His historical works are as valuable as his esoteric ones, chiefly his history on Theosophy and the Spiritualist Movements, in which he isolates an interesting hidden current behind some social and political happenings.

Regards

May I also suggest Sheikh Abd-ul Wahid Yahya as one who also was much more straightforward than Shah about many important aspects of Sufism?

He wrote books under his French name: René Guénon.

I find his Perspectives on Initiation (Aperçus sur l’initiation, 1946) particularly enlightening on what a spiritual teacher is for and what a path of spiritual development truly is, that also clears away a lot of common misunderstandings.

Man and His Becoming according to the Vedânta (L’homme et son devenir selon le Vêdânta, 1925) is a very thorough description of the spiritual development possible to man even if presented by means of the terminology of the ancient Indian Vedas. The content of this book is a fundamental piece of information for anyone interested in the field.

I must also mention here (even if striving to make this list extremely short) The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times (Le règne de la quantité et les signes des temps, 1945) which is a thorough diagnosis of Western culture and civilization from the standpoint of one who understands what a Tradition is. Never mind the year it was given to publication: it looks as fresh today as it was then.

The reactions to his work have been explosive. Admirers speak in superlatives. Critics are ferociously mean. See for yourself.
But know that Hindus (Ananda Coomaraswamy and others) as well as Muslims (Hossein Nasr, authorities of Al-Azhar University, Centres of High Islamic Studies in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other places) and Daoists – and others, have puclicly acknowledged him as one of the very few people of Western extraction that truly understood those Traditions and did a good job at presenting them to a Western audience. In this context, Guenon’s first published work – his doctoral thesis, rejected by the Sorbonne University in 1921 but now considered the best ever written introduction to Eastern traditions there is – should be also added to my short list: Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines (Introduction générale à l’étude des doctrines hindoues, 1921). If you read it, you will find such a devastating criticism of the scholarly methods employed in the West (by the Orientalists and others) – tantamount to a mortal attack on the very people who would judge his doctoral thesis – that you need not wonder why they rejected it. But even if the title refers only to the doctrines of Hinduism, the first half of the book refers to all spiritual traditions in general, as well as to the only culture that lacks (now) a Tradition of its own: ours.

I fully agree. And that is what happens when short-term thinking prompted by the need to increase the yields for the sake of an ever increasing rate of interest dominates the economy. Look at BP cutting corners and creating history’s so far biggest environmental disaster in the waters of the Caribbean Sea. Survivors of the disgraced oil-plattform were not allowed to reach the coast before they had signed papers freeing BP from responsibilities and cutting them short of any possibilities of future legal claims against the company…

It is not the financiers – nor, particularly, Adam Smith – who really created and drove the technological development of the West but a system of credit issued by sovereign states and carefully directed to building up the infrastructure of the country. But that is history now…

A flight to Heaven needs not be impeded by people trying to be free from poverty and material backwardness, which are perfectly legitimate needs. But people deprived from their right to higher purposes by the ‘wise’ of our culture know nothing but to behave as cattle and are an easy prey for the predators. They in turn know no better either for greed defeats itself in the end.

in this view, the promethean ability to ‘enhance the productive capacity of society’ is perilous and amounts to what Nasr refers to (in traditional language) as a rebellion against Heaven. in other words: enhancing the productive capacity in a way that goes against the Tao does not last long. short term enhancement, long term failure.

etc.
In this point a correction needs to be made.

Descendants of Ali Ibn Abi Talib, the 4th Sunni Caliph and first Sh’ia Imam are Sayyids. There are other lineages of “asraf” whose connection with various family members of the Prophet bestows nobility, but the line of Sayyids Shah claims descent from would be from childrne of Ali.

Ali was the husband of Fatima, daughter of the Prophet (peace and blessings upon him and his progeny)

Ali was an adopted son of the Prophet, so descent from him is considered to be a Sayyid.

Ali’s two sons, Hassan and Hussain, were the sons of both Fatima and Ali.

Also what Shah likely meant is that his father’s line were Sayyids, not his mothers. His mother was a Scottish convert to Islam to logically the only lineage from the Prophet Shah could have had was from his father, hence his meaning was true in this instance.

Shah was an interesting and intelligent writer. But there is very much the trickester in him. Like Casteneda, but smarter. There are books by Shah that are much, much, better than “The Sufis”

Someone who really wants to understand the sufis and their relation to Islam and culture in the middle east is best reading much different works.

Someone interested in the sort of “waking up” that Shah was trying to hint at would have to be very careful and weigh fully what he or she reads.

Shah I suspect was trying to communicate very profound things, to an audience of Westerners, conditioned and tragically dumbed down in certain ways so as to prevent the reception of certain types of information, due to centuries of indoctrination prejudice and simple in-access to certain languages and information.

You may find “Book of Strangers” by Ian Dallas to also be of interest. It is a modern story and allegory of Sufi initiation by a Scottish Shaykh of the Darqawi brotherhood. He is more straightforward about certain matter than Shah was, in my opinion.

But I also recognize that ‘the flight to nature’ (enhancing the productive capacity of society) may contradict the spiritual quest. I wrote in my posting above that ‘two – perhaps mutually contradictory – propositions are basically true about mankind.’

In this respect, I share the view of René Guénon – whom I have now referred three times in my postings here – because he was very clear about Western culture being an aberration in being the only one that has deprived mankind of a Tradition – in the spiritual sense of the world – and become a purely material civilization. So much so, that the word ‘material’ as is employed since Descartes first used it as the opposite to the mental world, does not have equivalents in the major and oldest languages of the world but had to be translated, as from the preceding century, with new verbal constructions. So, you see this culture of ours going sour because it has lost its Heart (what used to be Christianity) towards the 13th century, which is when the Middle Ages really ended.

Sadly enough, other cultures, which should preserve their own Traiditions, have become infected by ours. I have mentioned that this development has been predicted. Among several such predictions (or forecasts, all depends on how you look at them) I mentioned the division in four eras or Yugas made in Hinduism, the last of which is called the Dark Age or Kali Yuga, in which we are now.