CHAPTER 8
SUFI’S WORLD
The late 1970s were not a great time to go looking for God. The 1980s weren’t much of an improvement. The thing was, I’d got as far as agreeing that God did, in fact, exist, but… then what? How did I go about finding him – or Him as I had started to capitalize in my mind? Of course, my first recourse was books. I read: The Cloud of Unknowing; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Memories, Dreams, Reflections; Songlines– the sort of magpie list you’d expect from an untutored mind picking the shiny covers from bookshops. The only reason I didn’t fit in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was my complete failure as a bike rider, culminating in a tumble into a nettle bed while attempting to learn how to stop the damn thing properly.
It wasn’t helped by the lack of good bookshops at the time; even in London, there was only really Foyles and Watkins: the former still stuck firmly in the Soviet era of retailing, the latter still reeking so much of 1960s hippies that I found myself blushing whenever I entered its peculiar fug of incense and book glue. How many people, I wonder, have been stopped from finding God by the sheer embarrassment of looking for him? Am I alone in the main reason for my hesitating to give change to beggars – we are, after all, enjoined to give to those who ask – being the possibility of being seen doing so? There should have been another outcome in the parable of the sower: the seed that fell on rich soil but was then too embarrassed to germinate.
Blast. I’ve just realized I’m likely doomed to hell’s vestibule where, according to Dante, those people so undecided that they can’t choose to be bad are blown and buffeted by an unceasing wind, reduced to whining presences unwanted even by the devil.
As far as I was concerned, I’d done my bit: I’d agreed to God’s existence. Now it was his turn. Fugues after reading mystical poetry were all very well, but not much good if I couldn’t remember anything that happened (for years afterwards, I kept a note of the date and time, thinking that if I was ever hypnotized, I’d ask to be taken back to that point to find out what really happened when I heard the silent music in the solitary wooded valleys below the mountains and among the strange islands).
But God, for his part, was keeping schtum. No messages, no visions, nothing beyond a sense that I ought to do something accompanied by a complete lack of knowledge as to what. I mean, I was going to Mass, but it still passed me by: whatever you’ve heard of the poverty of Catholic church preaching, the reality in the 1980s surpassed it. And, Protestant readers, yes I had tried reading the Bible and, apart from little bits of the Gospels, it left me cold and unmoved – as much a surprise to bookworm me as anything that’s happened in my life. I tried other tacks but the Charismatic renewal that had taken off in places positively repelled me. I was a self-conscious young man; the thought of testimony, singing, or waving my hands in the air like I just didn’t care in any context other than a Cameo concert was beyond me. But in fairness to Charismatics everywhere, I did wave my hands in the air, quite enthusiastically, at a Cameo gig at Wembley Arena; why I could do that for a man wearing a red codpiece but not for a man wearing a white loincloth was a question I did not consider at the time.
The answer, I decided, was work. Look, I come from an immigrant family; we imbibed the absolute belief that anything we got we’d have to work for, and I’d sat down and done that while studying for my exams. Effort, everything said, brought reward. So I set about working at God. But how?
Exercise. Or, to be precise, the spiritual exercises of St Ignatius Loyola. With money in pocket, I took the old familiar 29 bus route to Foyles (it was still in its old premises then, before it moved next door to the building that once housed St Martin’s School of Art) and climbed the creaky wooden stairs to the top – if memory serves, the fourth – floor. That was the theology department, with books stuffed into shelves and piled high, and presided over by an old lady who alone seemed to have survived the regular staff purges instigated by Christina Foyle, who generally appeared to have an aversion to anyone remaining in employment for longer than a year.
As she handed me the little red book, she said that the Spiritual Exercises were her favourite retail item, ever since a previous customer had come in, asked for the book at the main information desk, and been directed to the Sports department. Unfortunately, the Exercises proved as opaque to me as if I’d been expected to work out cricket from the tea towel. The problem was, I realized, that I needed some help, some sort of guide – it was all very well for Blake, or Padre Pio, but I wasn’t in that category: they had their paths up the mountain lit in neon with angels pointing the way. I was going to have to find a guide.
Great.
If there was one thing I hated, it was opening up about these matters to other people. But, having gone through the usual list of “seeker” books, I’d moved on to stuff like Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich, The Imitation of Christ, Counsels on a Devout Life, and the Confessions– they pretty well all agreed on the need for a spiritual director (well, apart from Augustine, whom it’s pretty hard to imagine being directed anywhere by anyone except his mother).
John, the expelled monk, had put me off the idea of the monastic life – what I wanted was some way of finding God in the world, with the city and people all around me, rather than shutting myself off from everything. Besides, I had intimations of immortality, a conviction that I was put here, on this earth, to do… something. The trouble was, I did not know what. Oh, how I envied Mozart – there’d never been any doubt about what he was going to do. Yes, I’d extricated myself from the Italian/Asian my-son’s-a-doctor thing by dint of being so obviously uninterested in medicine that the interview panel barely bothered to disguise their decision, but what was I going to do?
