PIR-o-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN, founder of the Sufi Order in the West, was born in Baroda, India, on July 5, 1882, into a Muslim family of great musicians yet he also was much influenced by Hinduism. His grandfather, the central figure in the extended household of three generations, was Maula Bakhsh, a musician of wide repute who was known as the "Beethoven of India" and was respected as a composer, performer, and developer of a musical annotation which combined a group of diverse musical languages into one simplified integrated notation.
The Sufi Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan
Introduction
The house in which young Inayat grew up was a crossroads for visiting poets, composers, mystics, and thinkers. There they met and discussed their views (religious and otherwise) in an environment of openness and mutual understanding. This produced in the young man a sympathy for many different religions, and a strong feeling of the "oneness" of all faiths and creeds.
As a child, Inayat learned to play the veena and paid visits to holy men. In his mid teens he began to teach at the Academy of Music in Baroda and soon become a professor. His interest was to educate people about the rich musical culture of India and to encourage an understanding that traditional Indian music was not just Hindu or Muslim but a synthesis of both cultures.
By his twentieth birthday Inayat was playing the veena, an Indian stringed instrument, for the court gatherings of rajahs and maharajahs throughout India. The great patron of music, the Nizam of Hyderabad, responded to Inayat Khan's singing by awarding him the greatest musical title in India: Tansen of India.
Inayat Khan, having fulfilled his purpose in music and feeling a deeper call began to look for a spiritual teacher. He had seen the face of a very spiritual bearded man off and on in his dreams for some time. One day in Hyderabad, he had a premonition that something important was about to occur. A short time later, the man he had seen in his dreams entered the room. Both teacher and disciple were immediately drawn to each other.
This man was Hazrat Abu Hashim Madani, the successor to one of the branches of the Chisti Sufi Order in India. After taking the sacred vow of initiation, he went through a course of training for four years, in the four Sufi Schools: Chishti, Naqshbandi, Qadiri, and Shurawardi. Before Abu Hashim Madani died, he called his pupil Inayat Khan to his bedside: "Fare forth into the world, my child, and harmonize the East and the West with the harmony of thy music. Spread the wisdom of Sufism abroad, for to this end art thou gifted by Allah, the most merciful and compassionate." With this blessing he enjoined Inayat Khan to bring the message of Sufism to the West. "Following my decision and the call of God, I left India in 1910 to sojourn in the Western world, strong in the courage of the most blissful command I had received from my Murshid and in the glory of the noble object he had awakened in my soul."
Leaving for America September 13, 1910, with his cousin and brothers, Inayat played traditional Indian music to accompany the performances of famous "Oriental dancers," like Mata Hari and Ruth St. Denis, in both the United States and in Europe, all the while teaching of the Sufi path and gaining disciples. He traveled widely between 1910 and 1920. He decided to do more intensive teaching during the summer in France, and took up residence there near Paris in Suresnes where he could hold his "summer schools". Inayat Khan devoted the last third of his life to traveling throughout Europe and the United States, lecturing, delivering radio addresses, and teaching those who sought him out.
The Sufi Message does not call a person away from a belief or church; it calls one to live it. Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
In his sixteen years in the West, Inayat Khan, called Hazrat (an honorific title) by his students, brought the teachings and practices of Sufism into the lives of thousands of westerners. He inspired and directed the organization of an international Sufi movement and the inception of Sufi communities in many cities in western Europe and the United States, some of which have endured to this day. His teachings, gathered in the volumes of The Sufi Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan, originally published as 12 volumes - is the collected lectures he held in Europe and the United States - his disciples recorded them as systematically as possible, Murshid Inayat Khan personally wrote very little but the core of his Sufi Message writen by his own hand is the 'Gayan, Vadan, Nirtan - the Dance of the Soul'. Taken as a whole the Message offers a rich and complex, mystically based vision of human nature and human becoming.
Hazrat Inayat Khan as a Sufi teacher started "The Sufi Order in the West" (now called the Sufi Order International) in the early part of the 20th century.
His teaching strongly emphasized the fundamental oneness of all religions pointing to the ontological roots of all religious scriptures in the being of the Divine Reality which is best studied through the Living Manuscript of Nature.
It was at Suresnes, outside of Paris, France that Inayat developed the Universal Worship service that is now associated with the "Sufi Order in the West". The service consists of an invocation, a reading from each of the holy books of the world's major religions, and the lighting of a candle for each tradition. A candle is also lit for all those individuals or religious systems (unknown or forgotten) that have inspired mankind. The service continues with a sermon from one of the Cherags (ministers), and ends with a blessing.
Inayat said that he traveled a great deal not only to introduce people to the teachings but also to "tune the inner spheres of a country" to a "higher pitch of vibration". His disciple Sirkan Von Stolk talks about these vibrations during his meditation with Inayat:
At those moments he attuned and raised my consciousness to such a high degree that I could hardly stand it. The rate of vibration- that is the only way I can describe it - was so fantastic that it was almost too powerful for me, and I longed to return to the limited security of my own personality where I could I go on living at my own rhythm!
(Memories of g Sufi Sage, Hazrat Inayat Khan. by Sikar Van Stok with Daphne Dunlop, East-West Publications Fonds B.V., The Hague, 1967, p.40)
In later life, Inayat went through a three stage set of realizations which had such a profound effect on him as to make him "almost unrecognizable" to those who knew him. Inayat claimed that while his consciousness was far removed from the body, he was obliged to pass through the different states of awareness that all human beings pass through in their development. The experience was analogous to Dante's experience of hell, purgatory, and heaven which concludes in the Beatific Vision of God.
Part of this initiation consisted of an experience of Hell. Hell is a place that the living visit in dreams, and the dead experience when their consciousness lives on to reap the results of their negative actions in life. Inayat's view was that hell in the afterlife is comparable to dreaming but much more intense.
The next vision was an experience of purgatory where souls suffer in an effort to move beyond their attachments and limitations. This act of purification requires a great effort of will.
The third vision was a stage of bliss where the human element was purified and purged to the point of illumination. Von Stalk describes Inayat as "cosmic" and as a being "now given up to service as a superb channel for the divine" following this final experience.
Inayat had been a tireless teacher, writer, and lecturer traveling and lecturing almost continuously for 16 years. He had established his school in France, and a dedicated group of disciples. But, his difficult schedule had weakened him over the years. He left for India to see his homeland for the first time in seventeen years. He hoped to rest and meditate but was asked to lecture and graciously consented as was common. He died in New Delhi in 1927 of influenza.
The "dances of universal peace" originally developed by Samuel Lewis - an American disciple of Inayat Khan's from California - as Sufi Dances in conjunction with the Sufi Order are known throughout the world as a spiritual practice mixing meditation, song, and dance.
His message transcends the objective of most esoteric schools, which is the awakening of the individual. Hazrat Inayat Khan calls it, the awakening of the consciousness of humanity to the divinity in man/woman, our inheritance of the divine perfection.
I have combined this information from several different websites and trust that my fellow webmasters will forgive my borrowings in order that some introduction might be offered here. As I have time, I will develop a wholly original introduction that connects Inayat Khan to the cultural milieu of the 19teens and 19twenties in Europe.
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