The Tradition of Omar Ali-Shah in Latin America

Just published: Mark Sedgwick, “The Tradition of Omar Ali-Shah in Latin America.” In El Esoterismo occidental en Iberoamérica (siglos XVI-XX), ed. Juan Bubello and Marco Pasi (Buenos Aires: Editorial de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires: 2025), vol. 2, pp. 89-121.

Available from academia.edu here and at UBA.

This chapter explores the history and character of "the Tradition" of Omar Ali-Shah, a Sufi-inspired movement that became especially prominent in Latin America from the late 1960s. Emerging in Paris under the leadership of Idries Shah and his brother Omar Ali-Shah, the Tradition blended universalist Sufism, Islamic practices such as dhikr, and techniques from Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way. After Omar assumed leadership, the group spread rapidly in Argentina and Brazil, attracting cultural figures and intellectuals, and later expanding into Mexico and Spain.

The Tradition’s teachings emphasized higher consciousness and liberation from conditioning, while its practices combined classic Sufi elements with eclectic borrowings, such as ritualized recitations of the story of Mushkil Gusha. The chapter highlights how narrative and persona—Omar’s embellished biography, fictional teachers, and mythologized origins—played central roles in sustaining the movement’s authority. Today, though diminished, the Tradition remains one of Latin America’s most distinctive Sufi groups, reflecting both the adaptability and the paradoxes of Western Sufism.

Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch and the mystical study of mysticism

Doha Tazi Hemida has just published an excellent article about Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch (1909-1999) who, as she notes, is not mentioned in my Western Sufism, and really should be. The article is “Another Orientalism? The Case of Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch and Rumi,” preprint in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (2022), https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2022.2104171.

Vitray-Meyerovitch encountered Rumi through Louis Massignon (1883–1962), and Tazi Hemida draws attention to the conclusion of Pierre Rocalve, that Massignon founded a “a school of mystic specialists in mysticism.” She sees Vitray-Meyerovitch as another example of what she calls the “mystical study of mysticism,” which she argues convincingly is quite different from Orientalism and “the colonial relation of power and knowledge that seeks to appropriate its object of study, to destroy it and make it its own.” “The ‘type’ that de Vitray exemplifies belongs to a variety of Islamic Orientalism that is not invested in a civilizational endeavour of self-consolidation but rather inserts itself within a long subterranean tradition of encounters,” including European-Sufi encounters.

Tazi Hemida observes correctly that while the German and American reception of Rumi was mostly through poets (Goethe, Emerson and Thoreau), the French reception was through Orientalists (Massignon, Corbin, Vitray-Meyerovitch). Of these “mystic specialists in mysticism” only Vitray-Meyerovitch went beyond the universalism that she found in Rumi and actually became Muslim, in about 1954. She then learned Persian, and published her translations of Rumi between 1973 and 1990. She also spent 1969-73 teaching comparative philosophy at the Azhar in Cairo, and in 1972 became a follower of the Moroccan Sufi shaykh Sidi Hamza al-Qadiri al-Boudchichi (1922–2017).

Citation: Pierre Rocalve, Louis Massignon et l’islam: Place et rôle de l’islam et de l’islamologie dans la vie et l’œuvre de Louis Massignon (Damascus: Presses de l’Ilfpo, 1993).

Two new articles on Western Sufism, and one of relevance

Two new chapters on Western Sufism, and one of relevance to it, have just been published in a new book, Esoteric Transfers and Constructions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, ed. Mark Sedgwick and Francesco Piraino (New York: Palgrave, 2021). They are:

• "The Sufi Shaykh and His Patients: Merging Islam, Psychoanalysis, and Western Esotericism" by Francesco Piraino, pp. 195-217.

The Sufi shaykh in question is Gabriele Mandel, in Italy, who combines Islam, psychoanalysis, and Western Esotericism.

• "Sufism and the Enneagram" by Mark Sedgwick, pp. 219-246.

Covers the complicated relationship between the Enneagram from Gurdjieff to the Naqshbandiyya.

• "Heretical Orthodoxy: Eastern and Western Esotericism in Thomas Moore Johnson’s 'Platonism'" by Vadim Putzu, pp. 273-296.

