Creating the Person

Hazrat Inayat Khan was born in Baroda, India, in 1882, into a family of classical musicians. Initiated in the four major streams of Indian Sufism, he was sent to the West by his teacher, Abu Hashim Madani Chishti, "to harmonize East and West" with his music. Inayat Khan left India in 1910 and for sixteen years he lived and taught in Europe and America, bringing a message of love, harmony and beauty that was both the quintessence of Sufi teaching and a revolutionary new approach to the harmonizing of western and eastern spirituality. He established a school of spiritual training based upon traditional Sufi teachings infused with the vision of the unity of religious ideals and the awakening of humanity to the divinity within. Inayat Khan died in India in 1927, leaving a significant body of recorded discourse and instruction on all things pertaining to spiritual ideals in the midst of life in the world.

Pir Zia Inayat-Khan, is a scholar and teacher of Sufism in the lineage of his grandfather, Hazrat Inayat Khan. He received his B.A. (Hons) in Persian Literature from the London School of Oriental and African Studies, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Religion from Duke University. Pir Zia is president of the Sufi Order International and founder of Suluk Academy, a school of contemplative study with branches in the United States and Europe. His first publication, the anthology A Pearl in Wine: Essays in the Life, Music and Sufism of Hazrat Inayat Khan, was published by Omega Publications in 2001. Together with Shaikh al-Mashaik Mahmood Khan he leads the Knighthood of Purity of the Hazrati Order