In a recent series of posts, we have seen how the young musician Inayat Khan was awakened to Sufism, and then how he came at last to meet his Murshid. With this post we begin a short memoir of his early years in the West, written while he was in England during the First World War. He was by then a husband and the father of a growing family, with a gathering group of students, and the Sufi work was beginning to take form, but the full flowering that came in the 1920’s still lay over the horizon.

The lover remains solitary among people
and mingles with them as little as water with oil.’
   – Rumi

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.

Naturally it was a great change in my existence to leave India, the most spiritually awakened land, and start for the West, and especially for America, that modern home of material progress. It was the very opposite of the dream I had just experienced. The great activity of the people and the rapidity of things in general, the rush of machinery above, below, and all around; the transitoriness of affairs; men running hither and thither for trains and cars with newspapers and parcels in their hands – all this kept me under a complete spell of silence and bewilderment.

It was as if I had gone to sleep at home and had found myself in a bazaar on awakening. But being a Sufi, I very soon became accustomed to this change of life by attuning myself to my surroundings, and I found that they were indeed true lovers of dunya*, the material world about which Rumi has written in his Masnavi.

Every race and nation has its infancy, youth, and age, as also its birth and its death. And just like every individual, it even undergoes the evolution one passes through during the different stages of life, for from a philosophical point of view all the sons of the world are like little children, and their most important affairs are of no importance than a child’s top. As a new nation, America naturally appears childish owing to its youth, although its material progress is proportionately as great as the spiritual progress of India. But America is a land of promise; in time it will rise to be an ideal child among the children of God and a leader of reform.

It was very hard for me to keep a balance between my mission and my profession, which were so different from each other. On the one hand I had to be a teacher, and on the other an artist, and especially the interpreter of an art which was so little known abroad. This could never be understood by a people accustomed only to look at the external aspect of things. It was not as in India where Kabir, the great poet, preached while he sat weaving at his loom; where Guru Nanak taught within his prison. For some of the greatest teachers the East has produced were also masters of music, such as Narada, Tumbara, Bharata Muni, Tansen, Tukaram, Surdas, Amir Khusrau, Mirabai, Avicenna**, and Farabi.

Also, being a stranger, without any influence or good introductions, which a teacher never requires in the East, it was a long time before I became acquainted with the right people. In due time, by the mercy of God, my path was opened and I came into contact with those interested in music.

*Dunya, a word in numerous languages, means the material world, as distinct from the unseen, spiritual world.

**Hazrat Inayat Khan has spread his arms very wide to include Avicenna or Ibn Sina in this group. Although his poetry and thought surely had a profound effect on the culture of India, he was of Persian descent and lived in central Asia.

To be continued…