Not strictly speaking about Sufism, but important, as Thomas Moore Johnson was the publisher of some of the important articles about Sufism by C. H. A. Bjerregaard, and was also connected in other ways.

See https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030617875 for full details.  

The Inayatiyya in Austria

A new article explores the Inayatiyya (formerly: the Sufi Order) in Austria and, especially, its innovative approach to gender. The article is Sara Kuehn and Lukas Pokorny, “On Inayati Female Visions in Austria: Female Leadership in the Western Sufi Tradition,” Religion in Austria 4 (2019), 53–114, available https://www.academia.edu/38435835.

The article focuses on the teachings and activities of Murshida Zumurrud Butta, who was initiated by Pīr Vilayat Inayat Khan, and has been active in Vienna since the mid 1990s. Butta is also a chirāg, and Universal Worship is celebrated. The article also covers the activities of Lisa Malin, the head of the Sufi Healing Order in Austria, also initiated by Pīr Vilayat.

The focus, however, is on what Kuehn and Pokorny call Butta’s “gender-inclusive, or what might be called feminist, hermeneutics” (71). These are explored at length. They have also had an impact on practice. Part of the central prayer of the Inayatiyya asks:

Allow us to recognize Thee in all Thy holy names and forms:
as Rama, as Krishna, as Shiva, as Buddha,
Let us know Thee as Abraham, as Solomon, as Zarathustra,
as Moses, as Jesus, as Muḥammad, 

and in many other names and forms known and unknown to the world

In Vienna, this is now:

Allow us to recognize Thee in all Thy holy names and forms:

as Sītā, Rama, Rādhāand Krishna, as Pārvatī, Shiva, Tara and Buddha,

Let us know Thee as Sarah, Hagar and Abraham, as Deborah, Solomon, Anahita and Zarathustra,

as Asiya, Aaron, Miriam and Moses, as Mary, Jesus, Khadīja and Muḥammad,

and in many other names and forms known and unknown to the world (74)

A rich and very interesting article.

New essays on Western Sufism

There are six chapters on Western Sufism in a new book, Sufism East and West: Mystical Islam and Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Modern World, edited by Jamal Malik and Saeed Zarrabi-Zadeh. The publisher is Brill, which means that the prices are bizarre: $153 or €127. But people are expected borrow Brill books from libraries, not to actually buy them.

In the first part of the book, two chapters deal with early and scholarly Western understandings of Sufism. One, by Carl W. Ernst, “The Dabistan and Orientalist Views of Sufism,” looks at the reception of the Dabistan, an influential text discussed in chapter 6 of my Western Sufism. The other, by Alexander Knysh, “Definitions of Sufism as a Meeting Place of Eastern and Western ‘Creative Imaginations,’” looks at more recent scholarly understandings.

Three chapters then deal with specific stands within Western Sufism. My own “Sufism and the Gurdjieff Movement: Multiple Itineraries of Interaction” argues that there is more than one answer to the question of how the Gurdjieff movement related to Sufism after the death of Gurdjieff. Marcia Hermansen, in “Beyond West Meets East: Space and Simultaneity in Post-Millennial Western Sufi Autobiographical Writings,” looks at four examples of the genre: Michael Sugich, Nuh Ha Mim Keller, Rabia Christine Brodbeck, and Maryam Kabeer Faye. And Marta Dominguez Diaz, in “Between Two or Three Worlds: Reversion to Islam, Beur Culture and Western Sufism in the Tariqa Budshishiyya,” looks at the Budshishiyya, and especially at European-born Budshishis of North African background.

More general questions are handled by Saeed Zarrabi-Zadeh in “Sufism in the Modern West: a Taxonomy of Typologies and the Category of ‘Dynamic Integrejectionism.’” “Integrejectionism” is understood as a hybrid of integration and rejection, as Zarrabi-Zadeh argues that different Western Sufi groups (which can be fitted in to various typologies) all both integrate and reject modernity, though in different ways.

