato, but for many centuries he was the more influential of the two. His philosophy, now called Neoplatonism to distinguish it from the earlier Platonism of Plato himself, is at first not easy. Its basic assumptions are very different from those of our own day, and a certain amount of preparation is therefore needed. That preparation, however, is amply rewarded, as the basic idea of emanationism, as understood and taught by Plotinus, is then found time and time again, in one guise or another, until today. The basic idea of emanationism is that human souls share in the divine, and can and should return to the divine. Emanationism took me all the way to Emerson and Bejerregaard in the nineteenth century, and then on to Guénon and Inayat Khan and Gurdjieff in the twentieth, though all three modified emanationism in one way or another, and Guénon even tried to reject it, without success. As often happens on a journey, the scenery looked different on the return trip, seen from a new perspective and in a changed light.
There turned out to be much more intercultural transfer going on than I had thought, for a start. In Against the Modern World I had looked at how Guénon, a Westerner, had understood Sufism, an Islamic system, and I had thought that this was the most important intercultural transfer involving Sufism. I also looked at the return transmission, as developments of Guénon’s ideas were read in Iran and Turkey and Morocco. A transfer and a reverse transfer—perhaps characteristic of globalized modernity, it seemed. But following Plotinian emanationism showed that intercultural transfer was not about modernity. During the premodern period, St. Augustine of Hippo had been reading Plotinus in the fourth century, so there was a transfer from late antiquity into early Christianity.
Then the scholars of the Islamic golden age in Abbasid Baghdad started reading Plotinus, whose influence on the subsequent development of Arab philosophy was strong. A transfer from late antiquity into early Islam, then. And, because Sufi theology draws on Arab philosophy, a transfer into early Sufism, as well. Then, because Jewish high culture was integrated into Arab high culture during the golden age in al-Andalus, there was a transfer into Judaism. And, because of that integration, astonishingly, in thirteenth-century Cairo, there were Jewish Sufis. Non-Islamic Sufism turned out to be seven centuries older than people had thought.
While Jewish Sufism was developing in thirteenth-century Cairo, yet another premodern intercultural transfer was taking place in Paris. As the various golden ages of Islam were coming to a close, so the darkest ages of Europe were also ending. Order, political stability, and prosperity returned to a Europe that had known little of any of them since the collapse of the Roman Empire. The direct ancestors of today’s universities were established, and the study of philosophy flourished. New texts were in demand, and translations were made of Arab philosophical works. With Arab philosophy came Plotinus and emanationism.
Just as emanationism had fed into Sufism in the Arab world, so it fed into Christian mysticism in Europe, most notably into the mysticism of Meister Eckhart in Erfurt, Germany, in the early fourteenth century. Several modern scholars have already noted and marveled at the common ground between Eckhart and the great Sufi mystic, Muhyi al-Din Ibn Arabi. Here, in the complex transmission of Plotinian emanationism, lay the explanation, as well as another part of the common ground on which Guénon, Inayat Khan, and Gurdjieff later stood. The journey from Idries Shah to Plotinus and back again took me almost ten years. During those years, many excellent studies of Western Sufism appeared.6 Most major contemporary Western Sufi orders or tariqas have now been studied, often multiple times.
They have generally been studied in isolation, however, and little attention has been paid to the history of the phenomenon, which is often assumed to be recent, perhaps related to the so-called “New Age.” This is the gap in our understanding of Western Sufism that this book aims to fill. It looks at Western Sufism as one phenomenon, not just at individual Sufi groups, and it looks at the origins and development of Western Sufism up to the New Age. Its central argument is that Western Sufism is the product of Islam, of the antique world, and of the West’s intellectual history from the Renaissance via Spinoza to Helena Blavatsky and Doris Lessing. History is sometimes defined as that which happened at least fifty years ago—a useful rule of thumb, as it takes time for patterns in the jumble of events to become clear. This book departs from this rule of thumb only in the case of developments that straddle the fifty-year line, which are followed through for as long as necessary, and in the case of one Western tariqa that originated forty-eight years ago, in 1968. This, the Darqawiyya of Abdalqadir as-Sufi, was the first Western tariqa not to reflect the influence of early modern Europe.
It initiated a new phase in the history of Western Sufism. This book, then, follows the establishment of Western Sufism between 1910 and 1933, and its development up to 1968. It argues that Western Sufism was distinguished primarily by emanationism, anti-exotericism, perennialism, and universalism. Emanationism, as we have seen, is the idea expressed by Plotinus that human souls share in the divine, and can and should return to the divine. Anti-exotericism is the idea expressed by Toland that religions can be divided between a public, exoteric form and a secret, esoteric core, and that what is valuable is the secret esoteric core, not the exoteric form. Perennialism is the idea that the secret, esoteric core is very ancient, and thus can be traced back to the remote past. Universalism is the idea that truth can be found in all religions. This book argues that emanationism was a product of late antiquity, passed through Arab and Scholastic philosophy. Perennialism was a product of early Christianity, passed through the Renaissance. Universalism and anti-exotericism both originated in the early Enlightenment. Between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, many of the structures of Christianity that had sustained the Latin West for more than a millennium slowly collapsed. Some others were deliberately demolished in the struggle for human freedom.
The objective, however, was not to leave a void; rather, some of the independent thinkers of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment dreamed of an alternative religion, pure and simple and true. Once something has been dreamed, even if it does not exist, it can be brought into existence. One way of understanding Western Sufism is as the Renaissance and Enlightenment dream of a pure, simple, and true religion, made real during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book divides the origins and development of Western Sufism into four periods. The first is the premodern period, during which the philosophy of late antiquity, especially the emanationism of Neoplatonic philosophy, was developed by Abbasid philosophers, which contributed to the original emergence of Arab and Persian Sufism. Arab philosophy and Sufism then contributed to developments in Judaism and Jewish mysticism, all of which then contributed to developments in Latin Christianity and Latin Christian mysticism. The second period is the early modern period, during which Europe imagined Sufism and read Sufi texts in particular ways, while developing the new understandings of religion that later became part of institutional Western Sufism. During the third period, which is modern, Sufi groups were established in the West, and during the fourth period, which is also modern, those groups developed in various ways. In addition to these four historical periods, there is also the contemporary period, after the end of the High New Age. This period needs a separate book for itself.
This introduction has used the word “mysticism,” which many scholars find problematic. The history of the term, however, is one of this book’s topics. An important understanding of Sufism during the seventeenth century was as “mystical theology,” and the variety of religious practice to which that term referred had then already been known for centuries. This book will not address scholarly discussions about “mysticism” at any length, however. Instead, it generally seeks to contribute to this and to other discussions indirectly. Those who are already familiar with certain discussions will recognize much that is relevant to them, but the discussions themselves will not be introduced or addressed directly. The name of Edward Said, for example, will not appear again, save in one note. There are two reasons for this indirect approach. One is purely practical: this book is long enough as it is. The other is that not everyone will be interested in all the discussions on which this book touches. An approach that follows classic historical conventions, which is the approach that this book takes, avoids troubling those who are not engaged in particular discussions with details they are not interested in, while those who are interested can fill in the missing details themselves. A different policy, however, has been followed when difficulties would arise from the impossibility of filling in missing background details. Some readers will be familiar with the religious history of the West, and some will be familiar with Sufism, but few will be equally familiar with both. The book therefore gives both types of background. As well as being about Western Sufism, this book is about globalization and intercultural transfer. It will argue that globalization has been increasing steadily since the early sixteenth century, and it will identify intercultural transfers that have taken place by means of texts, through individual contacts, and through organizations. The results of these intercultural transfers will be identified in two major areas: theology and philosophy, and practice. The term “theology” is used very loosely, to indicate all conceptions of the relationship between humanity and what is understood as the transcendent, which was one of the original concerns of philosophy. The term will even be used in relation to the modern period, despite a tendency in this period for the focus to shift away from the relationship between humanity and the transcendent and toward the relationship between the individual and consciousness. The period after the end of the High New Age is excluded from this book, save in the exceptional cases already mentioned. Regions other than the West and religious movements other than Sufism are also generally excluded, though references will sometimes be made to them.
This is in some ways artificial, as regions and religions do not develop in isolation. The development of Western Sufism interacts with the Western encounter with Hinduism, and indeed with the Western encounter with Islam as a whole. This book does not aim to be a comprehensive treatment of all the phenomena that it touches on, however. It focuses on the Latin West, and generally ignores the Greek East. It is written in English, and gives developments and texts in the English-speaking world a prominence that they may not entirely deserve. Developments in France and Germany are less well covered, and developments in countries such as Italy and Russia are only mentioned when they are relevant to other areas. This is unfortunate, but the coverage that this book attempts is already ambitious, and some arbitrary limits are therefore inevitable. Even so, tracing chains of transmission over such a long period requires much simplification. If the forest is to be seen clearly, individual trees may not always be visible.
