Gurdjieff on Islam and the Original Revelation of Jesus Christ

Among the many religious and metaphysical systems surveyed in Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, Gurdjieff’s treatment of Islam—or as he calls it, the Mohammedan religion—is uniquely double-edged. It reveals both deep respect for its moral and practical genius, and yet a profound lament over its eventual distortion and mechanization.

For Gurdjieff, Islam arises as a fourth great religion—an echo of divine revelation refracted through the consciousness of the “full-of-hope Saint Mohammed”—which might have become a “hearth of hope and reconciliation” had it not been, like every other great revelation before it, adulterated by human egoism and the Hasnamussian tendency of the “power-possessing beings” (p. 704).

Gurdjieff’s Appreciation of Mohammed and the Early Islamic Teaching

Gurdjieff never dismisses Islam as a false revelation. On the contrary, he refers to its founder as “Saint Mohammed,” (p. 704) a title reserved in Beelzebub’s Tales for genuine initiates of divine origin. He affirms that the original teaching of Mohammed was a legitimate transmission of divine law, intended to serve as a regulative synthesis for the moral and psychological life of humankind. Mohammed, he writes, was “full of hope”—a phrase that, in Gurdjieff’s cosmological idiom, denotes a being who labored consciously for the collective evolution of mankind.

He even admits that, had the teaching remained pure, it “might perhaps have become a hearth of hope and reconciliation” among the nations. In Gurdjieff’s cosmic anthropology, each religion is given to humanity to actualize certain harmonizing functions in the planetary scale of energies. Islam’s original function was integrative—to weld divided human collectivities into a single order under divine law. In this, Mohammed was continuing the same evolutionary labor inaugurated by Moses and consummated by Jesus: the stabilization of man’s inner and outer life by conscious obedience to divine command.

The Corruption and Degeneration of Islam

Yet this hope was, as always, betrayed. Gurdjieff describes how the early followers of Islam “stirred this also into a hotchpotch,” mixing the purity of Mohammed’s revelation with the “fantastic theory of the Babylonian dualists” and the imaginings of the “Sheiks-Islamists” who embellished the religion with “blessings of the notorious paradise” that even “the Archcherub Helkgematios” could not have conceived (p. 704-705).

In this ironic humor, Gurdjieff exposes a serious metaphysical diagnosis: the mechanization of the esoteric into the exoteric. When divine truths are translated into literalist images—gardens, sensual delights, and material paradises—they cease to function as inner symbols of transformation. The “paradise” of the prophets becomes the opium of the people.

Moreover, the early schism into Sunnite and Shiite schools becomes for Gurdjieff a tragic parable of humanity’s incapacity to sustain unity of aim. The “psychic hatred” between these groups is said to have “transformed completely into an organic hate,” a collective disease later exploited by “European communities” to ensure that “they should never unite”(pp. 705–706).

Gurdjieff thus interprets Islamic division as part of the cosmic tragedy of man’s suggestibility—the ease with which sacred revelation devolves into factionalism, political manipulation, and reciprocal destruction.

The Destruction of the Dervish Tradition

Gurdjieff’s most poignant commentary concerns the closing of the dervish monasteries in early twentieth-century Turkey, which he identifies as the final extinguishing of the last “dying sparks” of true Islam. The dervishes, he says, had “taken in the teaching of this religion in its primary form very well” and transmitted it unchanged “from generation to generation.” In them alone there remained “a faint hope that… this teaching would infallibly regenerate and actualize those aims for which it was created by the full-of-hope Saint Mohammed” (pp. 710–711).

In this, Gurdjieff’s sympathy is unmistakable. The dervish path represented for him the living esoteric core of Islam—its capacity for conscious work, spiritual discipline, and inner transformation. Their destruction under Turkish secular reforms was, in his eyes, the same civilizational catastrophe that befell Russia under Westernization: the atrophy of Martaadamlik (religious feeling) and Nammuslik (patriarchal feeling)—those psychic organs that once grounded moral and spiritual life (pp. 711–712).

Thus, when he declares that “exactly the same will be repeated with the beings of Turkey as occurred to the beings of Russia,” (pp. 712) he is warning that imitation of Europe—its materialism and mechanized democracy—would destroy the last vestiges of man’s inner conscience. The tragedy of Islam, then, is not its falsity but its deformation: a once-living path turned into political form, a revelation of divine unity reduced to a means of worldly governance.

The Mohammedan Religion as a Mechanized Simplification

Later in Beelzebub’s Tales, Gurdjieff elaborates more systematically the metaphysical relation between Islam and Christianity. He calls Islam “the second great religion founded upon bits-here-and-bits-there from the teaching of the full-of-hope Saint Mohammed,” and observes that it was “particularly applied and used for egoistic and political aims by beings with Hasnamussian properties”.

The term Hasnamussian—one of Gurdjieff’s most severe designations—refers to beings crystallized in egoistic self-love and self-assertion, who pervert sacred knowledge into instruments of power. The “Hasnamussian properties” of the political rulers of Islam explain why, even though the teaching was divine in origin, it became the “most stripped of all”(pp. 709-710).

