21. The Golden Chain

Enneagram

Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah (1894 – 1969), a writer and diplomat, and a close friend of Aga Khan III and Atatürk, was the father of Idries Shah (1924 – 1996), whose seminal The Sufis, which appeared in 1964, introduced Sufi ideas to the West, and was well received internationally.[1] According to Shah, the Rosicrucians, Freemasons, Cervantes, Western chivalry, witchcraft, alchemy and the founder of the Franciscans, Saint Francis of Assisi, amongst others, were all influenced directly or indirectly by Sufism, often as a result of contact between East and West in the Middle Ages in places such as Spain or Sicily. Although Shah was at times criticized by orientalists who questioned his credentials and background, his book had a powerful impact on many thinkers and artists when it appeared, including the Nobel Prize winning author Doris Lessing, the poet Ted Hughes, and the writers Geoffrey Grigson and J. D. Salinger, and his friend Robert Graves.

Shah was born in Simla, Punjab Province, British India, to an Afghan-Indian father of Pashtun descent; Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, a writer and diplomat, and a Scottish mother, Saira Elizabeth Luiza Shah. Shah’s family on the paternal side were Musavi Sayyids. A Sayyid is an honorific title of Hasanids and Husaynids Muslims, recognized as descendants of the Islamic prophet's companion, Ali through his grandsons, Hasan and Hussein, and a Musavi is a title indicating a person descended from Musa al-Kazim, the seventh of the Twelve Shia Imams. In 1918, Shah’s father Ali Ikbal Shah became only the second Asian to join the Royal Society for Asian Affairs, contributing articles on Islam to the Society’s journal. As well, Ali Ikbal was associated with the British Foreign Office for several decades. In 1926, he attended the Meccan Congress as an observer, and spied on the Russian Muslim delegation for the British Vice Consul in Jeddah.[2] Ali Ikbal travelled widely and became a publicist for a variety of Eastern statesmen such as Aga Khan III, King Abdullah of Jordan, King Fuad I of Egypt, the Emir Abd al-Ilah of Iraq and members of the royal family of Afghanistan.[3] Ikbal Ali was also on friendly terms with Kemal Atatürk.[4]

According to Shah, Gurdjieff’s “Fourth Way” originated with the Khwajagan, a chain of Naqshbandi Sufi Masters from the tenth to the sixteenth century influenced by Central Asian shamanism.[5] In Istanbul in 1921, Gurdjieff met John G. Bennett, his future pupil, who then head of the British Directorate of Military Intelligence in Ottoman Turkey. 1953, Bennett had undertaken a long journey to the Middle East, visiting Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Persia, which included a mysterious visit to Abdullah Faizi ad Daghestani (1891-1973), Shaykh of the Naqshbandi Haqqani Sufi order, in Damascus.[6] According to The Golden Chain by Sheikh Kabbani (1945 – 2024), Daghestani initiated Gurdjieff and allowed him through a dream to “ascend to the knowledge of the power of the nine points,” which became the basis of his mystical geometric figure he called the Enneagram.[7] Kabbani was the son-in-law and deputy of Sheikh Nazim al Haqqani (1922 – 2014), leader of the Naqshbandi-Haqqani Order, who had also been a student of Daghestani, and who went to Britian where made contact with Bennett’s circle from whom he developed his first group of followers.[8] In 1961, Bennett would meet Shivapuri Baba, guru to Ramakrishna, Sri Aurobindo and Gangadhar Tilak, who was then supposedly 135 years old.[9] Bennet wrote his biography, Long Pilgrimage: The Life and Teaching of the Shivapuri Baba (1965).

Under the pen name of Arkon Daraul, Shah wrote A History of Secret Societies, which builds on the conclusion put forward by Syed Ameer Ali, the founder of the All-India Muslim League, whose president was Aga Khan III, that the Assassins were the foundation of the Western secret societies through the Templars.[10] Shah puts forward that Islam maintains the unity of all religions, as being the reason why some chains of transmission trace back to the Prophet Mohammed, while others trace back to Elijah. Shah adds that this idea of a universal religion was at work when ancient peoples equated their gods with one another, including Mercury, Hermes and Thoth, for example. Shah believes this to be the theosophical basis of Sufism, and quotes Ihsan Kaiser’s Speech of the Sages:

 

