Sufism (Arabic: ٱلصُّوفِيَّة), also known as Tasawwuf[1] (ٱلتَّصَوُّف), is a mystic body of religious practice within Islam characterized by a focus on Islamic spirituality, ritualism, asceticism and esotericism... it is precisely because it is historically proven that "many of the most eminent defenders of Islamic orthodoxy, such as Abdul-Qadir Gilani, Ghazali, and the Sultan Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn (Saladin) were connected with Sufism"[74] that the popular studies of writers like Idries Shah are continuously disregarded by scholars as conveying the fallacious image that "Sufism" is somehow distinct from "Islam." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufism (note "dervish")

Idries Shah (/ˈɪdrɪs ˈʃɑː/; Hindi: इदरीस शाह, Pashto: ادريس شاه, Urdu: ادریس شاه; 16 June 1924 – 23 November 1996), also known as Idris Shah, né Sayed Idries el-Hashimi (Arabic: سيد إدريس هاشمي) and by the pen name Arkon Daraul, was an Indian author and thinker, and a teacher in the Sufi tradition. Shah wrote over three dozen books on topics ranging from psychology and spirituality to travelogues and culture studies... In his writings, Shah presented Sufism as a universal form of wisdom that predated Islam. Shah used teaching stories and humour to great effect in his work.[62][73] Shah emphasised the therapeutic function of surprising anecdotes, and the fresh perspectives these tales revealed... Colin Wilson stated that "partly through Idries Shah, I have begun to see some rather new and interesting implications [about the subject of mysticism]"[93] and in his review of The Magic Monastery (1972) noted that Shah "is not primarily concerned with propagating some secret doctrine. He is concerned with the method by which mystical knowledge is transmitted... [The Sufis] transmit knowledge through direct intuition rather in the manner of the Zen masters, and one of the chief means of doing this is by means of brief stories and parables which work their way into the subconscious and activate its hidden forces." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idries_Shah

A fakir, faqeer or faqir (/fəˈkɪər/; Arabic: فقیر (noun of faqr)), derived from faqr (Arabic: فقر, "poverty"[1]) is an Islamic term traditionally used for a Sufi Muslim whose contingency and utter dependence upon God is manifest in everything they do and every breath they take. They do not necessarily renounce all relationships and take a vow of poverty, some may be poor and some may even be wealthy, but the adornments of the temporal worldly life are kept in perspective and do not detract from their constant neediness of God. The connotations of poverty associated with the term relate to their spiritual neediness, not necessarily their physical neediness.... In the Fourth Way teaching of G. I. Gurdjieff the word fakir is used to denote the specifically physical path of development, as opposed to the words yogi (which Gurdjieff used for a path of mental development) and monk (which he used for the path of emotional development). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fakir

• cf bed of nails https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bed_of_nails

Nasreddin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasreddin And who knows? Maybe the horse will learn to fly!"

Ibn Arabi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Arabi

cf Magick?

Compare Nasrudin (Nasreddin) and Ibn Arabi, then compare both to GI Gurdjieff

Claude Code says:

Nasrudin and Ibn Arabi

They share a tradition but work in opposite registers. Nasrudin is a figure of folk humor, anonymous and oral, loosely tied to a 13th-century Anatolian preacher. His stories carry no doctrine. They ambush the listener: the man searching for his lost key under the streetlight because the light is better, or the man scattering crumbs to keep away tigers ("there are no tigers here." "Effective, isn't it?"). The method is deflation. Logic, pretension, and the ego's certainty collapse in the punchline, and you are left standing in the gap. Ibn Arabi (1165–1240) is the opposite: a named, staggeringly prolific Andalusian author, and the most systematic metaphysician of Islamic mysticism. In the Futuhat and the Fusus al-Hikam he builds a cosmology in which existence is a continuous self-disclosure of God, the imagination is a real ontological realm, and the "God of belief" is only one of the infinite forms Reality takes. His heart, he says in a famous poem, has become capable of every form: pasture for gazelles, monastery for monks, the pilgrim's Kaaba.

Still, they converge on a few things. Both distrust literalism and the sufficiency of reason. Ibn Arabi ranks bewilderment (hayra) as the highest state of knowing, and his God is simultaneously "He" and "not He," beyond and within the world. Nasrudin enacts that paradox instead of theorizing it. There is also the malamati connection. Ibn Arabi honored the "people of blame," saints who hide their rank behind ordinary or even foolish behavior, and Nasrudin, the fool who is secretly wise, fits that archetype well. So one could say Ibn Arabi supplies the metaphysics of coincident opposites and Nasrudin supplies its street-level performance. The main difference is that Ibn Arabi's overall temper is expansive and affirming (everything is a theophany), while Nasrudin's is corrosive and comic.

Gurdjieff against both

Gurdjieff (c. 1866–1949) is unusual because he touches both figures directly. He cites Mullah Nassr Eddin in Beelzebub's Tales, and his own persona was thoroughly trickster: the outrageous behavior, the dyed-sparrow scam he recounts in Meetings with Remarkable Men, the deliberate shocks and ritual toasts to "idiots." Like Nasrudin, he teaches by disrupting a person's automatic frames. But he differs in that he built an institution around the disruption. Nasrudin leaves you with a punchline, whereas Gurdjieff gave you a program: group work, the sacred movements, the "stop" exercise, and a discipline of self-remembering, all aimed at waking a person from what he called mechanical sleep.