Books.
My love, my life, my mind and soul and heart.
I’d be a writer.
I was rubbish.
I had another go at writing a book. Three hundred-plus pages of single-spaced typing and the story meandered into swamp, never to emerge. I tried again, and again, and again: nothing. Through three decades, the eighties, nineties, and noughties, the sum total of my efforts was three short stories published, at the rate of one a decade. At that rate, I’d have to live a very, very long time to make a mark as a writer.
The City, though, was changing around me, and I felt it in my walking and driving. Only those people who travel the streets, particularly in the early morning when the night people have left but the day ones are yet to rise, know it well: taxi drivers, milkmen (there are still some around), postmen, delivery drivers. With my van stacked with TVs and videos, I drove the city’s streets each day, its arteries growing more clogged with traffic and people, the sound and look of it changing. On the face of it, money was starting to wipe difference away, turning Wapping and Docklands, Hoxton and Brixton into variations on the same place. One after another, the old pockets of poverty in Zone 1, and then Zone 2, were bought out, and the old, the sick, the mad, and the poor moved to somewhere further out, until moneyed uniformity settled, like a drift of chocolate on a Starbucks cappuccino, upon those areas that most vocally called themselves unique. Go into a bar, a club, a café, or a house in Camden or Shoreditch, Clerkenwell or, of course, slummy old Islington and you will find everyone looking studiedly different and thinking that means they are different within.
The strange and the odd, the sacred and the secret, had moved to the suburbs, to the railway terraces laid down in the great Victorian expansion and then the curves of Tudor-faced semi-detached houses that followed the Tube lines into the fields of Middlesex and Essex, of Kent and Surrey.
Which was how I found myself walking down a long road in Hayes. Hayes was once a village, but now, taking the rule-of-M25, it lies in London. The house I was looking for was somewhere on Hatton Road, so I’d got off the tube at Hatton Cross and started walking. Turned out the house was at the other end of the road and I had a mile of sweaty walking, under the roar of planes taking off, before I got to the house: behind garden walls, tucked off a green that suggested the rural past of Bedfont before London swallowed it and Heathrow drowned it in sound.
Seeing it, I walked past, too nervous to stop, then turned and stood in front of the door.
Some doors, once opened, can never be closed again.
I knocked.
Four years earlier, I’d been a member of a book club. Like most book clubs of the time, you got a choice of three or four introductory books at greatly reduced prices as long as you promised to buy the same number of books at rather less reduced prices before leaving. I’d got my bargains and had to buy one more book before leaving for cheap pastures new and, reading the catalogue, saw something that looked interesting: according to the blurb, the book purported to show “the transcendent unity of religions” in the religions’ own words.
The book was big and heavy and yellow. And through its thousand-plus pages it definitively showed, at least to my young eyes, that what I hoped was in fact true: all the world’s religions really did say the same things and lead to the same destination. Like different paths up a mountain to the same summit, while the views and difficulties along the way varied, the destination was the same. And introducing each chapter, the editor had included extracts from various writers whom I had never heard of but in whose words, with their astringent championing of truth and beauty, I found a thrilling counterpoint to the wishy-washy vacillations of the time. It was as if I’d stumbled into a secret garden of knowledge. Who were these men? Their names were strange, almost magical: Ananda Coomaraswamy, René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, Marco Pallis, Lord Northbourne, Titus Burkhardt, Martin Lings.
I started scouring the shelves of Foyles and Watkins, looking for titles by them, and started finding one or two. Although the writers were different, the tone, the sobriety, and the message were the same: the transcendent unity of religions, the decline into modernity, the ugliness of the present world, and the discarded tradition that had formed the framework of all previous civilizations, including our own before the Renaissance.
This was in the days before the internet, before everything being available at a click. To find books like these, I had to visit bookshops and send off to small publishers for clumsily typed book lists. I soon realized that most of these books were published by Perennial Books, Pates Manor, Bedfont, Middlesex. So, I wrote to the publisher. And the publisher wrote back, inviting me to visit.
So, I found myself poised outside the door, hand raised.
I knocked.
The door opened.
Some doors, once opened, can never be closed again.
The Victorian and Edwardian eras were the heyday of clubs and societies, occult circles and spiritual groups, but there was a renewal of these interests in the 1930s, the last fling of the imperial dream, when an extraordinary crop of travellers, explorers, and seekers set out into worlds that were soon to end. Think of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s odyssey on foot from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople; Wilfred Thesiger among the Danakil in Ethiopia and then, just after the Second World War, crossing the Empty Quarter before oil money destroyed the land and culture there; Robert Byron; Peter Fleming; and Evelyn Waugh. Eton and Magdalen colleges in particular seemed to specialize in dangerously beautiful and reckless young men who could, apparently without effort, turn their hands from writing to photography to wartime exploits, in between mixing with every level of society, domestic and foreign.
