Customer Reviews

Neglected Aspects of Sufi Study : Beginning to Begin

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This book is absolute required reading, SUFI 101, for anyone seriously interested in learning in the Sufi way. It contains important information on the potential student's requirements for approaching the Sufi enterprise and finding one's way through the groups of phonies and sensation mongers. It is also a strong introduction to the Sufi style of scatter: 71 pages of continuous text with no breaks or separations. The book is so dense with content that it requires a high degree of attention to maintain contact. That attention is definitely rewarded in the reading.

The title of this unassuming little book is not nearly as attention-grabbing as some of author Idries Shah's other works - such as WISDOM OF THE IDIOTS, LEARNING HOW TO LEARN and A PERFUMED SCORPION. But I found it to be every bit as worthwhile. Based on lectures Shah gave at the New School for Social Research in New York and the University of California in San Francisco, NEGLECTED ASPECTS OF SUFI STUDY covers many of the problems facing those interested in the kind of learning the Sufis have specialized in for centuries, which aims at greater perception and a higher form of understanding. Prominent among these problems are "the unrecognized assumptions which we make about ourselves and about learning and its processes." Among other things, Shah shows how such assumptions, which conventional education seems to have largely overlooked, constitute barriers to learning that are every bit as hindering as are high walls and locked doors - and perhaps even more so, since they are far less obvious to those whom they hold back. If a book's true value was reflected in its weight, this one would weigh a ton.

Despite having been published across a broad span of time, Shah's books work best taken as a whole -- and this book arms the self-styled student with a critical tool for measuring his or her development and can help to make the leap from "here" to "there". Those unfamiliar with Idries Shah are unlikely to begin with this book, but would be well-advised to study it carefully.