Manifestations of Thought

by Sadiq Anqa

This short book, written in the 1950s by one of the greatest Sufis of all time, is a classical presentation of the timeless wisdom of Sufism. Using the vast eternal wellspring within, the author offers us the vision to see into the future and to understand our origins. In an elegant, profoundly simple manner, the author uses a variety of vivid examples from science, literature, and the arts to open our eyes, ears, and hearts. This is the essence of Sufi teachings, clear and powerful.

87 pages, Paperback

First published September 21, 1988

Reviews

[Tara · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting book, even if much of its verbiage is derivative, and there is actual plagiarism in at least two places. Much of the work borrows ideas of the 19th-20th century writers Camille Flammarion and Maurice Maeterlinck. The description of the flower Being a realization of God, and the quote beginning one of the manifestos referring to “the silent books” are plagiarized word-for-word from Flammarion’s “Deiu Dans La Nature” (God in Nature, 1867). it is rather telling that Angha quotes only three actual Sufi thinkers in the text; everyone else is a European writer of the 18th through 20th centuries (plus some ancients). There is also the curious quote on extra sensory perception attributed to a person called Joseph Cenil, who doesn’t seem to have existed. Definitely a window into a place and time where a Sufism that is largely an alchemy of European rationalism was inspiring to the Pahlavi elite. Angha was probably an arif, but the large-scale copying this book engages in doesn’t demonstrate such.