I am in the pagan; I worship at the altar of the Jew; I am the idol of the Yemenite, the actual temple of the fire worshiper; the priest of the Magian; the inner reality of the cross-legged Brahmin meditating; the brush and the color of the artist; the suppressed, powerful personality of the scoffer. One does not supersede the other-when a flame is thrown into another flame they join at the point of “Sameness.” You throw a torch at a candle, and then you say, “See! I have an- nihilated the candle's flame!”[11]

 

Shah was a secretary and companion to Gerald Gardner, the most important representative of a modern cult of witchcraft and neo-paganism, Wicca, who formulated its rituals with Aleister Crowley.[12] Doreen Valiente in The Rebirth of Witchcraft and James R. Lewis in Witchcraft Today: An Encyclopedia of Wiccan and Neopagan Traditions, both connect the ceremonies Gardner devised as being a neighbor to Mabel Besant-Scott, the daughter of Annie Besant. Connected is a claim that was made about the Aniza tribe, to which the Saudis belong, by Gardner and Shah. Witchcraft, according to Shah, originated from the Aniza through the person of Abu el-Atahiyya, (748 – 828), one of the principal Arab poets of the early Islamic era. According to Shah, Abu el-Atahiyya was the leader of the “Maskhara” Dervishes who were also known as the “Revellers.” The name Aniza, he maintains, means goat and el-Atahiya, he claimed, was commemorated by the “Revellers” with the symbol of a torch burning between the horns of a goat, in obvious allusion to the Baphomet of the Templars, as depicted by renowned eighteenth-century occultist Eliphas Lévi. After el-Atahiya’s death, a group of his followers supposedly migrated to Moorish Spain where they influenced the spread of the witch cult in Europe.[13]

Shah was also a close friend of Robert Graves (1895 – 1985), author of The White Goddess, a key book for modern pagans and Wiccans, in which he proposes the existence of a European deity, inspired and represented by the phases of the moon, and which is the origin of the goddesses of various European and pagan mythologies. Graves was also a close friend of Gordon Wasson (1898 – 1986), whose research into psychedelics was funded by the CIA as part of MK-Ultra and inspired Timothy Leary[14] Graves, in his introduction to Shah’s book The Sufis, credits Richard Burton for discovering the Sufi origins of Freemasonry, and concludes:

 

Indeed, Freemasonry itself began as a Sufi society. It first reached England in the reign of King Aethelsan (924-939) and was introduced into Scotland disguised as a craft guild at the beginning of the fourteenth century, doubtless by the Knight Templars. Its reformation in early eighteenth century London, by a group of Protestant sages who mistook its Saracen terms for Hebrew, has obscured many of its early traditions.[15]

 

Graves further states that the proof that the Templars were influenced by the Sufi legend of the Temple of Jerusalem, and not the Temple of Solomon, is evidenced by the fact that the Temple Church in London is modelled on the Dome of the Rock. Graves explained that the real builders honored in Freemasonry as builders of Solomon’s Temple were “not Solomon’s Israelite subjects or Phoenician allies as is supposed, but Abdul Malik’s Sufi architects who built the dome of the rock on the ruins of Solomon’s temple, and their successors.”[16] The Sufi builder of the Temple, explains Graves, was the Sufi “King” Maaruf Kharki, disciple of Daud (David) of Tai (d. 781), considered the son of David, and referred to cryptically as Solomon.[17]  According to some sources, Kharki is of Mandaean origin.[18] The martyr of the Sufis, Graves then adds, was Mansur al-Hallaj, murdered, like the legend of Hiram Abiff in Freemasonry, because of the Sufi secret. The pillars of the Temple are not physical ones, but follow the Qutb (“pole”) of Sufism. According to Graves, one such Qutb was Abulfaiz, sometimes called Abuazz (the Boaz pillar of Freemasonry), was the great grandfather of “David” (Maaruf Karkhi), and is none another than Dhun Nun.[19]

Reflecting the mythos that was constructed, according to Shah, who became a dubious authority on the subject, Sufism is just the outward expression in Islam of a single occult tradition shared by all the major religions. This is the ancient secret which Freemasons believe they inherited from the Templars, who in turn supposedly gained it from Sufis, or Ismailis, during the Crusades. The ultimate mystery learned is the central teaching of the Kabbalah, that man is God. Gilani, the founder of the Qadiriyya, was known as the “Rose of Baghdad.” The rose became the symbol of his order and a rose of green and white cloth with a six-pointed star in the middle is traditionally worn in the cap of Qadiriyya dervishes. According to Idries Shah:

 

Ignorance of this background is responsible for much useless speculation about such entities as the Rosicrucians who merely repeated in their claims the possession of the ancient teaching which is contained in the parallel development called alchemy, and which was also announced by Friar Bacon [Roger Bacon], himself claimed as a Rosicrucian and alchemist and illuminate. The origins of all these societies in Sufism is the answer to the question as to which of them did Bacon belong, and what the secret doctrine really was. Much other Rosicrucian symbolism is Sufic.[20]

 

In 1965, Shah founded SUFI (Society for Understanding Fundamental Ideas), and dubbed himself Great-Sheikh, not only of the Naqshbandi, but of all Sufi orders. Several presentations were given by scientists like Alexander King to the Institute for Cultural Research (ICR), which was originally founded by Shah in 1965 as the Society for Understanding Fundamental Ideas (SUFI).[21] Other visitors, pupils, and would-be pupils included the poet Ted Hughes, novelists Alan Sillitoe and Doris Lessing, zoologist Desmond Morris, and psychologist Robert Ornstein, who co-wrote a book titled On The Psychology of Meditation (1971) with Oscar Naranjo. Over the following years, Shah established Octagon Press as a means of distributing reprints of translations of Sufi classics. Several of Shah’s books, Mulla Nasrudin, considered a folkloric part of Muslim cultures, were presented as Sufi parables, and which were discussed the Rand Corporation.[22]

Shah’s student, Claudio Naranjo (1932 – 2019) along with Oscar Ichazo (1931 – 2020), were figures from the Human Potential Movement, and developed the Enneagram of Gurdjieff into a pseudo-psychological personality profile system. Chilean psychiatrist Naranjo, belonged to the inner circle at the New-Agey Esalen Institute in California, where he became one of the three successors to Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy. Naranjo was also a member of the US Club of Rome, and in 1969 he was sought out as a consultant for the Education Policy Research Center, created by Willis Harman at SRI. Naranjo is regarded as one of the pioneers of the Human Potential Movement, for integrating psychotherapy and the spiritual traditions through the introduction of is introduction of Gurdjieff’s “Fourth Way” teachings.[23] Naranjo was also a close friend of Carlos Castaneda, who is famous for having written a series of books that describe his alleged training in shamanism and the use of psychoactive drugs like peyote, under the tutelage of a Yaqui “Man of Knowledge” named Don Juan.

 

Nation of Islam 

The Aga Khan III, along with Khalid Sheldrake, Lady Evelyn Cobbold, journalist Dusé Mohamed Ali, founder of the popular African Times and Orient Review (ATOR), had also been a supporter of Marmaduke Pickthall’s Islamic Information Bureau (IIB).[24] The young Marcus Garvey (1887 – 1940), then studying in London from Jamaica, frequently visited Ali’s Fleet Street office and was mentored by him.[25] Strangely, Garvey was a friend of Klansman Earnest Sevier Cox (1880 – 1966), who co-founded the Anglo Saxon Clubs of America, a white supremacist political organization which was active in the United States in the 1920s, and lobbied in favor of anti-miscegenation laws and against immigration from outside of Northern Europe. Cox wrote White America, proposing the repatriation of all Blacks to Africa. Cox is also noted for having mediated collaboration between White southern segregationists and African American separatist organizations such as Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA) and the Peace Movement of Ethiopia.[26] Earl Little, the future father of Malcolm X, was harassed by the Black Legion, who along with white authorities in the government and the Klan were concerned about this activism on behalf of Garvey’s UNIA. When the family home burned in 1929, Earl accused the Black Legion. When Malcolm was six, his father died in what was officially ruled a streetcar accident, though his mother Louise believed Earl had been murdered by the Black Legion.[27]

