Inayatiyya International Board
May 2023 Newsletter

Update on changes in the Organisation

Our friend Alia Sura Kirsten will be stepping down from her role as European Vice President of the Knighthood of Purity. She is the first person to have taken on this role since the Knighthood Activity was re-instigated in the 2000s. We are grateful for the breadth and range of her work during the last six years. She has been instrumental in building an infrastructure for the Knighthood Activity both globally and in Europe, in co-developing the Adab curriculum for Knights with Suhrawardi Gebel and offering a number of events and retreats, including the first International Gathering of the Knighthood Activity.

Alia is a firm believer in shared leadership and she created and held a network of the heads of the Knighthood Activity in Europe. This group has been meeting regularly since, and has worked collectively and individually to develop Knighthood activities in various European countries. In terms of her succession, the group has decided to adopt a shared leadership model and will be rotating this position amongst the group.

The current leadership is held by Qayyima Clainchard with support from Kabir Clainchard from France. Qayyima has been a student of the Inayatiyya path for the last 25 years. She was a journalist for a large press group in France, has been involved in several voluntary activities including working with a Hungarian and Jewish survivor of the Shoah (Magda Hollander-Lafon), and is an author of the book The Future is in US (published in 2014). Kabir will support Qayyima in this role. He too has been on this path for 25 years. He was a clinical psychologist for forty years in a hospital environment and dealing successfully with children, drug addicts and teenagers. Today, he is very involved in associations linked to migrants, and he is President of an Association in the city of Rennes working with issues related to young people.

We are grateful to them and the whole group for all the work they are doing.

We are also saying thank you to our dear friend Nicolas Ikram Enjalbert, who has been a trustee on the Inayatiyya International Board (IIB) for the last three years. We will miss his presence in our regular meeting where his strategic thinking, commitment and passion to getting things done and his desire to ensure that we put the voices of those we are serving at the centre of our work have been vital in shaping our work. The good news is that he is staying on as an advisor.