In addition to these six chapters, there are four chapters that focus more on “Eastern” Sufism: Jamal Malik on Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Rachida Chih on the Tariqa Muhammadiyya, Catharina Raudvere on Bosnia, and Ali S. Asani on “Sufi Rock” in Pakistan. The first three topics are all important, and generally something is already known of them. I, for one, knew nothing about “Sufi Rock,” and therefore found Asani’s chapter absolutely fascinating.   

New light on Inayat Khan’s time in Moscow

New light is shed on Inayat Khan’s year in Moscow (1913-14) by Oleg Yarosh, in “Universal Sufism and the Cultic Milieu in Russia at Turn of the xx Century,” Mondi 1, no. 1 (2019), pp. 101-20. Yarosh, who is head of Oriental Philosophy at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, uses not only Inayat Khan’s memoirs but also Russian sources that other researchers have not used.

Inayat Khan’s most important Russian host, it seems, was Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949, pictured), a celebrated poet who had spent much of his life abroad and whose salon was one of the most fashionable in Moscow. He was a follower of Anna Mintslova (1865-1910), a Russian disciple of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), and was also interested in Sufism, which few Russians then were—Sufism was too closely associated with Russia’s Muslims, who were not highly regarded by the elite, says Yarosh. Notes on Sufism are to be found in Ivanov’s archive, and he wrote poems referring to Rumi and Hafez. One of his last poems, written in exile after the Russian Revolution, was “Певец у Суфитов” (Sufi Singer), which hails both Rumi and Hafez, who are linked to the “witness” of Plato.

Ivanov’s understanding of Sufism, then, seems to have something in common with the literary Western Sufism of Goethe and of the later nineteenth century, not especially with that of Inayat Khan. But even if Ivanov did not learn his Sufism from Inayat Khan, a pre-existing interest in Sufism may have been what led him to introduce Inayat Khan into Russian society, and it was evidently through him that Inayat Khan met other celebrities such as the composer and pianist Alexander Scriabin (1871-1915), a friend of Ivanov—celebrities who, one gathers from Yarosh, may not have been quite as taken by Inayat Khan as his memoirs suggest.

Before he met Ivanov, Inayat Khan’s point of arrival in Moscow was a fashionable night-club called “Maxim,” run by an unusual African-American entrepreneur, Frederick Bruce Thomas (1872-1928: see Vladimir Alexandrov, The Black Russian, 2013). A Russian Theosophist, Eugenia Spasskaya, noted in her memoirs that when other Theosophists heard of “a Hindu, Inayat Khan” in this “tavern hell,” they tried to “buy out the naïve teacher,” but that Inayat Khan preferred to stay at Maxim for a while.

The Burhaniya in Italy

A new article on the Burhaniya in Italy: Paola Abenante, “Essentializing Difference. Text, knowledge and ritual performance in a Sufi brotherhood in Italy,” The e-Journal of Economics & Complexity 2, no. 1 (May 2016), pp. 51-68.

Abstract:

The paper explores the different and competing understandings of ‘proper Islamic praxis’ between Egyptian Muslim immigrants and Italians converts to Islam within the Italian branch of an Egyptian-Sudanese Sufi brotherhood, in Rome. The Italian brethren foreground intellectual engagement with texts and scriptures over ritual performance and the role of the body, elements to which immigrants instead give prominence. I suggest that such polarization and the reasons of its persistence may be best understood by focusing on the performative role of cultural essentialisms against immigrants and of stereotypes concerning the definition of ‘orthodox’ Islam circulating in Italy and beyond. Whereas these prosaic essentialisms and binaries do not actually map socio-cultural realities, they are on their turn performative: essentialised discourses orient everyday praxis, make sense of experience and support forms of empowerment and of domination within the brotherhood.

Interview on Sacred Matters

Sacred Matters: Religious Currents in Culture has a series in which they ask seven standard questions of the authors of books they like. They liked Western Sufism. My answers are available here.

Rumi in the New Yorker

Rumi is the topic of an article in The New Yorker by Rozina Ali, "The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi" (January 5, 2017). The author interviews both Omid Safi, who correctly places today's interest in Rumi in the context of nineteenth-century interest in Oriental poetry, and Coleman Barks, today's most important translator of Rumi. A good piece.