Announcing: A Sufi Went to War
The Shamcher Bulletin normally brings you snippets from Shamcher’s writings that might help frame and context our experience of the world we live in today. This issue is a little different.
Today mainly features the paperback release of Shamcher’s unpublished manuscript, A Sufi Went to War, also known as The Plot to Kidnap Hitler.
Interrupt
From a Talk to Transpersonal Psychologists in California in 1977
Describing a discussion with a Sufi from the East
And so he said, "Shamcher, I am not so very interested in the history. I just want to know what was the relationship between you, Shamcher, and your teacher, Inayat Khan." That's a very good point, that's the real essence of Sufism: what is the relationship between the mureed and the teacher. And I understood what he was aiming at, so I said, "You are touching a very critical point. I know that in Egypt and in the Middle East, the relationship between a pupil, a mureed, and a teacher, is a very devoted one. The mureed forgets everything in the contemplation of and in the memory of his teacher. He does everything the teacher says without a question. In the west, we don't exactly have that kind of attitude. There are a few that can do it; I could never do that. But Inayat Khan was gracious enough to accept us as we were.”
In the same talk
…in the first place I want to stop here and say: don't listen and think that you mustn't interrupt. Interrupt anytime you have a question. If you break off my thought, so much the better. I want to have continual change and exchange. I try to see what you like to hear, but I may see very wrongly. Even I am not perfect yet.
So Inayat Khan had a son, Vilayat, his eldest son. And he has a younger son, Hidayat. He had a daughter, Noor, and another daughter, Claire. Noor became almost a saint in France because she was wiring messages to the London headquarters from France, was captured by the Gestapo and beaten to death in jail. Vilayat also took part in the war, in fact, his father asked him before he died, "What will you do, Vilayat, if France goes to war?" "Well," said Vilayat, "I will look at it, and if it is a just war, I'll take part." "Son," said Inayat Khan, "You eat the food of France, you will fight the wars of France."
So when WW2 broke out he took part and so did I. And Ali Khan who had taken over the leadership, waiting for Vilayat to be of age, said to me, "Oh you can't use Vilayat you know, he is mixed in politics." "What do you mean by that?" "Well, he took part in WW2."
Intro to the book
Here’s a bit from the book introduction, outlining the chapters. You may recognize a few sections that have already been featured here in the Shamcher Bulletin.
In the first chapter, Mein Kaiser, Mein Kaiser, Shamcher introduces the obedience to a hierarchical regime that gave rise to Hitler and WWII. His childhood contact with the Kaiser while aboard ship in Norway stayed with him, setting the stage for what was to follow, while revealing the German goals and methods to his nine-year-old mind. In the next chapter, Geopolitik, he shares later experiences with German bosses in Borneo, along with an account of adventures in Dayakland—including an out-of-body event. That time in Borneo introduced him to a German who would prove helpful to him in his wartime exploits. The 1930s found Shamcher in Berlin, running a successful translation business that was soon to be infiltrated by German government-appointed “associates.”
Throughout the time leading up to the war, Shamcher criss-crossed the globe. In Chapter 3, Oceano to Elverum, he reveals the shift into war. From pro-Nazi Hollywood stars in New York and Los Angeles to Gavin Arthur’s Hill House in Oceano, intimations of the need to fight for Norway soon plunged Shamcher from a cold war into a hot one. He sailed back to Norway via the Panama Canal, and joined the Norwegian underground for the Battle of Elverum.
His war experience had begun. The book now expands on specific aspects of his wartime, on land, sea and air, including spycraft at the highest level.
The fourth chapter, The Huldre, intersperses a mythic realm of old Norse folklore into the action, as Shamcher ski-guides British MI-5 friends to safety in Sweden. This chapter is followed by three sections in which he is followed and interrogated by the Gestapo: The Phantom Sub occurs on a Finnish ship, A Veritable Navy Goat turns the tables during Gestapo interrogations, and Stale Beer follows more such encounters.
