Into His Lord’s Mercy: Remembering Martin Lings
My letter had remained unanswered, but a few days before my departure for Iran, I received a message through a friend that Martin Lings would soon contact me. I had wanted to stop over in England to see him. We had never met, but he had been a constant presence in my life since the early 1970s, when he and a handful of other Westerners who had formed a close-knit group around Rene Guenon (Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahid Yahya, 1886-1951) first entered my spiritual and emotional life. That first encounter, which had taken place in a literary setting through the works of Muhammad Hasan Askari (d. 1978), one of Pakistan's most insightful men of letters, was to take a totally different dimension on a hot summer day when my friend Siraj Munir (1951-1990) first talked about joining a Shadhili Sufi order of which Sidi Ab Bakr Sirj ad-Dn (Martin Lings) was a member. We had struck a deep friendship as soon as we met, but it was not until that hot summer day that I came to know of a new dimension of Siraj's life in which Rene Guenon, Frithjof Schuon (Shaykh 'Isa Nur ad-Din Ahmad, 1907-1998), and Martin Lings (1909-2005) were playing a major role.
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Muzaffar Iqbal
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