Letters from a sufi teacher is a small but remarkably concentrated manual of Islamic mysticism from the 14th century, preserved and translated into English in 1908 by Baijnath Singh for the Theosophical Publishing Society.
Its author, Shaikh Sharfuddîn Manerî (Makhdûm-ul-Mulk), was a renowned Sufi master from Bihar in northern India. He lived a life of study, retreat in forests and mountains, and guidance of disciples, and his tomb in Bihar Sharif is still a place of pilgrimage.
The book you have here is not a theoretical treatise. It is a selection of letters – short, sharp essays – written to his disciples and arranged as a practical guide to the path.
Structure of Letters from a Sufi Teacher
The English edition draws “copious extracts” from Manerî’s Maktūbāt-i-Sadī (“The Hundred Letters”), supplemented where needed from two shorter collections of letters, in order to cover the essential principles of the Sufi path.
The table of contents alone reads like a compact syllabus of esoteric Islam. Among the topics:
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On monotheism (tawḥīd)
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Turning to God or conversion (taubāh)
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On seeking the teacher
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On the qualifications of a teacher
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On discipleship (and discipleship continued)
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The friend of God (walī) and the brotherhood of friends
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Lights and unveiling of the supersensuous
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Illumination and dreams
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The origin of theosophy
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Seeking the path and the pillars of the path
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Purification, motives and prayer
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The sacred formula and “the naked faith”
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Love and devotion
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The steps of a disciple
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Contemplation, renunciation and self-control
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The soul (rūḥ), the heart and the desire-nature (nafs)
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The discipline and “alienation” from the desire-nature libraryofagartha.com
Each chapter is only a few pages, but the density of technical Sufi psychology and practice makes this more like a manual to be read slowly and repeatedly than a devotional booklet to be skimmed.
Monotheism as lived experience
The opening letter, “On Monotheism (Tauhîd)”, sets the tone for the whole work. Manerî distinguishes four stages of monotheism:
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Merely repeating “There is no God but God” with the tongue – hypocrisy, of no use at all.
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Repeating the formula with intellectual conviction – enough to escape “gross polytheism,” but still a low and unstable stage.
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A light that shines in the heart so that one sees God as the sole agent behind all phenomena, while still perceiving creator and creation as distinct.
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A further intensification of this light that so overwhelms perception that all separate existences become invisible in the “overpowering glare of the sun” – without actually ceasing to exist or becoming God.
Beyond these four, he hints at a fifth, wordless state: complete absorption where even the consciousness of “being absorbed” and of “seeking God” drops away.
For a modern reader, this first chapter already offers a very precise phenomenology of nondual states, with a strong warning: many seekers “lose their balance” in the forest of these experiences and need the guidance of a “perfect, open-eyed teacher.”
Teacher, disciple and the hazards of the path
Several letters deal with the necessity of a guide. Manerî stresses that after genuine repentance (taubāh), the seeker must find a teacher “versed in the elevations and depressions of the Path, its joys and sorrows, and the internal ailments of a disciple and their remedies.”
Without such a guide:
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The path is like travelling to the Ka‘ba without a guide – even though the road is visible, one is still likely to get lost.
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On the unseen path there are “robbers” in the form of the world, the desire-nature and subtle entities.
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Many intelligent seekers, walking alone, fall into heretical by-paths when they mistake partial experiences for the goal.
For readers used to self-guided modern meditation or entheogenic experimentation, this insistence on transmission and supervision will feel refreshingly – or provocatively – different.
The desire-nature and inner alchemy
One of the most striking sections is the cluster of letters on nafs, the desire-nature, and its discipline:
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He distinguishes the soul (rūḥ), the heart, and the desire-nature.
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He describes the gradual “alienation from the desire-nature” as the real conversion: not just giving up obvious sins, but having one’s qualities transmuted.
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True faith (īmān), he says, is only realised after this inner turning; before that it is “conventional and nominal.”
There is a strong sense of alchemical psychology here: the raw ore of desire is not simply suppressed but worked on, transmuted and clarified. Download the book here:
