Sufism: A Global History

This is not bad (as another reviewer already said) as something written by a pedestrian sequential thinker. He collected as much as an outsider could and he organized it as well as he could, although even this was found to be inadequate by yet another reviewer.What bothers me is that it gives only information about secondary or tertiary aspects without demonstrating any REAL understanding of Sufism. It is like a book about, say, physicists, which focuses on how they lived and dressed, what diet and other behavior they displayed, but saying next to nothing about the nature of their discoveries, how their minds worked. As the real Sufis say, it is the difference (obviously invisible and incomprehensible to Professor Green) between describing the container vs finding the content. In other words, it is a study ABOUT appearances and folkloric aspects of people from other cultures (who happen to be Sufis) without understanding the core and the function of their activity. For some reason Green thinks that Sufism starts with Islam, when it was present much earlier in many other cultures. From the Sufi point of view all prophets of all religions were seers of Truth = Sufis. So were the Greek philosophers so well known as founders of the Western civilization, or Egyptian priests. The Sufi guidance was available to humanity since we started being human. No need to limit it to Islam. Of course Muhammad was also a Sufi, and projected it to the point accessible to the common man, but the most crazy Islamists of various types are vehemently opposed to Sufism. If Green wants to learn IN Sufism, he would do better if he learned from such Sufis as Idries Shah and his father, or Dr. Robert Ornstein. Or Doris Lessing or Tahir Shah. But this would require a flexible and sophisticated mind, something which is not available to everybody, like not everybody can be a modern physicist or a pioneer in other areas truly moving humanity forward. Authors like Green may be well meaning but it does not make them experts in anything beyond superficialities. Still, his book is better than nothing for linear thinkers who in any case would not fathom the Sufi method of thought and action. It is therefore not any worse or any better than so many books in so many areas of human thought where people do not really know much, but still feel a need to exchange views. It certainly earns my two stars, perhaps even 2 plus. I wonder why the Shahs sold tens of millions of copies in over 30 languages, and still going stronger. Green holds a Chair named after Ibn Khaldun, who developed his mind thanks to several Sufi influences. This is the way to go forward.

Since in a three days will be the centenary of the renewer of contemporary Sufism, the giant of thought and action, the illustrious Idries Shah, I ordered through my Institute's library a copy of professor Green's book.I had high expectations but my first shock was that the book was never borrowed by any patron, it was obviously never even opened. As I went through it with high hopes, my disappointment grew. To make a long story short, the best I could say would be to compare Green's book to a book by someone who would aim to describe the gigantic civilizational progress achieved by the thinkers and doers of the Silicone Valley, and then producing only a superficial history and geography, some secondary facts and statistics, plus descriptions of the architecture of the main buildings of the leading companies, the amenities offered to their employees, the types of lifestyles they lead, including what diets and fashion they follow. Nothing about the core intellectual progress, of the spirit of innovation, of the technological insights, of breakthroughs. Just the pseudo academic descriptions of tertiary trivia; but the author of such a book would obviously never be mistaken for an insider, an accomplished information technologist. It seems that professor Green is such an outsider, a describer of useless phenomena, but not someone who understands the Sufi wisdom, its endless depth of understanding of the human nature, its evolutionary attitude to human psychology and its progress. Idries Shah, and his father Iqbal Ali Shah, left endless books of unfathomable practicality, useful for those who sincerely want to strive for self-understanding and changing themselves and the society, as the historical Sufi giants always did. Sufism is not a stagnant folklore as the poor scholastic might think.

Sufism by Nile Green is not the book for a "seeker." If you are interested in understanding the teachings of Sufism and/or have an "existential" interest in spiritual matters, look elsewhere. This is, however, a very good book for those who want a realistic understanding of the place of Sufism within the Islamic tradition. Green provides a smooth historical progression that helps one understand Sufism as a complex historical phenomena that has shaped many aspects of Islamic history, even politics. My one complaint is the "Katzian" framing of spirituality in introduction, which I find illogical for many reasons.

In time and as described. Thank you

Great book with plenty of great illustrations. The book is well designed by categorizing first by time period, and then by specific topic. The book is packed with so much information, and it is one of the only ones I know of on Sufism that covers that much territory to this extent. Unfortunately, the author may have either had a terrible editor to revise the written work, or it is simply poorly written in the first place. For my classmates and myself who were taking a class on Sufism, this book was very dry and somewhat painful to read, even if we did get a lot of information out of it.