Extract From Unauthorised Biography of

Doris Lessing
By Carol Klien

Finding the Way

Writing The Golden Notebook was an instrument of change for Doris Lessing.
The development of that book opened her to whole new ways of thinking and to
experiences that ran counter to the person she thought she was. Rather than push
the new aspects of herself away to maintain equilibrium, as some people would
do, she embraced them with curiosity and excitement.
She wanted to understand what was creating these new thoughts, many of
them incompatible with how she viewed herself at the time, as a ‘Marxist and a
Rationalist.’ As she had done all her life when her interest was piqued, she
embarked on a course of reading, this time in mystical, non-rational literature.
Several of these books were written by a man named Idries Shah. His work
presented her with a philosophical movement of the Islamic religion, called
Sufism. Lessing discovered that its teachings reflected many of the thoughts and
feelings that were currently concerning her. Not well known at the time, Shah
would with Lessing’s help, become internationally famous as the world’s leading
exponent of Sufism
Like other Islamic traditions, Sufism traces its origins back to the Prophet
Muhammad and takes inspiration from the divine word of the Koran. L~wever its
exact origins are unclear. The term ‘Sufi’ was not recorded until approximately
100 years after Muhammad’s death in 1632. It is adapted from the Arabic word
‘suf’ which means wool and refers to the simple garb that was worn by holy men.
In its earliest incarnations Sufism was a body of thought which could
simplistically be described as the mystical side of Islam. Writings which predate
the term ‘Sufi’ might well be considered part of that body of thought, therefore
it’s hard to define an exact starting point for Sufism. As might be expected over
the course of hundreds and hundreds of years, there have been many different
ideas contained within the rubric of Sufism, but asceticism and a personal
relationship with God are two hallmarks.
With the establishment of Sufi orders in the 12tt~ century the dervishes whose
—

ecstatic dancing led to the phrase ‘whirling dervish’ Sufi teachings became more
—

codified. But the development of Sufism throughout the Islamic world without
any central structure had meant its doctrines and practices are in no way uniform.
Indeed discussions of
Sufism can lead into a highly subjective realm. In the West this has often
taken the form of a debate between a modern wave of Sufi adherents and
scholars of Islamic history.
Anyone familiar with Doris Lessing’s views of academics would find it
easy to anticipate which side of the argument she would land on.
Universities have long been a source of irritation for her. She has attacked
academic literary analysis for its attention to extraneous detail, and mt-
picking. And Lessing has expounded at length about the inane questions
she has been subjected to by professors in her many on-campus speaking
appearances. About the academic journal which bears her name, The Doris
Lessing Newsletter she has commented, it is ‘acutely embarrassing I don’t...

like the cult atmosphere at all.’2

Ironically, in a May 1975 article in the magazine Encounter, Islamic
scholar L.P. Elwell-Sutton attacked Lessing’s Sufi mentor Idries Shah on
similar grounds, complaining about ‘the development of a cult of
personality.’3
Earlier that year, in the January 8 issue of the Guardian, Doris Lessing
had written a full page article titled ‘If you knew Sufi,’ to which ElwelI-
Sutton’s piece was in part a reply. And it contained a brief broadside in his
general direction, when she criticised scholars who have ‘attacked this
figure Shah sometimes viciously.’ It was the only sour note in what was
otherwise a full page tribute to Idries Shah written in prose so glowing it
would make a PR man blush.
After skipping over Idries Shah’s birth in Simla, India, in 1924, Lessing
explained her version of the amazing facts of Shah’s life, beginning with
his family. His mother was Scottish, his father’s family was of Afghan
origin, with ancestors that can be traced back not only to the Prophet
Muhammad, but to Abraham of biblical renown. Shah’s father helped
partition India, and when he wasn’t busy lecturing on three continents, he
made himself available to Gandhi and Egyptian President, Gamal Abdel
Nasser.
Lessing writes that Idries Shah had an education, ‘not commonly
associated with Princes.’ In addition to farm work, and studying at several
universities, Shah was sent packing ‘without money or support’ for a
twelve year learning trip where he acquired his extensive knowledge of
religion and philosophy.4 According to Lessing, Shah inherited palaces in
India and Afghanistan, controlled hundreds of millions in trust funds,
invented electronic devices that were marketed, served on the board of
companies in numerous types of business, ranging from ‘culture’ to
‘carpets,’ but for some reason, ‘supports himself and his family entirely
...