But the fearlessness and openness that characterized these travellers also manifested itself in the inner realm: with translations and travel opening up the world and its cultures, people again started to investigate the traditions and religions of the East – with the East starting from somewhere around the Balkans. For the English, the natural point of exploration was India, but for the French-speaking world it was North Africa.
I went through the door into a new world.
These writers I’d been reading: I had sensed, behind the words and beliefs they shared, something else, some further bond. It was more than just a group of men who thought the same: there was a communion.
Going through that door in Bedfont, I was still not sure what I would find. The woman who met me was kind in a formal, slightly interrogative way, as if she was looking for something in me. For my part, I was just going to the book source, the publisher that published the books and journals I’d started devouring. We had tea – in the years to come, there would always be tea – and she told me that her husband, Francis Clive-Ross, had recently died and she had taken on the task of running Perennial Books. Would I like another cup of tea and, by the way, if I wanted to write to any of the authors she published, she would be happy to forward the letter.
Would I?
Yes.
For me, at this time they seemed like the return to this earth of Plato and Boethius. I had read as many of their books as I could find, but among this school, three names seemed clearly pre-eminent: René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and Frithjof Schuon. I learned from Mrs Clive-Ross that Guénon and Coomaraswamy were dead, but Frithjof Schuon was alive. Getting home, I paused over the typewriter, thinking what I wanted to ask him. All the questions of faith and knowledge and religion whirled in my mind, refusing to settle, until I settled on one: what must I do to be saved?
I sent the letter to Mrs Clive-Ross and… nothing. No reply.
But as I waited, while in my favourite place – the local library – I pulled an edition of Who’s Who from the shelf and started thumbing through it, marvelling at the strange combination of the eminent and the soon to be forgotten within its pages, when I chanced upon an entry for another of the writers I had been reading. Turned out Martin Lings, once the keeper of Oriental Manuscripts at the British Museum, lived in a small town in Kent, and his entry in Who’s Who gave his address. So, cutting out the middlewoman, I wrote to him as well.
Martin Lings wrote back almost immediately, suggesting that I visit him at his home, since such matters were better spoken of. While the day of meeting wound round, the postman dropped a letter through our door. The return address, on the back, said it came from Frithjof Schuon and the address was given as Bloomington, Indiana.
Indiana?
I wasn’t even sure where that was. Looking it up in an atlas, it turned out to be one of the United States, and Bloomington a little town in what looked like Hicksville. It looked about as promising a location as Croydon. What was a man like Frithjof Schuon doing living there?
Oh, and the answer to my question?
Pray.
The man who prays cannot be lost.
A few days later I drove to Westerham in Kent and turned up a road signposted for Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s home, before branching down a quiet, deep, almost tree-enclosed lane that was as much green tunnel as open road. Parking, I stopped for a nerve-fuelled cigarette, then walked on to the address I had been given and stood in front of it.
It seemed, to my suburban eyes, the quintessential English cottage, with sprays of flowers spilling from the tiny front garden onto the quiet road.
I rang the bell.
The door opened.
I went in.
In writing this book, I realize that, in some ways, I never went out again.
In 1930, René Guénon sailed to Egypt.
He was a Frenchman, a philosopher, a traditionalist, a man who saw the whole of the great modern experiment as a disastrous falling away from the spiritual foundations of the world. He had emerged from, and previously much dabbled in, the occult underworld that flourished in Belle Époque France, having been a member of various theosophical, gnostic, and Masonic groups while researching and writing on Hinduism, and particularly the school of Hindu religious thought known as Advaita Vedanta. Advaita Vedanta is the most rigorously non-dualist of the Eastern schools of philosophy, proposing an identity between Atman – the self or soul – and Brahman – the ultimate reality, the cause of all that does not, itself, ever change.
In Egypt, René Guénon, the Frenchman, the Orientalist, the occultist and erstwhile Catholic, entered Islam. Or rather, as he later wrote, he had “moved into” it: “whoever understands the unity of traditions… is necessarily… ‘unconvertible’ to anything”.90 For René Guénon was the first, and key, proponent of the “transcendent unity of religions”, although the phrase itself came later, being coined as the title of a book by the man who would come to take Guénon’s place as the main exponent of Traditionalist views, Frithjof Schuon.
Why did Guénon become a Muslim? By all accounts, in Egypt he led an orthodox life, marrying an Egyptian woman and carrying out the religious duties expected of a Muslim, but his writing and thought still used Hindu doctrines, and especially Advaita Vedanta, as the light by which to illuminate religious ideas and symbols. Guénon became a Muslim because of the vital importance he attached to the idea of initiation: the direct transmission of spiritual influence through the rites of a religion, or an order within that religion. As far as Guénon was concerned, initiation had died out in the West with the suppression of the Knights Templar, and while he had for a time thought that Masonic initiation was valid, the only other avenue apart from Hinduism were the Sufi orders in Islam. In Egypt, Guénon joined the Hamdiyya Shadhiliyya Sufi order, and there followed, in his writing, an increased emphasis on the need for valid initiation. Responding to this, his perplexed readers started to write to him in Egypt asking what initiation they should seek. He responded, at least in print, by exclusion. The Catholic Church, and the theosophical and neo-Hindu groups that existed in the West at that time were all, for him, without a valid initiation. Having come from a traditionalist Catholic background, Guénon did not even bother to mention any forms of Protestant Christianity. As far as Guénon was concerned, you had to be born a Hindu, and into its caste system, to be a Hindu, so that was excluded. There wasn’t really much left over.
