America wasn’t what Inayat expected. Soon after arriving, he was touring the country with Ruth St. Denis, a “modern” dancer influenced by the pioneering choreography of Isadora Duncan and the melodramas of Sarah Bernhardt. St. Denis was sure her dancing was a respectful bridge between the West and the best of Japan, India, Egypt—lands she had visited only in her imagination. She dubbed Inayat’s ensemble the Royal Musicians of Hindustan—the centerpiece for her new seven-act dance that appropriated Hindu gods, priests, and temples, none of which, by the time she was done, had anything to do with her dancing. Perhaps more upsetting to the Royal Musicians was how St. Denis whirled around in costumes that were pleasingly erotic to her audiences and scandalous to her Indian accompanists, who were new to the West.
The tour made dozens of stops along the way to California. In Salt Lake City, the musicians refused to perform, preferring, according to a local newspaper, to observe a religious holiday “in true Oriental fashion.” St. Denis fumed that in the future her contracts with musicians would include clauses about religious holidays. Before they got to the West Coast, Inayat (and the other Royal Musicians) left St. Denis when she insisted he certify that she was performing authentic dances from India. He left just in time. She was about to debut a new dance she called “The Sufi.” One critic who sat through it sniffed that St. Denis “alternatively blinked at the painted sky, proudly examined her bare toes and tied herself into a knot as the curtain descended. . . . The audience giggled.”
On their own now, the Royal Musicians gave concerts and Inayat gave lectures on Sufism, trying to find the best way to reach Westerners. A mystical offshoot of Islam, Sufism, like all mysticisms, aspired toward a personal relationship with God, one that was beyond words and legalisms and the empty outwardness of rituals. Sufism’s force extended from the hidden meaning of Islamic scripture, especially from this verse from the Koran about creating the first human: “I have fashioned him and breathed into him of My spirit.” That spark of divinity, Sufis said, is in each of us, and Sufism could help us know it, and expand it.
The few Americans who knew anything about Sufism found it alluring, tantalizing. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a poem about the thirteenth-century Sufi, Sa’di; Thoreau’s pursuit of nature at a pond twenty miles west of Boston could have earned him a merit badge from a Sufi summer camp; and Whitman sang of the “last lesson” from a “graybeard Sufi”:
Allah is all, all, all—is immanent in every life and object . . .
It is the central urge in every atom . . .
To return to its divine source and origin, however distant . . .
Sufism fascinated these men though they had never met a Sufi. There were no Sufis in the United States, where almost anything connected with Islam was theologically unwelcome—the Prophet Muhammad had preached that Islam was the final revelation that had begun with Abraham. To Jews, revelation ended with the last of the prophets in the Old Testament. To Christians, it ended with Jesus. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, Muhammad was an impostor. Inayat also faced difficulty in the United States because Islam was maligned as a danger to American society—many slaves who had come from Africa were Muslims. Anything that comforted slaves disturbed their masters.
Inayat was not the first Sufi in the West. The year after Inayat left India, a Swede, Ivan Aguéli, had founded a secret Sufi group in Paris after studying Sufism in Cairo. But Inayat was the first Sufi in the United States, and he had to find a way to teach Sufism to Americans. He also had to find a new Sufism. The old one, the one he had known, was too esoteric, too Islamic for most Westerners. Teaching Sufism in India had been “like sailing in the sea, smooth and level.” Teaching it in the West was like “traveling in a hilly land.” To level the hills, Inayat constructed a “Sufism” that would have been unrecognizable in India. He didn’t rely exclusively, and overtly, on the Koran, like a traditional Sufi. Instead, Inayat melded Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim scriptures into an original gospel, emphasizing the universality of all faiths and of all humanity. Like any true mysticism, Inayat’s Sufism demolished barriers and distinctions; unlike more orthodox Sufism, there was scant mention of Islam or of its five “pillars”: faith, praying five times a day, donating to the poor and the needy, fasting during Ramadan, and making a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in your life. Eventually, Inayat’s Sufism had such modest Islamic content that he rarely mentioned it.
This was a Sufism in which everyone was welcome—Jew, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim. As Inayat asserted, “divine wisdom is not limited to a certain people.” And if there was a compulsion to call what he was crafting a religion, then it was a “religion of love, harmony and beauty.” Truth was the foundation of this trinity. Truth, Inayat said, “was all the religion there is. It is truth which will save us.”
Noor’s father, Hazrat Inayat Khan.
Several American scholars have waded into why Inayat distanced Sufism from the mysticism he had known back home. As a British colonial subject, said one, Inayat “felt inferior” in the West. Uncertain whether Sufism could hold up to Western scrutiny, Inayat didn’t want Westerners to know it had originated in the East, and surely not that it stemmed from Islam. That would have damaged his project from the start. Another academic added that if Inayat had taught the Sufism he’d known in India, “everyone would have deserted him.” Many ordinary spiritual seekers in the West, usually open and accepting, had little tolerance for anything that smacked of Islam.
Yet, the debate continues—was Inayat a reformer of Sufism, determined to prove its elasticity by adapting new ideas for a new world? If so, say some observers, then he was an absolutely authentic Sufi. Sufism rejected formalities and canon and edicts. And since Sufism emphasized individualism, why shouldn’t Inayat exercise his? Still, that notion is anathema to an Iranian Muslim who teaches Islamic Studies at George Washington University in Washington, DC. “Sufism without Islam is a total absurdity,” scoffed professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr. “That’s like not calling water wet. Inayat was not a reformer. He was a deformer.”
In the end, it may not matter if Inayat was a reformer, an apostate, or a nontraditionalist. At their core, his teachings reflect the central tenet of Sufism—mahabba, a love in which the trinity of lover, loved, and love itself arises from a compassionate and merciful God. Like any Sufi, Inayat never deviated from this.
On the West Coast of the United States, Inayat was attracting attention, sometimes as a spiritual teacher, sometimes for entirely different reasons. The Los Angeles Times called him a “polished gentleman” with the “grace of a man born to a high caste.” (The headline was less respectful: “Sinuous Gent from the Orient.”) Women swooned when they saw his photo: rugged and dashing, he defied the usual image of gurus and holy men—dyspeptic, chaste, and prudish. In San Francisco, he attracted his first student in the West—a thin, bespectacled Jewish woman who yearned to bask in Inayat’s “great and illuminated intelligence.” He taught her yoga, breathing techniques, meditation, and the virtues of modesty (“conceal your practice and its results and its effects upon you from others”) before returning to New York for more lectures and concerts. Most were at the New York Sanskrit College—a warren of threadbare rooms at 250 West 87th Street, an apartment building a quarter-block west of Broadway. The “college” was little more than a yoga studio, a second room with some rickety chairs sitting on top of a faded Persian carpet, and a revolving “faculty” of gurus, sages, and masters of the arcane and the esoteric.