Hazrat Inayat Khan’s lectures on the need for world reform gave rise to questions, to which he responds here, pointing out, among other things, the inherent defects of the present system. The previous post in the series is here.

Two questions were asked to this effect: what would be the best means of effecting the social and moral progress of the world?

The first thing is to study the question and then set to work. For an instance, when one says social progress – everybody has perhaps his ideas of social progress, and if each one thinks that what he thinks is the best way of social progress, that will not be the right way, because there would be a conflict between him and others.

Therefore, our work in the Sufi Order is to study the question, to see it from all points of view and to find out the best way.

And so it is with the moral question. The standard of morals of every person is different; every person likes to live according to his principles, and if he thought that the whole world should follow his principles, then it would be difficult. Therefore one individual cannot say that this or that is the right thing, and that the whole world should follow it. But at the same time one must be considerate.

That which is called a spiritual message, a divine message, is not only a message for spiritual evolution, but the law that is given from time to time. And the prophet is to be the reformer, but something more than reformer. Where the reformer is the child of the civilization, the prophet is the father of the civilization, and whenever the prophetic message has put the divine light on the subject of world reform, the world has become much different in all ages, and the ideal conditions in the world have been brought about.

For an instance, there was a time of the Prophet Mohammed, when he came in Arabia, in Persia and in Egypt, everything there was upset; peace was only a word, it was not to be traced anywhere. There was vulgarity and perplexity in the intellectual world, and superficiality of life.  When the Prophet came it was not an academic, intellectual message he brought; it was a divine message. A person may say, “It was given in Arabia, we do not know anything about it.” But remember, its influence brought about the Reformation and the Renaissance – these were the outcome of the Prophet’s message. Therefore, when the Prophet’s message came, it spread throughout the whole world, directly or indirectly.

Then in the time of Jesus, when there was no means of spreading the message, there were a few people around the prophet, very few, and fewer still with education, mostly fishermen without any knowledge. There were not the ships and the railway trains and the conveyances which take books and people from one country to another. But at the same time it was a message that had an influence, although it was given to fishermen. The fishermen kept it intact in some form or another, and after many years St. Paul came, whose mind was intuitively capable of conceiving all that came from the fishermen, and at the same time to perceive all that was said at the time by Jesus, and the message reached to the corners of the whole world, and it is the lack of understanding when people discard it. 

For an instance, now at present there is a tendency that the opinion of the majority is the opinion worth accepting. One cannot talk about it very much, but the wise man will always find out that the opinion of the minority will supersede the opinion of the majority; he will always find the opinion of the minority having more sense than the opinion of the majority.  That shows that there are many children and very few adults in the human family. To depend upon the opinion of the majority, as is the way in the world today, always leads to destruction. But what happens is that by the pretense of the opinion of the majority ruling, it is the one person who gets the majority, it is his opinion that the majority accept, and think for the moment, “We have our opinion.” But the leader among them, he forces his opinion upon the others, and they, being not much advanced themselves, takes his opinion, and then they think that it is their own and the opinion of the majority, and therefore it must be carried out. The world-system is wrong in this way.

To be continued…