I was sitting, squatting rather, on a low shelf in an alcove. The windows opened onto a glorious English garden, vibrant with sky-blue delphiniums, scarlet crocosmias (the “Lucifer” variety, ironically enough), and sun-yellow heleniums.
The room, on the other hand, was as far removed from England as anywhere I’d ever seen (bar, possibly, a council flat in St John’s Wood – yes, such a thing exists – whose owner had transformed the interior, through the judicious use of cladding, into a medieval castle). Reed matting, up to the level of my waist, clad the walls; red-and-yellow geometric rugs, Moroccan I later learned, covered the floor; exquisite calligraphy, in a script I didn’t know but thought must be Arabic, inscribed black on a glowing gold background, was hung in modest frames on a couple of walls; and a spider plant trailed plantlets from a simple and elegant shelf. This might make the room sound ornate, but it wasn’t: the house was painted simple white within and this was the background upon which the vivid reds and yellows, and occasional blues, were set: the effect was of restraint in the service of beauty.
In the alcove was a round, beautifully worked brass tray, set upon a low stand, and I sat behind it, awkwardly crossing my legs. Martin Lings, fifty-four years my senior, sat on the other side of the tray, apparently quite at ease with his legs tucked into such a position despite looking, to my young eyes, ancient, and poured the tea.
If you want to know what he looked like, think of Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi, even down to the earth-coloured robe.
“Milk?”
“Yes, please.”
He poured it into the cup first. My mother, who had a fixed obsession when I was young that I was permanently undernourished, had made tea by heating milk with tea leaves in it and adding four teaspoons of sugar. This tea did not taste like that tea.
We talked and I spoke a little of my life, while he told me something of his. It turned out he had lived in Croydon before his retirement.
After tea, Dr Lings showed me around his garden and then I left. Something had happened but, driving back home, I did not know what.
Bloomington and then Croydon. It was all getting quite strange.
In 1935 a young man, come down from Oxford having read English with C. S. Lewis as tutor, became a lecturer in Anglo-Saxon and Middle English at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania. The young man was Martin Lings, and while there he first encountered the works of René Guénon and was convinced, as he would remain to the end of his life, that he had come “face to face with the truth”.91 Despite Lewis’s tutelage, the young Lings had not returned to the practice of religion while at Oxford. He once told me that, at Oxford, Lewis had said of the difference between the two of them: “I am a man for whom imagination is the dominant mental faculty, but for you, it is the intellect.” For such a man, René Guénon’s ideas had the force of revelation, and Lings was soon one of the many people in the Frenchman’s circle of correspondents. But it was all very well accepting the idea, propounded by Guénon, that there was a common core of esoteric truth at the centre of the world’s main religions; how did one go from the idea to its realization? While some of Guénon’s readers were content with a purely intellectual approach to religion, Martin Lings wanted to live it as well as think it. To that end, all Guénon’s public writing, and his correspondence, emphasized the need for guidance from a spiritual master. The problem was the finding of one.
Over the next year or two I visited Martin Lings on three or four occasions and, during the course of tea taken in that strange room, which I learned was called the zawiya, or in the garden, I slowly learned that my intimation, that more bound this school of Traditionalist writers together than simply shared ideas, was true.
They were all, or nearly all, members of a Sufi order, a tariqa. And the order’s spiritual master, its shaykh, was Frithjof Schuon, the same Frithjof Schuon who had written to me from Bloomington. Martin Lings was the head of the order in England and, I learned, its members met fortnightly in the Kentish suburb of London, Beckenham, for what was called a majlis: prayer, meditation, singing, and even dancing – no whirling though – directed towards God. Or Allah.
Oh, and would I like to join?
In 1938, Martin Lings set off to find a spiritual master, leaving Lithuania and travelling south to, er, Switzerland. While he had expected to find a spiritual master amid the mountains, he’d had the Himalayas or Atlas Mountains in view rather than the Alps. But Guénon had told him where to go: Basle.
In the unlikely surroundings of this Swiss town the first functioning Sufi tariqa in the West, a tariqa composed at this time entirely of Europeans, had formed, centred upon its shaykh, Frithjof Schuon.
