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Charles Upton, 73, is an American Sufi Muslim, author of 16 books on metaphysics and spirituality—including works of spiritual psychology, metaphysical exegesis of mythopoesis, and “metaphysics and social criticism”—4 of poetry, and 3 on Islam. A protégé of Beat Generation poet Lew Welch, his first books of poetry were Panic Grass, published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in his City Lights Pocket Poets Series, and Time Raid, published by Don’s Allen’s Four Seasons Foundation is his “Writing” series. He was raised Catholic in an essentially pre-Vatican II Church, participated in the “spiritual revolution” and peace movements of the 1960’s and 70’s, and the Sanctuary Movement for Central American refugees in the 1980’s, later becoming associated with the Traditionalist/Perennialist School of comparative religion and metaphysics founded by René Guénon and then headed by Frithjof Schuon. In 1988 he converted to Islam and was received into the Nimatullahi Sufi Order under Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh; in the same year he published Doorkeeper of the Heart: Versions of Rabi’a through Threshold Books. in 2010, after Nurbakhsh’s death, he maintained his connection with Sufism by taking ba’yat with a lesser-known silsila of the ‘Alawiyya Tariqa. In 2011 he published The Wars of Love and Other Poems through Sophia Perennis Publications. In 2013 he conceived the Covenants Initiative, based on the groundbreaking work The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of the World by John Andrew Morrow, which has since become an international peace movement in the Muslim world; he is presently Executive Director of the Covenants of the Prophet Foundation. In 2016 he published What Poets Used to Know, his book on poetics, also through Sophia Perennis.
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