Into His Lord's Mercy: Remembering Martin Lings (January 24, 1909-May 12, 2005) (Obituary‪)‬

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. We shared certain dimensions of our spiritual quests at that time and, in our own ways, yearned for certitude and sought guidance. By that summer, Siraj had almost made his choice; his veritable search had led him to the small group which was then being led by Schuon, and Martin Lings was perhaps the closest person to Schuon.