Born in 1907, the young Schuon had also been convinced of Traditionalist ideas by his reading of Guénon and, learning of the eminent Algerian Sufi, Shaykh Ahmad al-Alawi, sailed to Mostaghanem, where he entered al-Alawi’s order, known as the Alawiyya. Schuon spent three months in Mostaghanem during which time he was, apparently, given permission to accept new members into the Alawiyya order. Returning to Europe, Schuon, according to his privately published memoirs, had his first vision, on the day of the Shaykh al-Alawi’s death.
A group of some thirty or forty Traditionalists formed around Schuon, all converts to Islam but committed to the idea of the essential unity of religions. As part of that, their order remained secret. There was hardly anything unusual in that; pretty well all the mystical, occult groups flourishing in Europe in the 1930s were at least secretive if not out-and-out hidden, and Schuon’s tariqa was no exception. But then, in 1937, Schuon had another vision and later said: “I woke with the certainty that I had become the shaykh”.92 The Sufi tariqa that had started as a branch of the traditional (small “t”) Alawiyya order was becoming something of its own.
Would I join?
Would I become a Sufi and a Muslim, albeit one professing the essential unity of religions? This was certainly not the option I’d expected to have presented to me a few years back when I first started reading and thinking my way back towards some sort of faith.
What would I say to my parents? Not drinking wasn’t really a problem – I was never much of a drinker, for the simple reason that too much alcohol, like too many drugs, simply made the room spin and me vomit – but no bacon… now that would be difficult. I’d been a vegetarian for six months, only to be broken by the smell of frying bacon.
Turned out I didn’t need to tell my parents. I didn’t need to tell anyone. I could keep my Islam a secret – the tariqa even licensed the discreet consumption of beer if doing so better covered one’s religious tracks.
I met some of the other young men who were in the order and they were like me… children of mixed marriages and mixed heritages, the offspring of the whirling cultures of modern London: Anglo/Indian; Pakistani/Persian; Bangladeshi; and Iranian. We even looked alike, although most of them sported neat, trimmed beards.
And I liked them. I liked them a lot. High minded but with the intellectual zest and energy of the young and the committed who believe they have found the answer that everyone else is seeking, we would meet in the shisha bars of the Edgware Road and talk into the night, running abstruse metaphysical notions past rather more limited understandings of history than we realized.
I had never known like minds before. Now, the streets and cafés of my own city brought them to me and in the newly proclaimed multiculturalism of 1980s London, we saw ourselves as an intellectual elite embodying the new culture of the city. We were profoundly backward looking but our very existence in this place and time was a symbol and portent of where the city was going.
So, yes, I joined.
I became a Muslim, a Sufi, and a Perennialist – although in my mind the order was reversed.
I don’t think any of my non-tariqa friends noticed.
In 1938, Martin Lings embraced Islam and became Frithjof Schuon’s disciple, remaining faithful to both to the end of his life. But in 1939, a fateful year indeed, he left for Egypt to visit Guénon, only for war to break out and a visit to turn into a thirteen-year sojourn, during which time he became Guénon’s personal assistant as well as teaching English at Cairo University. The Egyptian revolution in 1952 meant Lings had to leave and he returned to England.
While on leave, Martin Lings had married a childhood friend, Lesley Smalley, whom I came to know as Sayeda (an honorific title) Rabiah, the quintessential Englishwoman, kindly and acerbic in turn. On their return to Britain, they settled in Croydon – Croydon! – while Lings completed his PhD and worked as keeper of Oriental Manuscripts at the British Museum. Still, why should I find it odd that he lived in Croydon? I lived in Arnos Grove (or New Southgate, I’ve never quite decided which) and my years of repairing televisions had taught me that the suburbs were far, far stranger than the self-conscious exhibitionism of the city’s Zone 1 metropolitans.
And while working and studying, Lings also took charge of the English branch of Schuon’s Sufi order, organizing the twice-monthly meetings in Beckenham and, after his retirement, inviting about eight disciples to his house in Westerham. Tea would be taken, a lengthy walk made through the Kent countryside – Martin Lings kept up with this right into his nineties – during which he would speak to each person individually, providing counsel, advice, and just general conversation, before returning to his house and sharing a meal, followed by an hour of prayer and then silent, standing, invocation, turned towards Mecca, which lasted for up to another hour. Despite his age, I never, ever saw him flag, and even when my own legs were aching and I was beginning to sway he remained, a diminutive figure, standing in a plain Moroccan djelleba made of coarse wool, looking towards God.
