Volume 15, Number 1 · July 2, 1970
Mystic - Making
By L.P. Elwell-Sutton
Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn cArabi
by Henry Corbin, translated by Ralph Manheim
Bollingen Series XCI. Princeton, 406, 5 plates pp., $10.00
The Way of the Sufi
by Idries Shah
Dutton, 288 pp., $6.95
Tales of the Dervishes
by Idries Shah
Dutton, 222 pp., $6.95
The publication in the United States, hard on one another's heels, of three books on Sufism is a reminder of the current resurgence of Western interest in this branch of the 'Wisdom of the East,' an interest that marks the final phase of this twelve-hundred-year-old Islamic mystical teaching. Its origins and sources are indeed veiled in the mists of history. Mysticism is characteristic of most Eastern religions, perhaps—since essentially it means 'direct knowledge of God'—of all religions. In this sense the Prophet Muhammad and his followers in the seventh century A.D. could be said to have been mystics; but this still fell far short of Sufism.
Review, 3770 words
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