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To start: Idries Shah was about the most famous Sufi there was in the West. There weren't anyone around mostly that even knew what a Sufi was in 1964, when he wrote his first book. His father was a Sufi too and he mostly lived in England. He died in 1996 of heart failure. He kinds of admits that he was a smoker in some of his tapes and stuff, and he had several heart attacks after his adventures in Afghanistan, and was about dying for a decade before he actually did. Shah was a sayed, which is a descendant of Mohammed and the Islamic version of the master race, I guess. And did he act it! Idries Shah is about the smartest man I ever read. Although as my uncle Mick says, that ain’t saying much since I didn’t get that far in school and usually don’t have much stomach for this kind of thing. But I do think that the man was very, very smart. The Blaketashi guys let me write this because I was the one that got to run into Khidr last year. Boy, were they impressed. They said they would put it somewhere on their website, so you might look around for the interview I did. I assume they’re being upfront with me, but to be frank these guys give me the creeps a little with their tweed jackets and pony-tails and these smug little laughs like their shit don’t stink. These Blaketashis that is. Although I never met any Sufis but the Blaketashis, and they’re not even real Sufis I suspect. Not real Sufis, anyway, but I did go see a guy in a turban down in Boston once, who a lot of people thought was a real Sufi but I didn’t. The Blaketashis told me they could introduce me to some if I wanted, but first I had to figure out if I wanted to meet the "ones coming out of the deteriorated tradition, or the fully delusional ones" so I figured it wasn’t worth the trip. I guess real Sufis think that every age throughout history has one person who is the Teacher of the Age. But no one at the time knows who that really is. Khidr told me it was Idries Shah, and I believe him. I should of asked Khidr why he didn’t tell Idries to give up the smokes before it killed him but it didn’t occur to me until it was too late. But God has his own reasons, I guess, about things. Idries Shah was kind of hard on other Sufis. Like, he didn’t even seem to believe that most of the people who says they are Sufis really are. But since he was the Teacher of the Age, I guess we got to think about things as though it was possible that it’s all true. Like he says that none of the Sufi orders got started by the people who people think started them. That Rumi didn’t start the Dancing Dervishes and Naqshband the Naqshbandis. Shah says that no real Sufi dresses up in the west in anything but street clothes. He says that all Sufis who are sent over here on a mission speak the language of where they go to perfectly. He don’t hold with dervish dancing. He don’t hold with Sufis who make people change their names. He don’t think that you need to be a Muslim to be a Sufi. He don’t hold with everyone doing anything all the time, like zicker. That you shouldn’t ought to have to mutter anything in some foreign language you don't understand. He says that real Sufis are out there and don’t do these things and keep their heads down, and let the imitators as he calls them get all the glory. Last few years, I been looking around for real Sufis, but I can’t seem to find any. Except for Khidr that is, but he won’t let me back near him. I mean, I went down to Boston, and I think I’ve looked up every Sufi there is in the USA on the internet, and they all look like they came to the US straight from the pages of the National Geographic. Either that or they’re white boys from the USA who’ve gussied themselves up to look like Arabs, or Indians or whatever, with names like basketball stars. I even tried writing those folks which Shah left behind, like the Society for Sufi Studies, but they don’t answer me. So they either know some Sufi thing in particular, or maybe they just don’t like people like me, or they're all brain scientists now and not a Sufi among 'em, or maybe they're barely even there. Maybe they're just plain assholes. I don’t know which they are. But I got my suspicions. So I finally run into the Blaketashis who tell me that I have finally found what I’m looking for. Other than some wearing pony-tails, I guess they at least look and act kind of like Shah says real ones should. And they believed me when I told them about Khidr, which is an improvement as they were the only ones around here that ever heard of him, although one guy said that he didn’t think I had it in me to make such a thing up, although I don’t know if that’s a compliment of whether he’s just dissing me. At any rate, I’ve signed up for English Literature 131 at UMASS, so I guess I’ll have a better idea about the whole thing in a semester. They call that course ‘the novitiate’ which sounds kind of Catholic to me. If you want to read up more about Idries Shah, you can click on other stuff below.
Shah's Picture Octagon works about this stuff
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Some of Shah's and Octagon's
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