As the only young man in the tariqa who had a car – and a van – I was often called upon to act as a taxi service for visitors. This might have been irksome, struggling through the traffic from one side of London to the other. It wasn’t, because of the extraordinary people I met while acting as a taxi: from an old American who now lived in the tribal areas of Pakistan and coloured his beard red with henna, to an intense, and intensely bearded Russian (and this in the days before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when meeting a Russian was still an event), through to the memorable day when I nearly had to put an Iranian/American professor and an Arab prince into the back of a Ford transit van to get them back from Westerham. The conversations were varied, wide ranging, and almost always memorable: I was meeting the world, eminent and low, and it was treating me as its equal. For I realized that the tariqa had members in all sorts of walks of life, from the UN’s International Labour Organization through professors and academics, particularly in the fields of Islamic studies and comparative religion, to peers of the realm. One couple had been so on the beat in the 1960s that they really did go to Andy Warhol’s Factory parties. Mixed in with these were the sort of young, intellectual oddities that I was myself: intense young men who really did think that the hypostases of the godhead were important and even looked it up in a dictionary to find out what it meant. (I did, actually, once use the phrase “hypostasis of the godhead” with two old, good friends who were not involved with this side of my life: they almost split their sides in laughter.)
The tariqa was unashamedly elitist in its outlook; the doctrines promulgated in the books of its members were rigorously intellectual and there was, in any case, a traditional, or Traditional, justification for such elitism in the hierarchical nature of religious civilizations, notably the caste system of Hinduism; although Islam eschews such divisions, we were supposed to be Gnostics – those who approach God through knowledge. According to the doctrines of Advaita Vedanta, Gnostics can, by their intellect, understand the other ways of approach to God – through love, duty, work, etc. – but by adding understanding, the gnostic path was supreme, for those qualified. It was a seductive idea.
But there were rumours that all was not well in the order. I heard tell of tension between the English and American branches. The English zawiyyah, under the guidance of Martin Lings, had accepted many young men and women over recent years who came from Muslim families. The children of immigrants like myself, they, as much as I, appreciated the chance to spend time with older, properly English people who had been in the tariqa for many years: it was an education in manners as much as anything else, as well as an opportunity to hear tales of the past. Lings had studied with C. S. Lewis at Oxford, he’d heard J. R. R. Tolkien – my literary hero – lecture (apparently he seldom took his pipe from his mouth and was almost inaudible), and he’d gone on pilgrimage to Mecca when the only lights at night were flaming torches and the innumerable stars. We were universalists grounded in the forms of a particular religion and enjoying tutelage in the best of our home culture.
But things were different in America, in Bloomington. They had become increasingly universalist; there were strange rumours. No one quite appeared to know what was and what was not going on. And there had been disturbances in the English order as a result, which had led to many old-standing members leaving in the time before I joined, including Mrs Clive-Ross, who had first opened the door of this new world to me.
Then the news came that we were to have a visitor from America. It seemed like a chance to heal the breach. Although it was not going to be any eminent member of the order in America, yet it was a chance to reforge and renew contacts. And my interest in particular was piqued when I learned that the visitor was a young woman and that her mother was Sri Lankan and her father Italian.
It seemed like a sign.
When she arrived, she seemed like a vision.
When she left, I determined to go to America.
I was going to seek a wife.
I was going to meet the Shaykh.
The shock I’d experienced when seeing the return address on my letter from Frithjof Schuon was no less than the shock felt by the small community of his followers that had already formed in Bloomington, Indiana, when the Shaykh announced he was moving there permanently. Schuon had already visited America a couple of times and been strongly impressed by the rites and beliefs of the Native Americans, and in particular the Oglala Sioux. For Schuon, the Sun Dance, and the very faces and bearing of some of the Native Americans he met, were glimpses into a primordial past when men were closer to God, seeing by direct, symbolic intuition what we could only appreciate now through laborious thought.
But it was still a big thing for a seventy-three-year-old man to up sticks and move continents. It was an even bigger thing for a community that had always been on the margins, set in a little university town that hardly anyone had ever heard of, to have such a man coming to live among them. A tariqa had formed in Bloomington in 1967 around the nucleus of Victor Danner, a professor of religious studies at Indiana University. Frithjof Schuon moved into a house on the outskirts of Bloomington, with other members of the order living in the surrounding buildings.
And that’s when things started to go wrong.
In his memoirs, Schuon writes how he sought signs from God when faced with an intractable dilemma. When wrestling with the question of whether he should embrace Islam, he went out into the street after praying for a sign, to see a procession of North African drummers, something that was far from usual at the time, and took this as God’s answer. His move to Bloomington was also, apparently, in response to a further sign.
For, as with Blake, Schuon’s life was lit by visions. One, in 1973, brought with it “the overwhelming consciousness that I am not as other men”.93 The awestruck disciples in America very much agreed.
“You know about the Shaykh’s wife?”
I was shortly to leave for Bloomington, a flight in late November when the air fares were at their lowest, and I was speaking to one of my friends from the tariqa. He was the first of us younger men to have visited Bloomington, having gone there a few months previously; we’d all quizzed him about it and he’d been enthusiastic but guarded.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m going to meet her and then the Shaykh himself.”
“It was a white wedding – you know that?”
Thinking all weddings were back then, I must have looked blank.
“It was a vision. The marriage was to be… pure.”
I looked at him. “You mean?”
My friend nodded. “Yes.”
“Well, sure.” I must still have looked puzzled. Why was he telling me this?
