On Tuesday the 16th of
October, Susan Southall gave a presentation to the Spiritual Reading Group on
the life and work of the Sufi writer and musician Hazrat Inayat Khan
(1882-1927). Here is her paper, while in a separate post you will find the
quotes from his book ‘The Mysticism of Sound and Music’ (Shambhala, 1996) used
by the Group for discussion.
Hazrat Inayat Khan was born in 1882 in
Baroda, then a princely state in what is now Gujarat, India. He came from a
family that was intensely musical. His father descended from an ancient family
of feudal landowners who were Sufi saints, poets, and musicians. His mother was
the daughter of Sholay Khan Maulabakhsh, one of India’s greatest musicians at
that time, who travelled throughout India and was given princely rank by the
Maharajah of Mysore.
Their home in Baroda was the centre of
an extended family that contributed so significantly to musical culture in
Baroda that it brought together not only Muslim, but Brahmin and Parsi families
as well: this intellectual development was important to Inayat Khan in his
exposure to different religious traditions.
Inayat
Khan was what is known today as a gifted child. His musical skill was so
advanced that before the age of twenty he became a full professor at the
Gayanshala academy of music founded by his grandfather in 1886 (now the Baroda
University Faculty of Music). He had written his first book on music at the age
of fourteen, and at age nine, he sang a famous Sanskrit hymn at a court
ceremony, winning a reward from the Maharajah for his performance.
The
title Hazrat is an Arabic honorific used in India for high officials, royalty,
and clergy. Literally ‘Presence’ it corresponds to ‘Your Honour’, ‘Your
Excellency’, ‘Your Majesty’ or ‘Your Holiness’. The 25 Prophets of the Koran,
such Muhamad, Jesus, Moses and so on, may be described by their names as Hazrat
Moses, for example. Hazrat Inayat Khan has a princely background and is also a
religious teacher. Imams may be addressed as Hazrat. He may be understood as
not so much elite as superior: he comes from a high level of society and he has
added to this by his personal accomplishments and qualities.
His
personality as a child was lively and intelligent, but he was also marked by
deep reflection and questioning about God, nature, truth and morality. The tragedy
of family deaths marked his youth: he lost his grandfather — the famous
musician Maulabakhsh — his younger brother, and his beloved mother all before
he was twenty. Thereupon Inayat Khan began to travel.
The
life of famous musicians, even today, is often marked by travel. Inayat Khan
began by going to Madras and Mysore, places where his grandfather had won fame,
and had success there, returning home as a poet, publishing then a book of his
poems in various Indian languages. He soon took his grandfather’s style of
music to the centre of Moghul traditional culture, Hyderabad, where he moved in
musical circles and wrote his final book on music, explaining his grandfather’s
musical style for Urdu readers.
He
was introduced at the court of His Exalted Highness Nizam Mahbub Ali Khan. When
the ruler of Hyderabad asked about his music, Inayat Khan replied that his
music is his religion, because sound is mysterious, and knowledge of sound
through music reveals the secrets of the universe. His thought is music, his
feeling is music, his emotion creates beauty which leads to ‘the harmony which
unites souls in God.’
In
Hyderabad, he met his teacher of Arabic and Persian literature, Maulana
Hashimi, who saw in him a mystic developing into a Sufi Pir, a religious
master. In the Sufi tradition, a spiritual guide or Murshid is required to
bring a disciple to initiation into the mystical order as a follower of the
Sufi path to God. For Inayat Khan, the Murshid he met in Hyderabad, Syed
Muhammad Hashim Madani, although an Arab by background, came of the
specifically Indian order of Chishtiyya Sufis. As with Rumi and his beloved
guide and mentor Shams of Tabriz, the relationship of teacher and disciple was
devoted and close. The ideal in Sufi teaching is for rapturous study of God
through the Murshid, and the songs and poems Inayat Khan wrote in honour of his
master testify to ‘the joy and exaltation’ he felt through this relationship
until his mentor died in 1908.[i]
According
to Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, “Just before Hazrat Sayyid Abu Hashim Madani died …
he directed Pir-O-Murshid Inayat Khan, his successor, to go to the West and
attune the hearts of the people to the music of the soul. At that time my
father was a renowned Indian musician; he gave up a career in music for the
sake of the work he had been given to found the Sufi Order in the West.”[ii]
Inayat
Khan then left Hyderabad and travelled throughout India, Ceylon and Rangoon,
concentrating on perfecting his music and developing the process of the
spiritual life, described as annihilation of the ego and resurrection to finding
‘the essence of being’. In 1910, he left the feudal life of India for the
United States, accompanied by his brothers and cousins who were his disciples
already.
