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The Elephant in the Dark

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The author presents a completely unbiased view of many of the worlds religions and how they have been known to view one another. The interior of the religions philosophy is compared to the actions of the its followers with incredible insight and humor. There are numerous quotations from classical texts as well as contemporary insights from the author and noted specialists in the field of conscious evolution. Don,t miss this book. Truely a great read!!

Idries Shah wrote this wonderful book that examined the commonalities of Christianity, Islam, and the Sufis. He begins by discussing "ecumenical" which means "belonging to the whole world." The Sufis view of salvation is a "surrender to G-d". The author points out how through cultural inheritance and teaching, people of different faiths receive a distorted view of the other's religion. So one needs to examine personal beliefs and the beliefs of others to understand what surrender to G-d entails.

Muslim teaching acknowledges Jesus was an "al-Sayyed", a Prince or Lord, however they hold that he was fully human who encouraged people to surrender to G-d. The commonality of the two religions is belief in G-d and submission to his will. The author does a historical review of how respective rulers treated someone of a different religion within Christian and Islam domains of rule. The common history of both religions as seekers of truth are explained. According to Shah, it was a Christian monk who first informed the polytheist Arabs that when Mohammed was twelve years old, he was later to become a spiritual teacher.

For many centuries in the past, the writings of Christian and Moslem thinkers were replete with agreement in the fields of politics, science, medicine, and economics. There were many common threads between the cultures. The author acknowledges people reading a subject will find information which matches their own biases, based on narrow experiences. He admonishes, "Currently, in the East and West, there is so much publication and misinformation that only extensive reading will enable the student to form a useful opinion" [p. 64 c. 1974, 1978] These words are even more prophetic 30 years after written, in the post 9-1-1 era. The author realizes there is a tendency for over-generalization as well as the possibility of focusing too narrowly on portions any doctrine. Most importantly, it is necessary to recognize that there are a constellation of concepts built into Arabic words, which if translated from the Quran, will be disturbed or distorted. The mystical experiences of Sufis and Christian saints however seem beyond this cultural conundrum. The Sufi heritage possesses experiential descriptions that hold much promise in bringing the Christian and Islamic cultures together on the basis of commonalites in spiritual and moral grounding.

This book is highly recommended as a means of understanding foundational beliefs of Islam as they relate to Christianity. The author begins the book with the story told by by Rumi over 700 years ago, in which several men touch an elephant and each believes he is describing the whole, as one touches an ear, the other a leg, and another the trunk. For a mere 76 pages, this is a very thought-provoking book. Erika Borsos (erikab93)

Solving life's puzzles isn't as difficult as we make it. Putting the parts together, and getting the "whole picture" isn't easy. This little story reminds us how to try.

Subtitled, 'Christianity, Islam, and the Sufis', this important book is the basis of a lecture by Shah at a symposium at Geneva University in 1972. The theme of his contribution was 'Salvation as a Total Surrender to God: An attempt at Dialog between Christians and Muslims. The book demonstrates the commonality of the two religions based upon the unity of experience of the act of surrender and the historic acceptance of higher level practitioners of these religions of the practices and religion of the other. In keeping with the theme of his other books Shah is enormously helpful to those desiring to approach the bases of the religious experience by demonstrating obstacles that stand in the way. Important now, this book will grown in importance in the future as the decay of these religions moves those who can to look for their seed in the experience of the man of knowledge.