This approach brings benefits, but also suffers from problems. One is that the few pages that the early chapters devote to each of the major figures they cover are entirely inadequate. The work of many of these figures is a complete scholarly field in itself, and at least one entire book is required for a basic introduction to nearly each one of them. However, if each tree is examined in detail, the forest will never become visible. Within these limits, this book has attempted as comprehensive a treatment as possible. It will not, however, be the last word on the various topics it covers. Additional information and corrections will therefore be made available online at www.westernsufism.info. I am always interested to hear from readers. The first part of this book, the part that covers the premodern period, is divided into three chapters. The first of these covers Neoplatonism and emanationism, and introduces the concepts of emanation and emanative pull through the work of Plotinus. Crucial concepts such as the distinction between matter and form are examined, and the idea of the One as ultimate cause is explained, as is the crucial idea of the return of the soul to its origin. The chapter then looks at the fate of Neoplatonism and of emanationism after the coming of Christianity, tracing the book’s first intercultural transfer, with St. Augustine and the major early Christian emanationists Severinus Boethius and Dionysius. The second chapter covers Arab Neoplatonism, examining the impact of Neoplatonic emanationism in Islam, the book’s second intercultural transfer. It also introduces Sufism and crucial Sufi concepts in their classic form. It argues that Arab philosophers such as Avicenna (Ibn Sina) were generally successful in reconciling Neoplatonism with Islamic doctrine, and that the resulting Arab Neoplatonism provided the philosophical content of the theology of Sufism.
The chapter argues that Sufism is more than Islamic Neoplatonism, however, as it also contains Islam, asceticism, and such practices as dhikr, which are explained. The chapter closes with three Sufi writers: al-Ghazali as the classic exponent of sharia-compliant Sufism, who warned of the need to keep the esoteric secret; Ibn Arabi as the classic exponent of Sufi emanationist theology; and Ibn Tufayl, author of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, as the most easily comprehensible exponent of both of these approaches to Sufism. The third and final chapter in the first part of the book deals with the two other premodern intercultural transfers. It shows how Neoplatonism penetrated the Jewish intellectual milieu, and looks at its impact on Jewish thinkers from Ibn Gabirol to Maimonides, who (like the Arab Muslim philosophers) attempted to reconcile philosophy with religious doctrine, and like al-Ghazali stressed the need for secrecy. It was his son Abraham who appreciated Neoplatonism and Sufism to the point where he established a Jewish version of Sufism, for which he claimed a Jewish origin. He thus anticipated non-Islamic Western Sufism by seven centuries. Unlike the Kabbalah, which was also influenced by emanationism, Jewish Sufism did not survive. In Europe, when translations of Arab philosophical texts became available at the schools of Paris in the thirteenth century, attempts were also made by the Scholastic philosophers at reconciling emanationism with Christian doctrine. There was no clear equivalent of the Kabbalah or of Jewish Sufism, but Meister Eckhart publicly preached radical emanationism. He was judged a heretic.
The second part of the book, which covers the early modern period, is divided into four chapters. The first chapter covers the earliest Western understandings of Sufism, starting with the account of George of Hungary, printed in 1480. It shows how Sufism was then used in Western theological and political controversies by Martin Luther, by Sebastian Franck during the “Radical Reformation,” and by French political propaganda after the Franco-Ottoman alliance. Despite this, dervishes (as mendicant Sufis were known) soon became material for sensationalist and often purely derivative accounts of exotic deviance. Finally, however, as French Orientalist scholarship matured and provided access to original texts, the connection between Sufism and emanationism, the then topical “mystical theology,” came to be understood. It was explained most completely by Barthélemy d’Herbelot in his Oriental Library. By 1697, then, Western scholars had reached an understanding of Sufism that was little different from that of much of today’s scholarship. The second chapter of this part looks at other ways in which Sufism was understood, despite the work of Barthélemy d’Herbelot. The earliest of these is as Deism, a pareddown “rational” religion that some found in Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan when it was translated and published in 1671, although some still correctly identified this Sufi work as mystical theology. The chapter looks at the origins and nature of Deism, and at the origins and nature of the other Enlightenment theologies that would later be used to revise the Western understanding of Sufism.
