From:    Thomas Izaguirre                       Area: MagickNet
To:      All                                     3 Dec 96 00:11:30
Subject: Idries Shah (1924-1996)                UpdReq 

* Original Area: UAMAGK
* Original To  : All (1:121/45)
From the Obituary Section of the New York Times for 12/02/96:
 Idries Shah, an India-born author whose books about the varieties of Islamis 
mysticism known as Sufism have been widely published in the West, died on 
Nov. 23 in London.  He was 72.  He moved to Britain in the mid-1950's but 
traveled widely.
The Daily Telegraph, in reporting his death on Saturday, said he had heart 
trouble.
His book "The Sufis" (1964, Doubleday) has won wide praise.  The British 
author Doris Lessing, writing in the New York Times Book Review in 1977, 
called it "comprehensively informative."
For his part, Idries Shah observed not long ago, "I was merely at the right 
place at the right time," and "freeing Sufism from cultish accretions, 
weirdness and oriental quaintness has taken 25 years."
He was born in Simla, India.  His father, Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, who was also 
an author, was an Indian Muslim of high-born Afghan origin who traced his 
descent from the Prophet Muhammed.  His mother, the former Elizabeth Louise 
MacKenzie, was a Scot.
Idries Shah studied briefly at Oxford.  As the journal "Current Biography" has 
put it, he "succeeded to formal leadership in the Sufi community on the death 
of his father in 1969."
Hw wrote more than two dozen other books, including "The Way of the Sufi" 
(1968) and "Neglected Aspects of the Sufi Study" (1977)
He married Kashfi Kabraji in 1958, and they had a son and two daughters.
   Idries Shah was to mystical Islam what Gershom Scholem was to Kabbalah, an 
innovatorand revealer who did not dilute the message of the sacred tradition 
in order to suit armchair mystics, as is so prevalent today.  I found him 
influential for this study of the Western Magickal Tradition, research that 
basically led me to consider anything related to the Golden Dawn and Crowley 
as being suspect.  I appreciate his work and his inspiration.  He will be 
missed but, as a stone drop in a pond make ripples, his influence will 
propogate!
 Thomas Izaguirre


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