Fitzroy Morrissey at Literary Review:
Shortly before his death in 1974, R C Zaehner, Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford, observed that young Westerners who had turned away from Christianity were more often drawn to the religions of India and the Far East than to Islam. ‘The young’, the devoutly Catholic Zaehner stated, ‘are not interested in switching from one dogmatic monotheistic faith to another: hence they are little interested in Islam except when Islam itself is turned upside down and becomes Sufism, which in its developed form is barely distinguishable from Vedanta.’ ‘Indeed,’ he went on, ‘that egregious populariser Idries Shah has gone so far as to claim Zen as a manifestation of Sufism.’ This, Zaehner declared, was historical ‘nonsense’ and academically ‘detestable’.
Zaehner was referring to Shah’s The Sufis, which, since its publication in 1964, had become the most widely read book on Sufism in English. Helped by an introduction by the poet Robert Graves, The Sufis had met with critical acclaim. Writing in The Listener, the weekly magazine of the BBC, Ted Hughes described the book as ‘astonishing’, while, in The Spectator, Doris Lessing wrote that she couldn’t remember being more provoked or stimulated.
more here.