Nevertheless, he acknowledges that the religion’s social customs—sooniat (circumcision), abdest (ablution), and polygamy—had legitimate hygienic, psychological, and moral purposes. These customs, he says, were established so that “the everyday life of the followers of this new teaching—who had lost the capacity for contemplation—might at least mechanically flow more or less tolerably” (pp. 1010–1011).

Here is the essence of Gurdjieff’s appraisal: Islam is a mechanical religion of right practice, not of conscious knowledge. It represents a compassionate adaptation to a humanity whose inner faculties were already degenerating. Where the original Christian revelation demanded conscious participation in divine Being, Islam instituted disciplines of external law and bodily purity to preserve at least the outer form of spiritual order.

The Mohammedan and the Doctor: Gurdjieff’s Ethical Anthropology

In one of Beelzebub’s Tales’ most memorable dialogues (pp. 989–1001), a young Persian Mohammedan contrasts the moral life of his people with the decadence of modern Europe. He praises the polygamous customs of Persia as ensuring honesty and chastity, whereas European monogamy is riddled with adultery, hypocrisy, and prostitution. He attributes his immunity to venereal disease to the Mohammedan practice of abdest, ablution after bodily functions, which he exalts as “a beneficial custom” and a protection of health.

Beelzebub (speaking as the “Doctor”) responds not by ridiculing the Mohammedan but by elevating the discussion: he explains that Christianity, in its original form, contained even more good customs for both soul and body, but that these were lost or distorted by the “elders of the church.” Christianity, he says, was the most complete synthesis of all previous revelations, for in it “provision was made… both for the soul and for the body; and it even provided all the necessary regulations for a peaceful and happy existence”.

Islam, he continues, arose later, when humanity had lost the “capacity for contemplation” (p. 1010)—that is, the higher function of understanding divine truths consciously. Hence, Mohammed’s teaching had to be simplified and materialized so that its followers could “mechanically” live rightly, even if they could no longer consciously know the inner meaning of revelation.

This distinction is crucial. Christianity—specifically the original teaching of Christ—was intended for conscious transformation: the rebirth of divine humanity through active participation in divine Being (metanoia). Islam, by contrast, served as a merciful regression—a provisional order of external law for those no longer capable of conscious participation.

Thus, even in his critique, Gurdjieff does not condemn Islam but situates it as a later, adaptive stage in humanity’s spiritual decline.

Why the Original Teaching of Jesus Christ is the Best of all Religions

Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub declares unambiguously: “If only the teaching of the Divine Jesus Christ were carried out in full conformity with its original, then the religion unprecedently wisely founded on it would not only be the best of all existing religions, but even of all religions which may arise and exist in the future.” (p. 1009)

The superiority of Christ’s revelation lies not in its external dogmas or rituals, but in its total anthropology. It integrates the soul and the body, the moral and the cosmic, the temporal and the eternal. In the Christian mystery, divine incarnation restores the essential tri-unity of Being—consciousness, feeling, and body—in man himself. This is the “Trinitarian” mystery that Gurdjieff repeatedly insists is at the heart of his own teaching.

In Christ, divine revelation ceases to be a doctrine and becomes a Being-event—an ontological transmission. The Christian way demands inner transformation through conscious suffering and active love, not mere mechanical obedience. In this sense, it is esoterically identical with what Gurdjieff calls the “Fourth Way”: the way of inner work in ordinary life, through which man may awaken his soul while living amidst the world’s distractions.

Islam, for Gurdjieff, preserved many ancient hygienic and moral customs but lacked this ontological key. Its rites produced right behavior, but not the birth of conscience. The outer washing of the body could not substitute for the inner purification of the heart. Its law bound men to external order; Christ’s teaching sought to reconstitute the divine order within man himself.

From the Law to the Logos

In the final analysis, Gurdjieff’s view of Islam is profoundly tragic yet respectful. He saw in Mohammed’s teaching a sincere and noble attempt to preserve human order amidst the decline of consciousness—a divine concession to the needs of the age. Yet the “full-of-hope” saint’s vision was swallowed by the Hasnamussian forces of power and imitation.

Christianity, in its true essence—not the religion of the Church but the teaching of the Divine Logos incarnate—alone possesses the regenerative key to human transformation. It unites the external law of the Old Covenant and the bodily discipline later codified in Islam within the deeper mystery of the inner resurrection. For this reason, the teaching of Jesus Christ stands, in Gurdjieff’s cosmology, not as one religion among others, but as the archetype of all—its esoteric core being the restoration of divine consciousness within man.

Islam is thus honored as a later echo of revelation, preserving outer hygiene and social equilibrium where inner understanding was lost. Christianity, however, is the revelation of Being itself: theosis, the divine-human union that transforms not only the body and conduct but the very substance of consciousness.

In that sense, to recover the original Christianity is to fulfill—not deny—the hope of Mohammed. For both aimed at the same end: the restoration of right order under God. But only Christ revealed the path of conscious participation in that order, the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6) through which man may become once again a bearer of divine Being.