Omar Ali-Shah was a prominent exponent of modern Naqshbandi Sufism who lived from 1922 to 2005.
Background
Omar Ali-Shah was born in 1922 into a family that traces itself back to the Prophet Mohammed, and through the Sassanian Emperors of Persia to the year 122 British Columbia. He was the son of Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah of Sardhana, Uttar Pradesh, India and the older brother of Idries Shah, another writer and teacher of Sufism.
Career
He wrote a number of books on the subject, and was head of a large number of Sufi groups, particularly in Latin America, Europe and Canada. Omar Ali-Shah gained notoriety in 1967, when he published, together with Robert Graves, a new translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. This translation quickly became controversial.
Graves was attacked for trying to break the spell of famed passages in Edward Fitzgerald"s Victorian translation, and L. P. Elwell-Sutton, an Orientalist at Edinburgh University, maintained that the manuscript used by Ali-Shah and Graves – which Ali-Shah claimed had been in his family for 800 years – was a "clumsy forgery".
The manuscript was never produced for examination by critics. The scholarly consensus today is that the "January-Fishan Khan manuscript" was a hoax, and that the actual source of Omar Ali-Shah"s version was a study by Edward Heron-Allen, a Victorian amateur scholar.
The two brothers, Idries Shah and Omar Ali-Shah, worked and taught together for some time in the 1960s, but later agreed to go their separate ways. Their respective movements – Idries Shah"s "Society for Sufi Studies" and Omar Ali-Shah"s "Tradition" – were similar, giving some prominence to psychology in their teachings.
Omar Ali-Shah"s teachings had some distinctive features, however.
He had many more followers in South America, and his movement attracted a younger following than his brother"son Following Idries Shah"s death in 1996, a fair number of his students became affiliated with Omar Ali-Shah. Omar Ali-Shah – called "Agha" by his students – gave lectures which have been recorded for distribution in printed format.
He died on September 7, 2005 in a hospital in Jerez, Spain.