Inayat Khan

East Indian musician and poet, one of the spiritual giants of the twentieth Century and Muslim founder of the Sufi Order of the West. He was raised in a family of musicians where the home was crossroads for visiting poets, composers, mystics, and thinkers, an environment of openness and mutual understanding. This produced in the young man a sympathy for many different religions, and a strong feeling of the "oneness" of all faiths and creeds.

He was so fine a master of classical Indian music by the age of twenty that one of the greatest patrons of music, the Nizam of Hyderabad, responded to Inayat Khan's singing by awarding him the greatest musical title in India: Tansen of India.

Having fulfilled his purpose in music, he then relinquished a brilliant career to devote himself to the spiritual path. Having a divine spiritual experience at the age of 21, he found his ideal teacher in the being of Hazrat Abu Hashim Madani, the successor to one of the branches of the Chisti Sufi Order in India. He took the sacred vow of initiation and went through a course of training in the four Sufi Schools: Chishti, Naqshbandi, Qadiri, and Shurawardi, studying for four intense years at his teacher’s side. Before Abu Hashim Madani died, he called his pupil Inayat Khan to his bedside: "Fare forth into the world, my child, and harmonize the East and the West with the harmony of thy music. Spread the wisdom of Sufism abroad, for to this end art thou gifted by Allah, the most merciful and compassionate."

With this blessing the guru enjoined his student to take the message of Sufism to the West. Inayat Khan wrote, "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." Leaving his home on 13 September 1910, he landed in North America, giving lectures and guiding an ever-growing group of seekers.