After his family moved from London to Oxford in 1940 to escape The Blitz (German bombing), Idries Shah spent two or three years at the City of Oxford High School for Boys.
After his family moved from London to Oxford in 1940 to escape The Blitz (German bombing), Idries Shah spent two or three years at the City of Oxford High School for Boys.
Idries Shah was an Indian-born British author and teacher in the Sufi tradition who wrote over three dozen books on topics ranging from psychology and spirituality to travelogues and culture studies. He also established a publishing house "Octagon Press", producing translations of Sufi classics as well as titles of his own.
Background
Ethnicity:
Born in India, Shah was the descendant of a family of Afghan nobles. His mother was Scottish.
Idries Shah was born on June 16, 1924 in Simla, Himachal Pradesh, India. The descendant of a family of Afghan nobles, Shah grew up mainly in England. His father, Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, a writer and diplomat, was leader of the Sufis, his mother, Saira Elizabeth Luiza Shah, was Scottish.
His family on the paternal side were Musavi Sayyids. Their ancestral home was near the Paghman Gardens of Kabul. His paternal grandfather, Sayed Amjad Ali Shah, was the nawab of Sardhana in the North-Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, a hereditary title the family had gained thanks to the services an earlier ancestor, Jan-Fishan Khan, had rendered to the British.
Shah mainly grew up in the vicinity of London, United Kingdom. He began accompanying his father in his travels from a very young age, and although they both travelled widely and often, they always returned to England where the family made their home for many years. Through these travels, which were often part of Ikbal Ali Shah's Sufi work, Shah was able to meet and spend time with prominent statesmen and distinguished personalities in both East and W.
Education
After his family moved from London to Oxford in 1940 to escape The Blitz (German bombing), Idries Shah spent two or three years at the City of Oxford High School for Boys.
In fact, he was educated, as his father before him, by private tutors in Europe and the Middle East, and through wide-ranging travel - the series of journeys that characterise Sufi education and development.
In 1945 Idries Shah accompanied his father to Uruguay as secretary to his father's halal meat mission. He returned to England in October 1946, following allegations of improper business dealings.
Towards the end of the 1950s, Shah established contact with Wiccan circles in London and then acted as a secretary and companion to Gerald Gardner, the founder of modern Wicca, for some time. In those days, Shah used to hold court for anyone interested in Sufism at a table in the Cosmo restaurant in Swiss Cottage (North London) every Tuesday evening.
In 1960 Shah established a publishing house "Octagon Press", producing translations of Sufi classics as well as titles of his own. His most seminal work was "The Sufis", which appeared in 1964 and was well received internationally. In 1965, Shah founded the Society for Understanding Fundamental Ideas (SUFI), later renamed The Institute for Cultural Research (ICR) - a London-based educational charity devoted to the study of human behaviour and culture. He served as the director of studies for the ICR from 1966 until his death. Besides, he established the Society for Sufi Studies (SSS).
Shah also organised Sufi study groups in the United States. Claudio Naranjo, a Chilean psychiatrist who was teaching in California in the late 1960s, says that, after being disappointed in the extent to which Gurdjieff's school entailed a living lineage, he had turned towards Sufism and had become part of a group under the guidance of Idries Shah. Naranjo co-wrote a book with Robert Ornstein, entitled "On The Psychology of Meditation" (1971).
Over the following years, Shah developed Octagon Press as a means of publishing and distributing reprints of translations of numerous Sufi classics. In addition, he collected, translated and wrote thousands of Sufi tales, making these available to a Western audience through his books and lectures. Several of Shah's books feature the Mullah Nasruddin character, sometimes with illustrations provided by Richard Williams. In Shah's interpretation, the Mulla Nasruddin stories, previously considered a folkloric part of Muslim cultures, were presented as Sufi parables.
Idries Shah's books on Sufism achieved considerable critical acclaim. He was the subject of a BBC documentary "One Pair of Eyes" in 1969. However, Shah was at times criticised by orientalists who questioned his credentials and background. His role in the controversy surrounding a new translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, published by his friend Robert Graves and his older brother Omar Ali-Shah, came in for particular scrutiny. However, he also had many notable defenders, chief among them the novelist Doris Lessing. Shah came to be recognised as a spokesman for Sufism in the West and lectured as a visiting professor at a number of Western universities. His works have played a significant part in presenting Sufism as a secular, individualistic form of spiritual wisdom.
In later years of his career, Shah wrote around two dozen more books over the following decades, many of them drawing on classical Sufi sources. Achieving a huge worldwide circulation, his writings appealed primarily to an intellectually oriented Western audience. By translating Sufi teachings into contemporary psychological language, he presented them in vernacular and hence accessible terms. His folk-tales, illustrating Sufi wisdom through anecdote and example, proved particularly popular. Shah received and accepted invitations to lecture as a visiting professor at academic institutions including the University of California, the University of Geneva, the National University of La Plata and various English universities. Besides his literary and educational work, he found time to design an air ioniser (forming a company together with Coppy Laws) and run a number of textile, ceramics and electronics companies. He also undertook several journeys to his ancestral Afghanistan and involved himself in setting up relief efforts there; he drew on these experiences later on in his book Kara Kush, a novel about the Soviet-Afghan War.
In late spring of 1987, about a year after his final visit to Afghanistan, Shah suffered two successive and massive heart attacks. He was told that he had only eight per cent of his heart function left, and could not expect to survive. Despite intermittent bouts of illness, he continued working and produced further books over the next nine years.
Idries Shah died on November 23, 1996, at the age of 72, in London, United Kingdom, and was buried in Brookwood Cemetery.
Quotations:
"Study the assumptions behind your actions. Then study the assumptions behind your assumptions."
"Enlightenment must come little by little - otherwise it would overwhelm."
"You must empty out the dirty water before you fill the pitcher with clean."
"Knowledge is not gained, it is there all the time. It is the "veils" which have to be dissolved in the mind."
"Before you learn how to meditate, you must unlearn what you think meditation might be."
"Sometimes a pessimist is only an optimist with extra information."
"Opinion is usually something which people have when they lack comprehensive information."
"A motto of the human race: Let me do as I like, and give me approval as well."
"The union of the mind and intuition which brings about illumination, and the development which the Sufis seek, is based upon love."
"It is not important to have said a thing first, or best - or even most interestingly. What is important is to say it on the right occasion."
"The human being, whether he realises it or not, is trusting someone or something every moment of the day."
Membership
Shah was an early member and supporter of the Club of Rome. He was also a member of the Athenaeum Club. In addition, Idries Shah was a Governor of the Royal Humane Society and the Royal Hospital and Home for Incurables.
Club of Rome
Athenaeum Club
Royal Humane Society
Connections
Shah married the Parsi Cynthia (Kashfi) Kabraji in 1958; they had a daughter, Saira, in 1964, followed by twins - a son, Tahir, and another daughter, Safia - in 1966.