Murshid, Identity & Race Text, Audio, and Video
On Sunday, June 14, 2020, we hosted our second Inayatiyya Forum on Race, Justice, Equity & Love. Pir Zia contextualized the conversation with a talk on the history of race within the Inayatiyya, from 1737 until today. Please see below for his written notes along with the forum’s audio and video.
Chronological Notes on Race, Gender, and the Life and Sufism of Hazrat Inayat Khan
By Pir Zia Inayat Khan
How is it that we find ourselves in a spiritual movement founded by a brown-skinned South Asian man in the capital of the British Empire; a movement historically composed primarily of white-skinned people, and especially of women, with significant exceptions, and now gradually becoming more diverse while society grapples with questions of justice and equity?
1737 The city of Richmond is founded on land formerly inhabited by the Powhatan Confederacy of native people. It becomes in time a major hub of the slave trade and, briefly, the capital of the Confederacy.
1783 [and onward] The expulsion of the British Empire from North America lends momentum to colonial military expansion in South Asia.
1799 Tipu Sultan, ruler of Mysore and ally of Benjamin Franklin, is killed on the battlefield in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War.
1848 The spiritualist movement begins in upstate New York, soon to spread throughout the U.S. and Europe. Women, assigned the traits of passivity and renunciation in Victorian culture, feature prominently in the movement. As mediums, women both employ and subvert the expectation of passivity.
1857 Amidst the suppression of an anti-colonial uprising in Delhi, British forces demolish the Chishti-Nizami-Kalimi Khanqah. The leader of the lineage, Kale Miyan, is apparently killed.
1875 In an effort to redirect the spiritualist movement, H.P. Blavatsky and Col. Olcott found the Theosophical Society. The Society advocates Universal Brotherhood but also propounds a hierarchical race theory positing seven “root races,” identifying Aryans as the fifth and current race.
1882 Inayat Khan is born in Baroda to a family linked to the royal line of Tipu Sultan and jointly engaged with India’s musical traditions and the “New Light” of the West.
1907 Sayyid Abu Hashim Madani, representing Kale Miyan’s lineage, blesses Inayat Khan, saying, “Go, my child, into the world, harmonize the East and the West with the harmony of thy music; spread the wisdom of Sufism, for thou art gifted by Allah, the most Merciful and Compassionate.”
1910 Inayat Khan lands in New York City, reflecting: “I saw before me the welcoming figure of the statue of Liberty, an idol of rock, which I felt was awaiting the hour to turn into an ideal, awaiting the moment to rise from material liberty to spiritual liberty.”
1910-1912 Inayat Khan tours the U.S. As a dark-skinned man, he is subject to segregation laws. Media portrayals play on racist tropes.[1] Pierre Bernard invites Inayat Khan to teach at his “Tantrik Society” but threatens violence when Bernard’s half-sister, Ora Ray, resolves to marry him: “Enthusing about oriental wisdom was one thing, allowing one’s sister to marry a brown foreigner was another.” Inayat Khan’s retrospective observations express respect for the African Americans he encountered, and a critique of racism.[2]
1918 Inayat Khan founds the Sufi Order in London. Members are primarily former Theosophists. The Order’s third object is: “To help bring the world’s two opposite poles, East and West, close together by the interchange of thoughts and ideas, that the universal brotherhood may form of itself, and man may meet with man beyond the narrow national and racial boundaries.”
1923 On his second visit to the U.S., Inayat Khan is detained at Ellis Island and questioned by a tribunal. He would later reflect: “It seems so contrary to the attitude of the ancients of welcoming a foreigner as a brother and treating him most kindly in every way, that he may not feel that he is in a strange land.”
1926 Inayat Khan visits America for the third and last time. In New York, he is welcomed by Garveyite African American social reformer Lady Marie Louise Montague, founder and president of the International Humanity League. Montague urges the establishment of a “universal brotherhood of man under the Fatherhood of God.” Inayat Khan is elected “Union Leader of the World Coalition formed by a merger of the Sufi Movement and the International Humanity League.”
1927 Inayat Khan dies in Delhi.
1940-44 Motivated by their passionate opposition to Nazi racism, Inayat Khan’s daughter Noor and son Vilayat serve in the Allied war effort.
1944 Noor is executed in the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, susequently receiving the George Cross for her wartime heroism.
1951-53 Vilayat Khan reports for Dawn on the use of torture by the French colonial administration in Algeria, articles that galvanize the independence movement.
Circa 1960 John Coltrane is influenced by Inayat Khan’s The Mysticism of Music and Sound.
1976 Muhammad Ali memorizes and recites Inayat Khan’s prayer “Truth.”
1980 Vilayat Khan founds the Hope Project in India as an internationally supported initiative to aid disadvantaged communities in Delhi.
1970-2000 The New Age movement unfolds as a largely white cultural phenomenon, intersecting with Inayat Khan’s legacy.
2017 The Inayati Order shifts its North American headquarters to Richmond, Virginia.
2020 The killing of George Floyd gives rise to a transformative nation-wide conversation on race. The Inayatiyya embarks on a process of collective reflection on Race, Justice, Equity, and Love.
[1] Washington Post, 18 February, 1912: “Islamism as the Sunnis, the strictest of the Moslem sects, understand it is readily poured into listening ears by Inayat Khan. … With almost physical force the insistent cry of “Love, love” dominates all other sensations. The dark, liquid eyes of the preacher are luminous with emotion. Fair bosoms rise and fall, for a major part of the audience is women—the atmosphere is electrical. A new sensation is experienced; there is something new to think of; an attraction springs up between teacher and pupils and a new religion or new obsession is formed and propagated, with American women for disciples and a dark-skinned hierophant from the mountains of Afghanistan as the master.” (No wonder Inayat Khan later wrote, “The attitude that the Press in the United States takes is queer.”)
[2] Inayat Khan wrote, “With the liberal idea of freedom in all directions of life and in spite of Abraham Lincoln’s liberal example and reform, there is still to be found in America a prejudice against color which is particularly shown to the Negroes who were for a long time in slavery, and since their freedom the prejudice has become still greater. It seems almost impossible to think that in a country which is most up-to-date in civilization, there should be a population so looked down upon. … The people in America … think Negroes are too backward in evolution to associate with. But it seems to me the coming race will be the race of the Negroes; they are showing it from now. … The most surprising thing to me was that, conscious of all the prejudice against the Negro from all around, he does not allow his ego to be affected by it. In every position of outward humiliation he is put to, he stands upright with a marvelous spirit.”
On women, Inayat Khan wrote: “However much qualified men proved to be in the work, the valuable service that women have rendered to the Cause have been incomparably greater. … If it were not for some women as my collaborators in the Cause, the Sufi Movement would never have been formed.” He wrote also, “I see as clear as daylight that the hour is coming when woman will lead humanity to a higher evolution.”
