At 11:35 pm on the 5th of July, 1882, in an upstairs room of the large house of Maula Bakhsh in the city of Baroda, in the state of Gujarat in western India, a baby boy was born. At that moment, the aunt of the infant, Inayat Bibi, was on her deathbed, dying for her ideal, and when she heard of the birth, she said, “He is born with the ideal for which I am dying, and my only satisfaction in the hour of my death will be that this child should be called by my name, Inayat.”* Thus was Inayat Khan born and named.

In every sense his was a remarkable life. He grew to become a musician of prodigious talent, sought by princes and honoured in the highest courts of the land. Then later he sailed to the west, where, as a virtually penniless dervish he spent sixteen years in almost constant travel across North America and Europe, teaching the wisdom of Sufism and the universal message of love, harmony and beauty. He touched–and long after his passing continues to touch–countless lives around the world.

Today would be a good day to smile, to give thanks, and to do our best to bring a smile to the lips of others.

In the early 1920’s, students would gather at the family home in Suresnes, France, to celebrate the birthday of their Murshid. One lady customarily drove from Switzerland with a car filled with yellow roses for the event. If we have felt any benefit from our contact with his spirit, today would be a good day to smile, give thanks, and do our best to bring a smile to the lips of others.

Here is a brief but very revealing anecdote from the childhood of Inayat. The date is not recorded, but it perhaps occurred when he was about eleven years old:

One day Inayat was praying on the roof of the house, offering his prayers, and he thought to himself that there had not been an answer yet to all the prayers he had offered to God, and he did not know where God was to hear his prayers, and he could not reconcile himself to going on praying to the God whom he knew not. He went fearlessly to his father, and said: “I do not think I will continue my prayers any longer, for it does not fit with my reason. I do not know how I could go on praying to a God I do not know.”

His father, taken aback, did not become cross lest he might turn Inayat\s beliefs sour by forcing them upon him without satisfying his reason, and he was glad on the other hand to see that, although it was irreverent on the child’s part, yet it was frank, and he knew that the lad had really hungered after Truth, and was ready to learn now what many could not learn in their whole life. He said to him: “God is in you, and you are in God. As the bubble is in the ocean and the bubble is a part of the ocean, and yet not separate from the ocean. For a moment it has appeared as a bubble; then it will return to that from which it has risen. So is the relation between man and God. The Prophet has said that God is closer to you than the jugular vein, which in reality means that your own body is farther from you than God is. If this is rightly interpreted, it will mean that God is the very depth of your own being.”

This moment to Inayat was his very great initiation, as if a switch had turned in him, and from that moment onward, for his whole life Inayat busied himself and his whole being became engaged in witnessing in life what he knew and believed, by this one great Truth. It was like a word that was lost and he found it again.

*Inayat means the intention to care, and therefore favour or gift; in Sufism, it refers to Divine grace. It may be used by women or men.