The earliest of these was the prisca theologia and perennialism, developed during the Renaissance Neoplatonic revival that is often (wrongly) understood as Hermetic, and which has its origins in early Christianity. A variant, universalism, was promoted by Postel in sixteenth-century France. Then, in late seventeenth-century England, Toland promoted Spinoza’s Pantheism and developed anti-exotericism. The following chapter shows how these Renaissance and Enlightenment theologies came to be applied to Sufism, resulting in an understanding of Sufism as perennial, esoteric, Deistic, universalism that replaced the earlier (and more accurate) understanding of Sufism as mystical theology. It shows how Pierre Bayle’s understanding of Spinozism accidentally created a category into which Sufism was then fitted. It further shows how this understanding was developed in British India by Jones, and looks at the role played in this development by the Dabistan. The Jones version of Sufism was then further developed by another British colonial scholar, James Graham, whose portrayal of Sufism would prove permanently influential, even though other Orientalist scholars quickly pointed out its deficiencies. These were not the only ways in which Sufism was understood, however, so the final chapter in the second part of the book looks at other understandings, showing how these developed and were conveyed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in verse, fiction, drama, painting, and journalism. They were often trivial, emphasizing dervishes as stereotypical Oriental characters or vaudeville figures. Even Lessing and Goethe, whose work deserves to be taken seriously, ultimately did no more than trivialize Sufism. The best-known, possibly Sufi poem in Western history, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, is considered in detail, and is shown to have been understood as both Epicurean and as mystical. It is argued that the tension between these two understandings is precisely what makes it a great poem. The chapter closes with a very different alternative understanding of Sufism: namely, of dervishes as fanatical warriors, the product of colonial warfare from Algeria to the Caucasus via the Sudan. The third part of the book consists of three chapters and covers the period from 1910 to 1933, during which Western Sufism first became established in institutional form.
The first chapter shows how emanationist, Renaissance, and Enlightenment understandings reached organized Western Sufism, which they did by two routes. Emanationism and universalism passed through the New England Transcendentalists, notably Emerson, and through the Neoplatonists of Missouri, notably Thomas Moore Johnson. Anti-exoteric perennialism passed through Blavtsky’s Theosophical Society. Emerson modified Neoplatonist emanationism slightly, shifting the focus somewhat from the One to nature. The Theosophical Society modified anti-exoteric perennialism rather more. Perennialism implies sources of wisdom that are hidden because they are ancient. The Theosophical Society added new sources that were hidden but contemporary: namely, the Mahatmas. It also emphasized a new development of Enlightenment thought: anti-dogmatism. Sufism was not the main focus of any of these groups, but two individuals connected to these groups were interested in Sufism. One was Bjerregaard, who wrote on Sufism for both the Theosophical Society and the Missouri Neoplatonists. The other was Ivan Aguéli, a Swedish Theosophist who not only wrote on Sufism in Arabic and French, but who actually became a Sufi himself, in Egypt. Aguéli then became the first Westerner ever to transmit a Sufi initiation to another Westerner in the West, in 1910. The second chapter in this section follows Bjerregaard into the Sufi Movement of Inayat Khan, established in 1915, and the first significant Western Sufi organization. The chapter looks at Inayat Khan’s time in America, where he met Bjerregaard and discovered earlier Western understandings of Sufism. It also looks at the Sufi Movement’s origins in the English Theosophical milieu and at its later years in France, its teachings, and at its practice. It argues that the Sufi Movement’s teachings combined Islam, emanationism, and anti-exoteric universalism. Its practice was divided between the exoteric Universal Worship of the Church of All and the esoteric practice of the Esoteric School. The Sufi Movement prospered during the interwar period, and established an institutional framework that enabled it to survive the early death of Inayat Khan in 1927. With time, however, it became less Islamic and more exoteric. The next chapter in this section follows Aguéli into the Traditionalism of Guénon, whom he had initiated in 1910. Guénonian Traditionalism is one of two interwar movements in addition to the Sufi Movement that link Theosophy and Western Sufism, the other being the teachings of Gurdjieff. The chapter argues that although Guénon publicly rejected both Theosophy and emanationism, he was still influenced by both, as well as by perennialism and by anti-exotericism on the model of Toland. It also argues that the Gurdjieff teaching owes less than is thought to Sufism, and much more than is thought to Peter Ouspensky and, through him, to the psychology of William James. Gurdjieff’s Sufis were simply his version of Blavatsky’s Mahatmas. Ouspensky and Gurdjieff, it argues, were early promoters of the transformation of emanationism from its original focus on the soul and the One, to a focus on consciousness and the expansion of consciousness. To this end they used novel practices, including asceticism