Against Ibn Arabi the comparison is more interesting and more contrasting. Both offer a graded cosmos and a cosmic role for the human being. In Ibn Arabi the Perfect Human is the polished mirror through which God sees Himself. In Gurdjieff humans are potential transformers of cosmic energy, and even the Creator needs their conscious labor to keep the universe running. Both also imply a reciprocity between the divine and the human. But the moods diverge sharply. Ibn Arabi's world is already saturated with God, so realization means unveiling what was always there: your essence exists eternally in God's knowledge, and nothing needs to be added. Gurdjieff's ordinary human is a machine with no soul until he creates one through effort, so the emphasis falls on struggle, technique, and "intentional suffering" instead of grace and unveiling. Their idioms differ too. Ibn Arabi remained inside Islamic law and Qur'anic exegesis. Gurdjieff spoke in a quasi-scientific, engineering vocabulary (laws of three and seven, kinds of hydrogen) and drew on Christian, Islamic, and Central Asian material in a syncretic mix.

A caveat on lineage

Gurdjieff's claimed sources (the Sarmoung Brotherhood, Naqshbandi-linked Central Asian circles) are murky and partly self-mythologized, and there is no evidence he read Ibn Arabi. Later Naqshbandi thinkers did engage Ibn Arabi's school, so an indirect current is plausible but unproven. Idries Shah's efforts to frame Nasrudin as a vehicle of Sufi teaching, and to link Gurdjieff to that stream, are influential but disputed by scholars, who see Nasrudin's folk corpus as broader and often bawdier than Shah presents it.

The three together

Loosely, they are three faces of one problem, how to break a person's certainty and open something truer. Nasrudin is the method (shock and laughter), Ibn Arabi is the theory (a universe of divine self-disclosure), and Gurdjieff is the school (a systematized practice of waking up). Gurdjieff is the one who tried to unite all three, writing a Futuhat-scale cosmological epic while behaving like Nasrudin in the drawing room.

If you'd like, I can turn this into a doc, or go deeper on any pairing, such as Gurdjieff's self-remembering against Sufi dhikr.

the latter

Self-remembering and dhikr are close cousins. Both name the same problem, heedlessness, and both answer it with a practice of sustained presence. They part ways over what you are remembering.

The shared diagnosis

Sufi literature has a precise opposite to dhikr: ghafla, heedlessness. It is the state of moving through life on autopilot, absorbed in whatever is in front of you. That is nearly Gurdjieff's "sleep." He held that ordinary people live as machines, identified with every passing thought and impulse, and that the one thing they never do is remember themselves. The Qur'an frames the cure in language a Gurdjieffian would recognize: "Remember Me and I will remember you," and "in the remembrance of God hearts find rest." A saying often quoted in Sufi circles, of doubtful authenticity, has it that "people are asleep, and when they die they wake up." Gurdjieff would have nodded.

Gurdjieff's practice

As Ouspensky reports it, self-remembering is divided attention. Your attention flows outward toward whatever you are doing, and simultaneously it turns back to include you, so that you are aware "I am here, doing this." It is not self-observation as a running commentary, nor is it self-consciousness in the anxious sense. It is a wordless act of presence that is usually sensed in the body, and Gurdjieff insisted it is nearly impossible to sustain. You manage a few seconds, then you fall asleep again, and the whole work is repeatedly re-making the effort. It is done in daily life, not in retreat.

The Sufi practice

Dhikr has many layers. There is the tongue's repetition of a divine name or phrase, the heart's silent version, and deeper stages the masters call the secret and the hidden. It is often coordinated with breath, and in communal form with rhythm and movement, as in the Mevlevi sema or a Khalwati hadra. The one that matters most for this comparison is the Naqshbandi tradition, which prefers silent dhikr and formulated its method as principles that read remarkably like Gurdjieffian exercises: hosh dar dam (awareness in the breath), nazar bar qadam (watch your step), khalwat dar anjuman (solitude in the crowd), and nigah dasht (guarding attention). Solitude in the crowd is essentially inner presence in ordinary life. It is not a coincidence that Gurdjieff's alleged sources were Naqshbandi-adjacent, though as noted earlier that lineage is unproven, and J.G. Bennett, a Gurdjieff student, later studied directly with a Naqshbandi shaykh and was struck by the resemblance.

Where they diverge

The first difference is the object. In dhikr you remember God, and the self is what has to be forgotten or annihilated (fana). In Gurdjieff you remember yourself, and the aim is to build a real, permanent "I" where before there was only a bundle of shifting ones. That looks like a direct contradiction, but the tradition has a bridge: "He who knows himself knows his Lord," a saying Ibn Arabi loved. If the self is a mirror for the Real, then remembering oneself rightly and remembering God converge. A Sufi would say Gurdjieff stops at the mirror, while a Gurdjieffian might say the Sufi begins by pretending a self that does not yet exist has been dissolved.

The second is grace. Dhikr is reciprocal: as you remember God, God remembers you, and the fruit arrives as a gift. Gurdjieff's system leans mechanical and effortful. Help from higher centers comes only after and through your work, and nothing is promised. The third is framing. Dhikr lives inside law, prayer, a lineage, and the shaykh's authority, while Gurdjieff stripped the theology away and taught a portable technique in a scientific vocabulary. The fourth is form. Dhikr uses a content (a name, a phrase) and Gurdjieff uses none, only the shape of attention itself. Some later Work groups added silent "I am" phrases, but that came from followers, not from him.

A fair summary is that dhikr aims attention at the Beloved and trusts that self-knowledge follows, while self-remembering aims attention at the one who is attending and trusts that something higher will eventually answer.

Would you like me to look at how Gurdjieff's Movements compare with Sufi sacred dance next, or how self-remembering compares with Ibn Arabi's idea of the heart (qalb) as the organ of knowing?