A hundred years ago, in the course of a meeting in which Hazrat Inayat Khan was training students to help spread the Sufi work, a mureed asked a question – or more accurately, made a declaration. The student said he (or she – the gender is not recorded) thought it was all very beautiful, and that the connection with Murshid and the Movement gave a great feeling of comfort – but….

The declaration that followed was that, notwithstanding all the beauties of Sufism, this person was very busy, and could not bring themself to say the prayers. ‘Words that have been invented, even by Murshid’ weren’t acceptable; ‘it’ must come from the heart, this person said, and not in a definite form.

Perhaps this statement gave Hazrat Inayat some feeling of disappointment, but he was far too courteous to say so. Instead, his brief reply followed two lines, the nature and purpose of prayer, and the feelings of this particular mureed.

Prayer, he said, does not mean thought or feeling or imagination. A prayer, he explained, is words spoken in praise of the Lord. And as other posts in the Inner Call (here and here, among others) have noted, this is not because the Lord needs our prayers, far from it. Our prayers can never exalt or enrich the One Being, but they certainly can exalt and enrich us, so long as we really keep our attention on the Lord; that is their purpose. As our Murshid explains, ‘the words that you say are recorded on your spirit,’ and go on working in the depth of your mind continually. ‘Therefore,’ he concludes, ‘the power of the prayer that is said is great.’

Of course, feeling certainly has a place in prayer. When the words of a prayer are enlivened by strong feeling, they become even more deeply engraved on our spirit, just as the movements of the body when the prayers are offered also give us a clearer impression. Endeavouring to pray with only feeling, though, would be ineffectively vague.

Nevertheless, in this case Pir-o-Murshid Inayat left the matter up to the person in question. If the mureed felt agitation against the prayers, he said, then the prayers should not be said. “Our contentment,” Murshid said, “is that the person is satisfied. If a patient says, ‘I am cured,’ a doctor must not give him medicine. …If he is happy without saying prayers, we do not want to make him unhappy saying prayers.”

We should be cautious, though, about giving too much significance to Murshid’s concession. He did not mean to grant that every mureed should choose their own practices – only that we must not dogmatically impose spiritual remedies upon anyone. At the beginning of the spiritual journey, it is necessary to admit that we are not as splendid as our ego might claim, and we need to address our infirmities. The Murshid may have prescribed the right medicine, but accepting it and being willing to work with it is a large part of our cure.