My friend cleared his throat. “You’ve seen pictures of the Shaykh? You can see, he’s a passionate man with a virile nature.”
I nodded. I had seen one or two photographs of Frithjof Schuon; he did not look the sort of man for whom celibacy came easy, but hearing this of him, I respected his self-control the more.
“Um, as you know, in Islamic law a man may have more than one wife. The Shaykh married again.”
I looked at him.
“While keeping his first wife? The one he has a ‘white marriage’ with?”
My friend was, I thought, showing signs of blushing. He nodded.
I pursed my lips, shrugged. After all, the Shaykh had lived a celibate, married life for many years. Some relief might be in order.
“He has four wives now.”
I stared at my friend. “What?”
“Four. He has four wives. As allowed in Islamic law.”
I stared, open-mouthed.
“At least he doesn’t have any concubines…”
In Bloomington, Schuon instituted “Indian Days” along with the regular weekly meetings for prayer and the remembrance of God that were the core practice of the order in the rest of the world.
Schuon and his wife – his first wife – had been adopted into the Sioux nation when they had first visited America in 1959, and they had returned for further, long visits before moving permanently to the States. They had attended a Sun Dance on that first visit. The Sun Dance is the great rite of the Oglala Sioux, when a sacred tree is erected and, during the three or four days of the ceremony, expiation and sacrifice are offered.
Indian Days were not Sun Dances but, I was told before going, an effort to anchor the physical recreation of the community in Bloomington in something more sacred than games of basketball. As such, they featured dancing, drumming, and singing. And, yes, I was going to have to wear a loincloth.
There are some sticking points that ride on a great point of principle, and others that come from a slow accumulation of misgivings, but too little cognizance has been given before now on the importance of sheer embarrassment in the rising up and saying, “No.”
I had worn a loincloth once before. When I was fourteen and playing a non-speaking Indian in the school production of Bertolt Brecht’s play Buffalo Bill and the Indians. What I had to do was dance the Sun Dance, while wearing a loincloth, around a sacred tree (which had to be imaginary as we didn’t have the props to provide one) and pretending to have hooks piercing my chest muscles, ripping the flesh from me. As far as the audience could see, we were stumbling around in a circle, looking as if we were all subject to dreadfully painful cases of intestinal bloating, before falling to the ground. While wearing loincloths.
Damn it, I was wearing trousers.
They had them: buckskin trousers, like you see in Western films, and as I put them on in that changing room I looked around. Men, middle-aged mostly, but some old and some young, were getting changed around me and all of us, despite the best efforts of exercise and diet, bore the marks of the comfortable, well-fed life of the modern Westerner. And we were putting on loincloths, buckskin shirts, headdresses. I was, at least, safe in my trousers.
The drum started and we filed out and lined up. The room was big, huge really. Some of these people in Bloomington had mansions rather than houses, and I was in the basement of one of them: a room easily large enough to hold a banquet in.
Then the women entered. Most wore buckskin dresses but some of the younger women had on what could only be described as buckskin bikinis; but then, alongside me, were men dressed only in loincloth and beads.
The drums sounded, pounding rhythm – I was about to see the man I had crossed an ocean for – and Frithjof Schuon entered the room. If any elderly white European could carry off being dressed as a Native American chief with full headdress, he was the one.
Signs are dangerous things. I had crossed the ocean to seek a wife and, a few days into my visit, I was standing beside her, standing as if on the water itself in the middle of a lake. Above us, the moon shone in a clear sky, encircled by a halo spreading the colours of the spectrum into the night, when a shooting star plunged to the moon.
Surely that was a sign of God’s favour, of a love sanctioned by heaven and a marriage destined by Providence. Turned out it wasn’t even the sign of a short fling.
Like I said, signs are dangerous things. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. A few years later, when I first became engaged to the woman I would marry, I had a serious case of nerves and cold feet, and thought of calling the marriage off, only to dream that night that I had won the National Lottery and then thrown away the ticket. I have never before, or since, had a significant dream, but that dream was a true sign.
I had not realized before how appallingly difficult it must be to live amid signs and visions. It was what I had wanted when I set out on this quest: to see, directly. William Blake had lived with visions throughout his life, but his great blessing was to be thought mad, and thus have no followers, no disciples, heaping their weight of expectation and hope upon him. Frithjof Schuon lived with visions throughout his life, and followers gathered around him, and covered him with dreams.
On the regular Sunday afternoon walks I took with Martin Lings I saw him walk, one after another, with people who placed the burdens of their lives on his thin shoulders, and he bore the weight without flinching.
In Bloomington, I saw the weight of dreams, and it was beyond bearing.
I went into the Shaykh’s presence. I sat with Frithjof Schuon for a few minutes, mainly in silence. I sat with a genius, a poet, a philosopher, a man who might have shaken worlds and broken kingdoms. I sat with a good man, who told me to pray. I sat with a man burdened with dreams.
I came home, to London. And I left the tariqa.