Before finding Sunni Islam, Malcolm X had been a member of the Nation of Islam, which had its origins in the Moorish Science Temple of America, founded in 1913 by Noble Drew Ali (1886 – 1929). In an unpublished essay, Ravanna Bey of the Moorish Science Academy of Chicago, reported that the Drew’s parents had encountered Jamal ud Din al-Afghani, who was visiting the United States in the winter of 1882-1883, at which time he initiated them into Salafism and the Brethren of Sincerity, or the Ikhwan as-Safa of the eighth century.[28] One version of Drew’s life, common among members of the Moorish Science Temple, claims that he left home at the age of sixteen and joined a band of gypsies who took him to Egypt.[29] Another version asserts that he ended up in Egypt travelling as a merchant seaman, though some say as a magician in a traveling circus. There he was initiated by the last priest of an ancient cult of High Magic who took him to the Pyramid of Cheops, and received the name Sharif (Noble) Abdul Ali.[30] In one version of Drew’s biography, the priest saw him as a reincarnation of the founder, while in others, the priest considered him a reincarnation of Jesus, the Buddha, Muhammad and other religious prophets.[31] In Egypt, Drew’s prophecy produced the Circle of Seven Koran. This prophecy might also have taken place in Mecca, where he was empowered by King Abdul Aziz al Said. In 1912 or 1913, he had a dream in which was commanded to found a religion “for the uplifting of fallen mankind.”[32] And especially the “lost-found nation” of American blacks who were actually Moors, after which he founded the Canaanite Temple in Newark, New Jersey, before relocating to Chicago.

Drew’s Circle of Seven Koran mentions Marcus Garvey as a “forerunner” and some say he was his cousin, just as John the Baptist was Jesus’s cousin.[33] The book was heavily plagiarized from the Rosicrucian text Unto Thee I Grant (1925) and Eve S. And Levi Dowling’s The Acquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ (1909).[34] Dowling said he had transcribed the text of the book from the Akashic records, through Visel, “the goddess of Wisdom, or the Holy Breath.” The Gospel claims that Jesus studied with the Brahman and wise men of Buddhism as well as a Persian sage, and that he preached to the Athenians before joining the Egyptian Priesthood of Heliopolis.

Moorish Science Temple was founded in Chicago, a bastion of the Ahmadiyya cult. Following death of its founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, in 1908, the Ahmadiyya fractured into the Qadianis, the more conservative faction, who supported strict adherence to founder’s version of Islam, and a more liberal group, the Lahoris, who supported rapprochement with orthodox Islam. Between 1921 and 1925, Ahmadiyya made its first important inroads in the United States when the first Qadiani Ahmadi missionary, Mufti Muhammad Sadiq (1872 –1957) a companion of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, persuaded more than one thousand Americans to convert, both white and black. Many African-American Ahmadi Muslims joined the faith in Chicago and Detroit, cities where Garvey’s UNIA was strong. In July 1921, Sadiq initiated the first Muslim publication in the United States, the Moslem Sunrise, through which he reached out to Garvey’s followers, encouraging them to connect Islam with their advocacy of black nationalism and Pan-Africanism.[35] In a January 1923 issue, he declared:

 

My Dear American Negro… the Christian profiteers brought you out of your native lands of Africa and in Christianizing you made you forsake the religion and language of your forefathers—which were Islam and Arabic. You have experienced Christianity for so many years and it has proved to be no good. It is a failure. Christianity cannot bring real brotherhood to the nations. Now leave it alone. And join Islam, the real faith of Universal Brotherhood, which at once does away with all distinctions of race, color and creed.[36]

 

By 1940, Ahmadiyya claimed between five and ten thousand American converts, half of them African Americans, with their primary missionary centers being  Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, and Kansas City. “It was within this rapidly changing social context,” explains Manning Marable, “that an olive-skinned peddler calling himself Wallace D. Fard made his appearance in Detroit’s black ghetto.”[37] Elijah Mohammed (1897 – 1975), the founder of the Nation of Islam, was instructed by a mysterious Arab named Wallace Fard Muhammed (c. 1877 – disappeared c. 1934), who claimed he was God. Fard, probably born in New Zealand to a man from Pakistan and an Englishwoman, arrived in Chicago after having entered the United States illegally in 1913, and having joined the Theosophical Society of San Francisco, Marcus Garvey’s UNIA, and in Chicago the Moorish Science Temple.[38] Fard’s religion was a hodge-podge of Islam, Jehovah’s Witness doctrine, Gnosticism, ufology, and heretical Christian teachings and Prince Hall Freemasonry.[39] It basically sets the history of the occult in reverse, where the “Sons of God” or Nephilim, are God, a man, and his council, in “Shambhala,” explicitly associated with the “Great White Brotherhood” of Blavatsky.[40]