by what he earns from writing.’5 Not content simply to accept his

hereditary role as the chief of the Dervishes, Shah had also founded an
Institute of Cultural Research to help spread enlightenment to study
groups that contain ‘nearly as many different professions as there are
members.’6
 In Elwell-Sutton’s piece about Shah, a different picttre emerges. He
disputes the idea that anyone could inherit the role of head of the dervishes
because Sufl ‘knowledge is not passed on through physical heredity.’
Explaining that Shah’s inherited title Sayyid ‘confers neither sanctity nor
authority.’ Elwell-Sutton describes, Sayyid as a term applied to
‘descendants (real and imagined)’ of Muhammad’s daughter Fatima.7
Therefore as a Hashemi Sayyid, Idries Shah could claim descent from the
Prophet, but since the number of Sayyids runs into the millions, it is not
much of a distinction.
None of the palaces Lessing mentions, appear in Elwell-Sutton’s
version, there is ‘only a modest estate’ near Delhi, a present given to the
Shah family by the Indian government, after it was expelled from
Afghanistan for aiding the British in the First Afghan war in 1841.8
Elwell-Sutton’s harshest words were reserved not for Shah, himself, but
for his teaching. ‘This is Sufism (if it deserves that name) without Islam,
‘Sufism’ without religion, ‘Sufism’ centred not on God, but on man. Page
after page of his writings do not even mention the name of God, the word
‘love,’ the concept of unity with God through love. He is far more
concerned with prescriptions for self-improvement, directions for the
achievement of personal happiness, guidelines for a worldly elite.’ Shah
is, said Sutton, ‘a man very much of this world, impressed by big names
and revelling in the lionising and the personality cult that centres around
him.’9
***

It wasn’t just scholars who were critical of Shah. John Bennett, a seminal
figure in what now would be called the New Age movement, wrote an
extremely negative account of Shah in his, 1974 autobiography Witness.
Bennett, devoted much of his life to spiritual pursuits after surviving the
trench warfare of the First World War. He had spent time in Asia, and his
quest for enlightenment had included time following two famous names in
the New Age movement Gurdjieff and Subud. Bennett also had followers
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of his own, who were members of his institute at an estate, Coombe

Springs, in Kingston, Surrey.
In 1962, Bennett met Shah who was close to half Bennett’s age.
According to Bennett, Shah had ‘come to England to seek out followers of
Gurdjieff ‘s ideas with the intention of tcansmitting to them knowledge
and methods that were needed to complete their teaching.’1° When he and
his wife met Shah, they had mixed feelings. Initially, they found the
younger man ‘restless, he smoked incessantly, talked too much, and
seemed too intent on making a good impression. Halfway through the
evening, our attitude completely changed. We recognised that he was not
only an unusually gifted man, but that he had the indefinable
something that marks the man who has worked seriously upon himself.”
Bennett’s description of what follows makes himself seem like a man
under a spell. He decided ‘to put myself at Shah’s disposal and do all that I
could to help him.”2 As the weeks passed, it was clear that what Shah
really wanted was Coombe Springs, both the property and those pupils
who he felt could help him further his cause. Shah insisted that if Bennett
were to turn over the property to him, the gift had to be ‘absolute,
irrevocable, and completely voluntary.”3 Bennett agreed, influenced by the
fact that Shah was so much younger than himself, and that having him
take over Coombe Springs would insure its continuation after Bennett’s
death. Some of Bennett’s colleagues urged him instead to sell the property
and to give half the money to Shah, while keeping the other half to build
himself a retirement home in the country. But Shah was not open to
halfway measures about the gift. Pushed to hurry, Bennett moved out of
Coombe Springs.
The next few months were extremely difficult. As soon as Shah took
over the house, he forbade Bennett’s people from visiting, and made
Bennett feel so intrusive that he stayed away completely In 1966, Bennett
learned that Shah had decided to sell Coombe Springs for one hundred
thousand pounds. The sale was made to a developer who would take the —

to Bennett — holy land, and build twenty-eight luxury homes for

commercial sale. Shah and his family then moved to Langton House in
Kent where he was living and working when Doris Lessing met him.