In The Finn, A Cunning Man is He, Shamcher describes working in the Norwegian Underground, as well as travel from Sweden to Helsinki to New York. Central to the book is an outline of one of his most intense plans: To Kidnap a Head of State. In conjunction with German generals and various Allied espionage units, this plan was tragically stalled and then stopped at the top, by US President Roosevelt. Here Shamcher laments the loss of a plan that would have saved the lives of so many who were killed as the war was allowed to continue to rage on.
The Littlest Things looks back from San Francisco to Norway and accounts the exploits of Tronstad and sabotage of the transport of heavy water from Norway to German atom bomb research.
In Over the Hill and Into the Fire, he moves from a desk in the Army to flight in the RAF, stealing supplies behind enemy lines and turning the tables once more on would-be captors. His tongue-in-cheek happy chapter, A Welcome turned Terror, is a lighthearted account of the liberation of Brussels, starkly followed by Gore, outlining the realities of German torture, as experienced by Count Stauffenberg, an anti-Nazi German. Torture was the real threat he faced as a spy every day. In Spies are Beautiful, he hails spies as great heroes of wartime, and outlines espionage, spy capture, rumours of his CIA connections.
With I Conquer Bardenberg the war comes close to the end, and here, with American GIs, while still in his RAF uniform, Shamcher fights on foot beside sympathetic German farmers to rout the last of the Nazis in Bardenberg. Air battle is described in Nothing Ever Happens Up There, flying with American B-24s over Germany.
Yet at the end of this war, intimations of a new war on its way. Shamcher went on a clandestine mission to Russia from Kirkenes in Norway, the closest town to the Russian border. In Chapter 17, this combined Russo-Norwegian effort revealed to him a new Russian effort toward That Coming War.
A dangerously misunderstood local hero is saved in I Shall Call Him Finn, when Shamcher and a head of the Underground find a way to release a Norwegian home front volunteer from overzealous post-war citizens.
Chapter 19 is titled Idiot’s Delight. Despite being called an idiot, Shamcher is appointed by Norway’s Prime Minister to participate in the post-war economic rebuilding plan. Peace Strikes shows him finding his way in a post-war world. From LA to NY to Spain to NY to Oslo, from hitch-hiker to squatter in the Stortinget building of the Norwegian Congress, he finally settled in a New York brownstone, to begin a new life as an American.
As Shamcher recalled:
After one of Sufi Inayat’s talks, a listener asked, “Should a Sufi be a pacifist?”
Said Inayat, “If people of goodwill lay down their arms today, they will be forced into war, forced to fight—not for their ideals but against them.”
Two of his children shortly afterwards distinguished themselves in World War II. I went over the hill to serve, though pacifists screamed at me.
(Note: Here Shamcher refers to both Vilayat and Noor, whose wartime efforts were openly known. He doesn’t mention the lesser-known wartime work of Hidayat, who also served in the war, behind the lines partisan in the South of France, hiding in the hills and causing major damage. )
Now available from the Shamcher Archives, his WWII memoir, A Sufi Went to War.
In A Sufi Went to War, Shamcher Beorse outlines an extensive wartime experience that encompasses land, sea, and air.
From the Norwegian Underground, to the RAF and MI-5, Shamcher's WWII service involved tense interrogation by the Gestapo, and other close calls. With British Intelligence and escaped German officers, he participated in the detailed plans for kidnapping Hitler.
As a Sufi, Shamcher faced it all head on. He threw himself fully and wholeheartedly into the cause, whatever the risks may have been, following and relying upon his intuition and love of humanity to help create a better world for the future.
Available now from Amazon
ISBN: 978-0978348595
Page Count: 218
Trade Paperback: 6 x 9
List Price: $20
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I added this for the record, - Note: Here Shamcher refers to both Vilayat and Noor, whose wartime efforts were openly known. He doesn’t mention the lesser-known wartime work of Hidayat, who also served in the war, behind the lines partisan in the South of France, hiding in the hills and causing major damage.
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