According to the FBI, Fard had as many as 27 different aliases and was a sometime petty criminal. Fard’s activities were brought to wider public notice after a major scandal involving an apparent ritual murder in 1932, reportedly committed by one of his early followers, Robert Karriem. Karriem had quoted from Fard’s booklet titled Secret Rituals of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam: “The unbeliever must be stabbed through the heart.”[41] Karriem told the detectives that he intended to carry out more murders, which he called “sacrifices.” He referred to Fard as the “gods of Islam,” and told the investigators, “I had to kill somebody. I could not forsake my gods.”[42] When Fard was interviewed, he told detectives, “I am the Supreme Ruler of the Universe,” resulting in his being placed in a straitjacket and padded cell for psychiatric examination.[43]

According to its former leader Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam received funding from Texas oil tycoon and JFK assassination conspirator H.L. Hunt (1889 – 1974).[44] On February 15, 1965, just six days before he was shot at the same location, Malcolm X confessed with regret that he had personally led negotiations with the Ku Klux Klan based on their mutual dedication to segregation. As Malcolm reported, when a number of members from the Nation of Islam were in trouble with the police in Munroe, Louisiana, they got hold of James Venable, the Ku Klux Klan’s lawyer. According to Malcolm, similar arrangements were made with the American Nazi Party of Lincoln Rockwell, who was in regular correspondence with the Nation of Islam’s founder, Elijah Muhammad. John Ali arranged for Rockwell to address the crowd attending the 1962 annual Saviour’s Day Convention at Chicago’s International Amphitheater, where he declared, “Elijah Muhammad is to the so-called Negro what Adolph Hitler was to the German people. He is the most powerful black man in the country. Heil Hitler.”[45] Referring to Hunt’s involvement in the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X remarked, “And never have I seen a man in my life more afraid, more frightened than Elijah Muhammad was when John F. Kennedy was assassinated.”[46] Since then, the Nation of Islam, under its current leader, former Calypso singer Louis Farrakhan, has openly adopted the teachings of the Church of Scientology. The translation of the Quran by Muhammad Ali (1875 – 1951), an Ahmadiyya scholar, became the version adopted by the Nation of Islam, both under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad and current leader Farrakhan.[47]

 

Moorish Orthodox Church of America

Peter Lamborn Wilson (1945 – 2022)—also known as Hakim Bey—founded the Moorish Orthodox Church of America (MOCA), which purports to be an outgrowth of the Moorish Science Temple of America. The Moorish Orthodox Church derived influences of the Bektashi Sufi order, as well as the Queer Spirit and Radical Faerie movements. The Radical Faeries were founded in 1979 by Harry Hay, who is considered the founder of the Gay Liberation Movement. Hay, who was a practitioner of Crowley’s sex magick, was a member of the Agape Lodge of the OTO in Los Angeles under W.T. Smith.[48] Bey has also written on the alleged connections between Sufism and ancient Celtic culture, technology and Luddism, Amanita muscaria use in ancient Ireland, and sacred pederasty in the Sufi tradition.[49] Wilson’s first use of the pseudonym Hakim was in 1983, when he published Crowstone: The Chronicles of Qamar, a Sword and Sorcery Boy-love Tale. Hakim Bey has also received criticism for writing for the bulletin of North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), a pedophile advocacy organization in the US that works to abolish age of consent laws criminalizing adult sexual involvement with minors.[50] Bey has also written on the alleged connections between Sufism and ancient Celtic culture, technology and Luddism, Amanita muscaria use in ancient Ireland, and sacred pederasty in the Sufi tradition.[51]

Wilson was a friend of Kerry Thornley, who along with Greg Hill, was the founder of the mock religion of Discordianism, decided to the goddess Eris, the Greek goddess of discorded. Thornley later became a close friend of Lee Harvey Oswald, stationed as a radar technician at Atsugi Air Base in Japan, the CIA’s headquarters in the Far East, where the CIA conducted extensive LSD testing.[52] In 1961, Greg Hill and Thornley moved to New Orleans, where they joined the cabal of Kennedy assassination conspirators. In 1968, Garrison subpoenaed Thornley to appear before a grand jury, believing that Thornley and Oswald were involved together in covert CIA operations. Garrison later suspected that the Discordian Society itself was a CIA front. What especially incriminated Thornley was his public celebration on the announcement of JFK’s murder, and the fact that he would introduce himself as follows: “I’m Kerry Thornley. I masterminded the assassination—how do you do?”[53]