Lessing’s meeting with Shah came about after Doris Lessing read The Sufis
—or maybe The Searchers, Lessing has offered different accounts
— and wrote to him. But she had to wait a long time for his response.
(Paradoxically, considering how she feels about professors, Doris Lessing
did not feel ready to start her spiritual journey without a teacher.) Lessing
wrote to Robert Gottlieb that when she initially found out about Sufism,
after more than four years of searching for a discipline to explain and
guide her life, she was overcome with joy. Finding Shah seems to have
allowed Doris Lessing to surrender many of her defences, built up over the
years as one after another, people or disciplines disappointed her.
Gottlieb asked her to tell him about being a Sufi, so that he could
understand something that was so important to her, and Lessing somewhat
reluctantly began to do so. Part of Lessing’s tentative explanation to
Robert Gottlieb was that Sufis believe there is only a tiny core of the self
which can be nurtured and developed. The area that fosters growth is
buried deep inside us and will lead us into the light only when
it is ready to do so. It was not easy to explain the Sufi way to those not yet
ready to grasp it.
This was something Lessing knew from first hand knowledge of
watching Sufi teaching in action. One friend remembered her telling about
a man in one of Shah’s teaching sessions who fell asleep while it was
going on. Later, when she asked the man why he had allowed this to
happen, he complained that Shah wasn’t ‘doing anything.’
This was not Doris Lessing’s perception. She was perfectly comfort-
able with the indirect teaching style of Shah’s Sufism, a methodology
which Shah explained this way: ‘The Sufi attitude is undoubtedly that of
‘being,’ but unlike the familiar type of mystic, he will use ‘knowing’ as
well. He distinguishes between the ordinary knowing of fact and the inner
knowing of reality. His activity connects and balances all these factors —

understanding, being, knowing.”4

If such explanations seem obscure, there is also the suggestion that only
those who have reached some higher state of being will be able to
comprehend the discipline. As Shah states, ‘It is a form of communication
among the enlightened ones. It has the advantage of connecting mundane
with the greater dimensions; the ‘other world’ from which the ordinary
humanity is cut off.”5
Shah felt that Sufism defies conventional definition and he had little
patience with people who assumed they understood what Sufism is simply
because they have studied or observed it. ‘Outward observers are not
capable of commenting upon Sufism, only upon its externals. ‘Who tastes,
knows,’ is a Sufi saying. Equally, whoever does not taste, does not
know.”6 In other words Either you get it, or you don’t. The teaching story,
—

the main instrument of Sufi enlightenment demonstrates this dichotomy.

To apt students the teaching stories are an important aide to personal
growth. Unlike traditional fables or parables, extolling some moral or
truth, the tales are open-ended and invite individual interpretation that
fosters intellectual and personal development.
Others find the stories oblique or even pointless. Nancy Shields Hardin
in her essay ‘The Sufi Teaching Story and Doris Lessing’ felt that the
following story, contained ‘zany antics and actions’ that ‘surprise the
listener and encourage him to discover another level of knowledge.”7
‘Nasrudin finds a king’s hawk perched on his window-sill. He has
never seen such a strange ‘pigeon.’ After cutting its aristocratic beak
straight and clipping its talons, he sets it free, saying, ‘Now you look more
like a bird. Someone had neglected you.”8 It may be safe to say that not
every reader will experience the discovery that Shields did. But for
students, of Sufism a teaching story can becomes a mirror to see oneself
and state of mind. It can foster a holistic way of looking at life, where the
right and left brain hemispheres are unified, joining the
intuitive and abstract to the rational and logical. Indeed it is one of the
purposes of the Sufi teaching story to teach a perceptual change from the
linear mode of thought to a more spontaneous, instinctual understanding
of life. Lessing’s fiction often has aspects of the Sufi teaching story, the
dream and real worlds flowing into each other, enabling a reader to look at
some life experience in a new way.

In a Times story about Shah’s 1994 book, The Commanding Self Doris
Lessing wrote that discovering the teaching story taught her how to
appraise her own talents. She also used two of the stories in the tribute to
Shah. One was about an elephant and a mouse who fall in love and decide
to marry. On their wedding night, the elephant keels over and dies. The
mouse says: ‘Oh Fate! I have unknowingly bartered one moment of
pleasure and tons of imagination for a lifetime of digging a grave. ‘19
Lessing adds approvingly, ‘There is not a grain of sentimentality in this
view of life.’20 She believes that to understand what it means to think like a
Sufi, one must abandon conventional limitations on thought and language.
These beliefs have been manifested in her writing. Her characters are often
engaged in an evolution of consciousness, as witnessed by, for example,
their facility for extrasensory perception.
‘Martha could easily hear what Lynda was thinking. Being more
sensitive now, by far, than normally, she heard better: normally she could
hear an odd phrase, or a key word, or a sentence or two. Summarising
what was going on in somebody’s head; now it was not far off being
inside Lynda’s head.’2’
A Sufi who has reached a certain phase of evolution would be able to
see the workings of another person’s mind. The influence of this evolu-
tionary aspect of Sufism on Doris Lessing is made clear by her inclusion
of this quote from Idries Shah’s, The Sufis in the epigraph to part four of
The Four Gated City.
‘Sufis believe that, expressed in one way, humanity is evolving towards
a certain destiny Organs come into being as a result of a need for specific
...