His
life as a Sufi in the West was then unusual. In 1912 he travelled widely in
Europe and Russia, giving concerts of Indian music and lecturing; he also
married an American, Ora Ray Baker (Amina Begum) and the couple eventually had
four children. They settled in France, but lived in London throughout World War
I, from 1914-1920. It was in London that
the Sufi Order was arranged, having a headquarters there where initiates could
be trained and lectures, courses, and concerts were given. By this time there
were national branches in various countries: in 1920 the headquarters moved to
Geneva, while the family moved back to France and lived near Paris.[iii]
Of
his four children, his two sons became heads of the Sufi Order in their turn,
while one of his daughters, Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan, was a heroine of the
French Resistance in WWII. As a British agent, she was a wireless operator in
France when she was captured, interrogated by the Gestapo, tortured and executed
in Dachau, without giving information to the Germans. She was posthumously
awarded the George Cross. [iv] The
role of a woman in Mughal nobility was ‘to live her religious faith, and to
live and represent, and so perpetuate, her ancestral standards and values’[v] so
therefore ‘one could never take a great lady’s name in any personal sense’, as
‘discussing women, and especially high-born ladies, with others, was
disrespectful and so, offensive … Divulging one’s actual name, rather than
one’s alias, degree or title for public purposes was shocking, breaching
accepted conventions. . Even the deliberate shortening of names out of
reverence, although grammatically faulty — such as Inayat Khan for Inayat Allah
Khan — contained something of that dissimulation of the “real” name’ (even for
men). So, the book published about Noorunnisa under the title of her code-name
Madeline caused problems for the family. His other daughter Khair-un-Nisa is
not written about so and has fulfilled the tradition of Mughal women remaining
obscure.
Inayat
Khan worked intensively as teacher, lecturer, performer and administrator of
the Sufi Order, until his death in 1927 on a return visit to India, where he
had visited the most famous Sufi shrine, the tomb of Khwaja Mu’inuddin Chishti,
with its serene atmosphere and sacred music. He caught a fatal chill in this
place, and died at Delhi 0n 5th February, 1927.[vi]
The beginning of the 20th century
brought movements in art, religion, music and philosophy that we are still
dealing with today. Inayat Khan shares a birth year with Stravinsky and Joyce. Major
events circle around the year 1910, when Inayat Khan was sent to the West.
Daighilev’s Ballet Russes performed Stravinsky’s Firebird in the Paris 1910 season, bringing new colour and excitement
to the stage. Schonberg produced his Theory
of Harmony in that year, and Pierrot
Lunaire, with its expressionist Sprechstimme
in 1912, and began to explore atonal music. The boy Krishnamurti came to
the attention of the Theosophical Society in 1909.
Picasso
painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in
1907 and 1909-1912 made the break with traditional perspective that would lead
to cubism. Matisse in 1907-1913 was exploring his Wild Beast (Fauve) colourism,
including orientalism during his time in Algeria 1906. In literature, Joyce
began writing Ulysses in 1914. Gertrude Stein was producing experimental
writings and stream of consciousness, including automatic writing with William
James, who has already described the mystical experience in 1902 in Varieties of Religious Experience.
While
James is a pragmatist, who believes that truth is best measured by practical
results (a viewpoint particularly appropriate today), Freud went about founding
the International Psychoanalytical Movement in 1910. His book on religion, Totem and Taboo, was published in
1913.Wittgenstein was in Cambridge with Bertrand Russell during this period:
his notes written during WWI will become the Tractatus, striving for a new understanding of language.
There
are many other examples of this extremely fruitful period. New sounds, new
sights, new thoughts and understandings are coming into the West, and some of
these arise in other cultures: Russia, North Africa, and India.
For
Inayat Khan, musicianship early ‘ranked only and uniquely with sainthood and
nobility’: it is his ‘specific firm ground from which to move the world.’[vii]
There you have his background as a whole: feudal owners of lands, properties,
honours, and titles; Sufi mystics; courtly and gentlemanly musicians. The
Mughal heritage identified as ‘the highest, most humane mode and standard of
life’ or ‘humanity’ for India became through Inayat Khan universalism. Where
his grandfather attained princely rank, Inayat Khan reached even higher,
becoming a ‘God-realised mystic.’[viii]
https://inayatiorder.org/hazrat-inayat-khan/
(accessed 24 August 2018)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/inayat_khan_noor.shtml
(accessed 24 August 2018)
[i] Material in
this article from htpps://inayatiorder.org/hazrat-inayat-khan/ (accessed 24
August2018).
[ii] Pir Vilayat
Inayat Khan, Awakening: a Sufi Experience,
edited by Pythia Pray. (New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1999). p.166.
[iv] Material
from http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/inayat_khan_noor.shtml (accessed 24 August 2018)
[v]Shaikh Al-Mahaik Mahmood Khan, ‘ Mawlabakhshi Raijkufu A’lakhandan: The
Mawlabakhsh Dynastic Lineage, 1833-1972 ‘in A
Pearl in Wine: Essays on the Life, Music and Sufism of Hazrat Inayat Khan,
ed. Pirzade Zia Inayat Khan (New Lebanon, Omega, 2001), p. 28, pp 35-36.
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