As Margo Adler indicated, some, like Thornley’s friend Robert Anton Wilson, have alleged that the entire pagan movement is a plot centered around Thornley’s worship of Discordia.[54] According to Wilson: “Much of the Pagan movement started out as jokes, and gradually, as people found out they were getting something out of it, they became serious. Discordianism has a built-in check against getting too serious.”[55] Wilson explained, “Many people consider Discordianism a complicated joke disguised as a new religion. I prefer to consider it a new religion disguised as a complicated joke.”[56] As Wilson clarifies, however, “It will be understood by the Cabalistic reader that Discordianism is a system of transcendental Atheism, agnostic Gnosticism, skeptical Monotheism, and unified Dualism. In short, the Erisian revelation is not a complicated put-on disguised as a new religion, but a new religion disguised as a complicated put-on.”[57] According to Greg Hill, who was interviewed by Adler:

 

Eris is an authentic goddess… In the beginning I was myself as a cosmic clown… But if you do this type of thing well enough, it starts to work. In due time the polarities between atheism and theism become absurd. The engagement was transcendent. And when you transcend one, you transcend the other I started out with the idea that all gods are an illusion. By the end I had learned that it’s up to you to decide whether gods exist, and if you take a goddess of confusion seriously, it will send you through as profound and valid a metaphysical trip as taking a god like Yahweh seriously. The trip will be different, but they will both be transcendental.[58]

 

Appalled with the social and political climate in America, Peter Lamborn Wilson left for Lebanon in 1968. He travelled to India with the intention of studying Sufism, but became fascinated by Tantra, tracking down Ganesh Baba. He spent a month in a Kathmandu where he was treated for hepatitis, and practiced meditation techniques in a cave above the east bank of the Ganges. Wilson then moved to Iran where he developed his scholarship. He translated classical Persian texts with French Traditionalist scholar Henry Corbin, a regular at Eranos and friend of Denis de Rougemont, and also worked as a journalist at the Tehran Journal. Following the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Wilson returned to New York where he lived with William S. Burroughs. Burroughs credited Wilson for providing material on Hassan-i Sabbah which he used for his novel The Western Lands.[59]

 


[1] Obituary. The Times (November 8, 1969).

[2] Kramer. Muslims Assembling, p. 107.

[3] “Shah in his Eastern Context.” in Professor L.F. Rushbrook Williams (ed.). Sufi Studies: East and West ( E.P.Dutton & Co., 1974), p. 20.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Kathleen Riordan Speeth & Ira Friedlander. Gurdjieff: Seeker of the Truth (Wildwood House, 1980), p. 36.

[6]  “A New World Sufi Order?” Islamic Party of Britain (Autumn 1993).

[7] Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani. The Naqshbandi Sufi Way: History and Guidebook of the Saints of the Golden Chain (KAZI, 1995).

[8] Vadillo. The Esoteric Deviation in Islam, p. 447.

[9] John G. Bennett & Thakur Lal Manandhar. Long Pilgrimage: The Life and Teaching of Sri Govinananda Bharati known as the Shivapuri Baba (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1965); Godwin. Arktos, p. 32.

[10] Daftary. The Ismailis, p. 477.

[11] Idries Shah. The Sufis (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1971), pp. 51–51.

[12] Morgan Davis. From Man to Witch: Gerald Gardner 1946, www.geraldgardner.com.

[13] Shah. The Sufis, p. 213

[14] “J.P. Morgan & Co. (see Wasson file).” MKUltra Subproject, no. 58 (doc: 17457). Washington, D.C.: National Security Archive at George Washington University. Copy link: http://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/mkultra/mkultra4/DOC_0000017457/DOC_0000017457.pdf

[15] Shah. The Sufis, p. xix.

[16] Ibid., p. xix.

[17] Ibid., p. xix.

[18] Thabit A.J. Abdullah. “The Mandaean Community and Ottoman-British Rivalry in Late 19th-Century Iraq: The Curious Case of Shaykh Ṣaḥan.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 61: 3 (Brill, 2018), pp. 396–425.

