Zia Inayat-Khan

 9 September 2013

Toward the One

Dear Companions on the Path,

May these lines find you well.

Following a summer of travels, I have just returned with my family to the Abode of the Message. It is good to be back.

Somewhere between East, West, heaven and earth lies Turkey. Wherever we have turned here—in Istanbul, in Haci Bektash, in Cappadocia, in Konya—we have found the face of the Friend. As we prepare to leave tomorrow, our hearts are full of thanks for the kindness of our gracious hosts: Dr. Mehmet and Zehra Muge Kasim, Mehmet Soran, Fazal Mai, Hadiye, Nurunnahar, Gozem, Aysen, and Sheikh Celaleddin and Maylee Loras.

Yesterday was the Urs (anniversary of a Sufi master’s passing), and tomorrow is the birthday, of my father, Pir Vilayat Inayat-Khan (1916-2004). Among the many things for which he is remembered is his passionate love of sacred music.

On the misty morning of June 8th at the Abode of the Message, the Shama class of the Suluk
Academy celebrated its graduation.

As their project, the class cleared and marked an enchanting woodland trail, known as Jamil Loop, leading from Chair Factory Road (past the Abode farm and pond) to the Sanctuary atop Mt. Lebanon.

We have been born into a world that is fast changing. Never have so many men and women lived upon the earth. Never have men and women taken so much from the earth. The planet is groaning under the strain of our demands. Glaciers are melting, rivers turning toxic, rubbish heaping up, species vanishing—all that we may keep up a way of life that gives us happiness. But are we really happy?

In the 1920s Sufi seekers used to gather in Suresnes, France each summer for two months of sacred study, practice, prayer, and remembrance. After the Second World War the municipality appropriated the large Sufi garden to make room for urban sprawl and the Summer School moved elsewhere.

On April 6^th the Parvana class of the Suluk Academy celebrated its graduation at Fazal Manzil in Suresnes. The members of the class hail from France, England, Ireland, Scotland, Holland, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, Lithuania, and Spain.

In India in the 1950s my father collected a large stack of old Sufi books in the form of lithographs and manuscripts. These books were mostly the works of saints of the lineage to which my father’s father belonged, and most of them have not been published since the nineteenth century. Among the authors represented were (by attribution) Khwaja Mu‘inuddin Chishti, the founder of the Chishti Order in India; Dara Shikuh, a Mughal crown prince and Qadiri Sufi; and Shah Kalimullah Jahanabadi, a major systematizer of Chishti teachings, and founder of the Kalimi line of the Chishti Order.