organs What ordinary people regard as sporadic and occasional bursts of

...

telepathic and prophetic power are seen by the Sufi as nothing less than
the first stirrings of these same organs.’22

It was just these types of sentiments that annoyed many of Lessing’s

friends when her focus switched from politics to Sufism. They felt that
involvement with Sufism had made Lessing become elitist, egotistical
and secretive. Others thought Sufism had given her a degree of inner
peace that had made her more easy going. Gottlieb, writing with his
customary affectionate tone, assured Lessing that he would not reject her
beliefs even though they were not his own. Though, in another letter,
Gottlieb at first confessed he could not comprehend Lessing’s impulse to
align herself with a master or teacher, but quickly added that the important
issue for both Doris and himself was to keep improving themselves and
their lives in whatever ways seemed right for them. It is not likely that
Gottlieb would acknowledge any personal criticism of Idries Shah,
knowing the extent of Doris Lessing’s commitment, one that, in 1979, led
her to set up a Sufi Trust for one hundred thousand dollars drawn from
money that her books would earn from Knopf. The activities of the trust
are not generally known.
‘I don’t understand Shah from nowhere!’ said Stuart Hall mockingly. It
is a sentiment echoed by many of Doris Lessing’s friends and colleagues
who knew her in her political days. Clancy Sigal at first assumed they
were lovers, a belief shared by many people who saw them together,
though Lessing denies this. ‘It’s the only explanation I can figure for her
falling in with that charlatan,’ said one sceptic. Elwell-Sutton also puzzled
over Shah’s hold on intellectuals like Lessing and the poet Robert Graves,
whose summation of purpose ‘To be in this world, but not of it that is the
...

Sufi’s ideal’ he found totally inaccurate, in terms of historical Suflsm.23

Referring to Shah’s students, Elwell-Sutton commented ‘It is signifi-
cant that the bulk of them come from the intellectual establishment:
poets, novelists, journalists, critics, broadcasters.’24 He wondered if there
might also be some kind of pleasure in giving up intellectual control and
obeying and following a fixed discipline. And there was the elitist aspect;
being au courant with a provocative way of thinking, and belonging to
some exclusive club that would be out of the reach of less exceptional
people.

All of these possibilities probably hold some clue to Lessing’s unequivo-

cal support of Idries Shah. But whatever the mix of reasons for her
unquestioning acceptance of his superiority, it is evident from her writing
that being a Sufi has both brought her greater peace and intensified her
interiorness. Through her interpretation of Sufi thinking, Doris Lessing
appears to have been able to put some regrets to rest. As with the Zeitgeist,
which is larger than free will, one can believe that some of one’s past
actions are the result of an as yet unevolved self. One cannot be held
responsible for being unenlightened. What’s more, one can even regard
some of those more turbulent periods as part of one’s
evolution, where one is finally able to reach a higher level of under-
standing.
Like Communism before it, Sufism allowed Lessing a place to belong,
while remaining an outsider. On her trips to New York, Lessing would
take Shah’s books around to religious and New Age bookstores to try to
sell them to the storeowners. ‘She’d just trot out with a bag full of the
books, without making appointments, or saying who she was in advance,
just wandering around the city from store to store,’ recalled one Knopf
editor, still sounding bewildered at the memory. ‘I said, if I’d known you
were doing that, I would give you a list of certain bookstores. And she
said, ‘No, rambling about like this is more fun.’ She wanted to do it her
own way. So I don’t know where she went or what she managed to sell.
But she was determined to do this for Idries Shah. She wanted to further
his work.’
In a London Telegraph obituary following Shah’s death on November
23, 1996, Lessing wrote, ‘It is not easy to sum up 30 odd years of learning
under a Sufi teacher, for it has been a journey with surprises all the way, a
process of shedding illusions and preconceptions.’25 Through Sufism, a
life that political ideology and artistic achievement could not fully
illuminate has become comprehensible. And apparently, Sufism continues
to answer Doris Lessing’s questions. She quite simply declared in 1990,
‘It’s the most important thing in my life.’26