[19] Shah. The Sufis, p. 450.

[20] Ibid., p. 390.

[21] Elizabeth Hall, “At Home in East and West: A Sketch of Idries Shah,” Psychology Today 9 (2): 56 (July 1975).

[22] Idries Shah (Presenter), “One Pair of eyes: Dreamwalkers,” BBC Television, (19 Dec 1970).

[23] “Claudio Naranjo, M.D.,” Blue Dolphin Publishing. Retrieved from http://www.bluedolphinpublishing.com/Naranjo.html

[24] Gilham. Loyal Enemies, p. 227.

[25] David Dabydeen, John Gilmore & Cecily Jones (eds). The Oxford Companion to Black British History (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 25.

[26] William H. Tucker. “A Closer Look at the Pioneer Fund: Response to Rushton.” Albany Law Review Vol. 66 (2003), p. 1146.

[27] Kofi Natambu. The Life and Work of Malcolm X (Indianapolis: Alpha Books, 2002), pp. 3-5. 

[28] Peter Lamborn Wilson. Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam (City Lights Books, 1993), p. 16.

[29] Tasneem Paghdiwala. “The Aging of the Moors.” Chicago Reader (November 15, 2007).

[30] Peter Lamborn Wilson. Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam (City Lights Books, 1993), p. 16.

[31] Paghdiwala. “The Aging of the Moors.”

[32] Wilson. Sacred Drift, p. 16.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Anouar Majid. We are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades Against Muslims and Other Minorities (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. 80.

[35] Manning Marable. Malcom X: A Life of Reinvention (Viking: 2011), p. 83.

[36] Ibid., p. 83.

[37] Ibid., p. 84.

[38] Anouar Majid. We are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades Against Muslims and Other Minorities (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. 80.

[39] C. Eric Lincoln. The Black Muslims in America. 1st ed., (Beacon Press, Boston, 1961), p.108; and Malcolm X, p. 12.

[40] True Islam. The Book of God: An Encyclopedia of Proof that the Original Man is God (Atlanta: All in All Publishing, 1999).

[41] “Head of Cult Admits Killing,” Detroit Free Press (November 21, 1932), p. 1; Sergeant Sam Smith, “Master Fard’s Deceptions and Doctrines.”

[42] Michael Newton. Holy Homicide: An Encyclopedia of Those Who Go With Their God…And Kill! (Loompanics Unlimited, Port Townsend, Washington, 1998), p. 185.

[43] “New Human Sacrifice with a Boy as Victim is Averted by Inquiry.” Detroit Free Press (November 26, 1932), p. 1.

[44] Karl Evanzz. The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X (New Wave Books, 2011).

[45] Ibid.

[46] David Miller. The JFK Conspiracy (Writers Club Press, 2002). P. 194.

[47] Khaleel Mohammed. “Assessing English Translations of the Qur'an.” Middle East Quarterly, 12: 2 (Spring 2005). Retrieved from https://www.meforum.org/middle-east-quarterly/assessing-english-translations-of-the-quran

[48] Stuart Timmons. The Trouble with Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement (New York: Alyson Publications, 1990), p. 75-76; George Pendle. Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006) p. 150.

[49] Peter Lamborn Wilson. “Contemplation of the Unbearded - The Rubaiyyat of Awhadoddin Kermani.” Paidika, Vol.3, No.4, (1995).

[50] Knight. William S. Burroughs vs. The Qur’an, pp. 76–79.

[51] Wilson. “Contemplation of the Unbearded.”

[52] Martin A. Lee, Robert Ranftel & Jeff Cohen “Did Lee Harvey Oswald Drop Acid?” Rolling Stone Magazine (March 1983).

[53] Adam Gorightly. The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How he Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture (New York: ParaView Press, 2003).

[54] Adler. Drawing Down the Moon.

[55] Gorightly. The Prankster and the Conspiracy.

[56] Ibid., p. 136.

[57] Andrew W. Griffin. “BOOK REVIEW: ‘Historia Discordia’ by Adam Gorightly. Red Dirt Report (August 6, 2014).

[58] Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon, p. 335.

[59] Knight. William S. Burroughs vs. The Qur’an, pp. 11-78.

Divide & Conquer