Oh, the leaving was long. A gradual tapering away. But after Martin Lings died in 2005 there was nothing further to keep me.
I had seen, at first hand, the unique possibilities and perils of religious genius. That Frithjof Schuon was a religious genius I had no doubt. Of the extraordinary difficulties attendant on that sort of genius I now also had first-hand knowledge.
And I began to see patterns to this genius, recurring through history.
The great historian Christopher Dawson noted how religions don’t so much arise from civilizations as create them:
The great civilizations of the world do not produce the great religions as a kind of cultural by-product; in a very real sense, the great religions are the foundations on which the great civilizations rest. A society which has lost its religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture.94
How often had a religious genius, gathering followers about him, gone into exile as a result of signs and visions, there gathering his strength – and, usually it seemed, wives – before his vindication? Thus had Frithjof Schuon done, and before him Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormons. Martin Luther, another German, had had similar crises and lived a life patterned on the same template. And, most tellingly, the man whose example I now ostensibly followed, the Prophet Muhammad, had lived this pattern as well.
In Bloomington, I found myself in a cult centred upon a man who had not the strength or, in the end, the inclination to lift the weight of dreams from his shoulder. By the last few years of his life, the speculation was openly made, not “Who is the Shaykh?” but “What is the Shaykh?”, with disciples vying with each other in a religious rank race, seeking always to push him higher and higher: spiritual master, spiritual pole (qutb), pneumatikos, avatar.
Worship bends men, it breaks them. I don’t believe it broke Frithjof Schuon, but it bent him. And with his bending, all that he wrote and taught is called into question.
Much of it is valid.
The rigour of his and Guénon’s attack on modern culture will, I hope, help give the Muslim world the intellectual self-confidence to withstand the worst aspects of the West and thus, finally, outgrow the corrosive lack of self-belief that has led to the gun and the bomb being chosen as the method of counter-attack.
His insight into spiritual states and moods, and the meaning of sacred art, is extraordinary.
But the message, in its entirety, stood upon it being realized in the person who most espoused it. In that, Frithjof Schuon failed, and the message fails with him.
Let’s be honest here: I was pretty rubbish at the methods of prayer practised by the tariqa. Sitting cross-legged, invoking the Divine Name, sent me to sleep more effectively than a cup of cocoa. The themes of meditation that were supposed to lead down into the Divine Nature infallibly drew me down into daydream. Maybe, if I’d been better at all this, if God had seen me nodding off, my head doing the pigeon peck of the sleep fighter, and decided to shock me into attention by removing his veils, then I would still be in the tariqa. After all, it was a principle of its method that turning to God necessarily made him turn towards us: “It is in trusting to that [teachings and method] that we ‘obligate’ God toward us.”95 So, if I had just kept going and closed my mind to doubts, then maybe I would have seen, and known it all to be true. It is possible – but it could only have happened if I had turned away from further knowledge.
I returned to London, to the city that had given birth to the modern world so excoriated by the Traditionalist writers, and set about resuming my life.
It was time to learn, to see if the central claims made by the Perennialists, the claims that I had accepted, really held up. While the messenger had failed, maybe his message was still valid.
I enrolled on an MA in religion and discovered that no, the claims did not hold up. Only by making an a priori assumption of the truth of the amalgam of Advaita Vedanta and Neoplatonism employed by Traditionalist writers to view the world’s religions could aspects of those religions be turned into pages from the same book. Only by ignoring key aspects of those religions and, in the case of Theravada Buddhism, the religion itself, could the religions be squeezed into the same box. Only by begging the question of the validity of the intellectual intuition so adverted in their writings could the Perennialists avoid the hard questions of demonstrations of intuited truth: you either “saw” it – in which case you were qualified for the truth; or you didn’t – in which case you weren’t capable of the truth.
This was truth reserved for an elite.
The problem was, we weren’t much of an elite.
Some were. I have met no finer, or holier, man than Martin Lings, although I have known some his equal in other contexts and different countries. But the truth or otherwise of the Perennialist claims – many of which are not demonstrable to scholarship but depend upon the sort of “aha” moment of recognition that Martin Lings experienced when he first read René Guénon – then requires further support in their effects: do those who talk this talk, walk it too?
As I said, religious genius is the greatest burden and heaviest temptation that can be laid upon a human being: is it so surprising that it breaks those upon whom it is placed? I have no animus towards Frithjof Schuon – I pray for the repose of his soul every night – but the fond old belief that God does not test people beyond their strength is just not true; some he breaks by taking, others he breaks by giving. God is a fire. He devours. He burns.
You can run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Sooner or later God’ll cut you down. (Traditional)
And those who constrain him in words, he chops off at the knees. St Thomas Aquinas was reduced to silence in the final few months of his life, after he saw that all he had written was as straw before the reality. Metaphysics is a compulsive pursuit, but philosophers and theologians beware, for there is one thing we do know about God: he tells stories – and a good story will not be constrained.