and “discomfiture.” The chapter also introduces the two men who would later apply Traditionalism and the Gurdjieff teaching to Western Sufism, Frithjof Schuon and John G. Bennett. Schuon established a Traditionalist Western Sufi tariqa, the Alawiyya, in 1933, and Bennett followed the Gurdjieff teaching from 1921. The fourth and final section of the book consists of four chapters that cover the further development of Western Sufism through the New Age. The first chapter covers a period of polarization after the end of the Second World War, as Western Sufism began to divide between more Islamic and less Islamic tendencies, reflecting its inherent tensions. The most important Islamic tendencies were represented by the Traditionalist Alawiyya in Paris and the work of the Traditionalist Seyyed Hossein Nasr in Iran, where he established the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, and then in America. The most important less Islamic tendencies were represented by Meher Baba, an Indian understood to be an avatar, and by Pak Subuh, an Indonesian guru. Both were universalist and anti-dogmatic, and both perhaps owed something to the Theosophical Society, but neither were particularly Sufi. Schuon and Bennett exhibited polarization within their own selves. Schuon was adopted into the Oglala Sioux, a Native American tribe, while remaining shaykh of a Sufi tariqa; he ended up gravitating toward universalist perennialism. Bennett lived as a Muslim Sufi in Damascus and Turkey, but then moved away from Islam to sponsor Pak Subuh, only to end up joining the Catholic Church. The next chapter looks at Idries Shah, the most widely read Western writer on Sufism. At one level, Shah’s books simply retell the folk wisdom of the Muslim world, especially through the delightful stories of Nasruddin, and this is one reason for their popularity. The chapter argues that at another level, however, they reflect the example of Shah’s friend Robert Graves, who also retold good stories to good effect, and the influence of Gurdjieff. The chapter traces Shah’s complex relationship with Bennett and the Gurdjieff teaching. Despite the popularity of his writings, Shah refused to lead more than a few followers, criticizing both those whom he disparaged as gurus and their followers. Even so, he had a great impact on the Western public. His understanding of Sufism, however, did not survive his death in 1996. Shah was much read during what many took as a “new age,” the period introduced in the following chapter. During this period, the Sufi Movement split into four sections, which reacted to the new age in different ways, all of which tended towards greater universalism. The “official” Sufi Movement, based mostly in the Netherlands, safeguarded its heritage very effectively, but declined for lack of charisma and innovation. In California, “Sufi Sam” Lewis spread the universalist Sufi message among the hippies with the aid of his antiestablishment rhetoric and his Dances of Universal Peace. In America and Europe, Vilayat Inayat Khan’s Sufi Order International responded to the new age by speaking more about consciousness and less about Sufism, and establishing a Sufi “community” resembling a commune in upstate New York. In England, Fazal Inayat-Khan established a community which closely resembled a hippie commune, and led his followers toward freedom, including the limited use of narcotics and freedom from the “neurotic” traditional family. The final chapter of this section looks at two Western Sufi groups that also established communities in response to the new age, but moved toward Islam rather than universalism. One was an offshoot of the Sufi Order International that came under the guidance of a colorful Turkish exile, Bülent Rauf, and established itself as the Beshara School, focusing on the study of Ibn Arabi. With the Besahara School, Western Sufism returned to the original theological roots of Sufism in Arab Neoplatonism.
The other Western Sufi group was the first Western Sufi tariqa to be founded on entirely new bases, with no connection to any of the Western Sufi or religious groups discussed in earlier chapters or to the alternative theologies of early modern Europe. This was the Darqawiyya of Abdalqadir as-Sufi, originally Ian Dallas, a Scot. It was not anti-exoteric, perennialist, or universalist. It was simply Islamic. Even so, it did develop in unusual directions, reflecting the politics of it shaykh. As the Murabitun, it established a number of self-governing communities ruled by the sharia. In theory these were intended to prepare for jihad, but in practice they ended up developing expertise not in military matters but in the scholarly interpretation of the sharia, notably the Maliki madhhab (school). The final chapter of the book offers a conclusion. Many people have contributed to this book, and I cannot name them all. Special thanks go to all my interviewees, however, and to those who have commented on drafts of parts of this book, especially J. R. Colombo, Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Boaz Huss, Zia Inayat-Khan, Ahmet T. Karamustafa, Mahmood Khan, Anders Klostergaard-Pedersen, and Cynthia Read. Thanks are also due to the Danish Council for Independent Research, which funded part of the research used for this book, to Nils Bubandt, and to Dietrich Jung and Anemone Platz, who facilitated a sabbatical to finish it. Finally, thanks are due to Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Google Books, and HathiTrust. Digitalization of printed books has made possible that which was previously impossible.
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