The Reconciliation of Races and Religions | Page 7

God and that love between two human hearts is but a type of the love between God and His human creatures, and that the supreme happiness is that of identification with God, has never been more alluringly expressed than by the Sufi poets.
The Sufis, then, are true forerunners of the Bab and his successors. There are also two men, Muslims but no Sufis, who have a claim to the same title. But I must first of all do honour to an Indian Sufi.
INAYAT KHAN
The message of this noble company has been lately brought to the West. [Footnote: _Message Soufi de la Libert�� Spirituelle_ (Paris, 1913).] The bearer, who is in the fulness of youthful strength, is Inayat Khan, a member of the Sufi Order, a practised speaker, and also devoted to the traditional sacred music of India. His own teacher on his death-bed gave him this affecting charge: 'Goest thou abroad into the world, harmonize the East and the West with thy music; spread the knowledge of Sufism, for thou art gifted by Allah, the Most Merciful and Compassionate.' So, then, Vivekananda, Abdu'l Baha, and Inayat Khan, not to mention here several Buddhist monks, are all missionaries of Eastern religious culture to Western, and two of these specially represent Persia. We cannot do otherwise than thank God for the concordant voice of Bahaite and Sufite. Both announce the Evangel of the essential oneness of humanity which will one day--and sooner than non-religious politicians expect--be translated into fact, and, as the first step towards this 'desire of all nations,' they embrace every opportunity of teaching the essential unity of religions:
Pagodas, just as mosques, are homes of prayer, 'Tis prayer that church-bells chime unto the air; Yea, Church and Ka'ba, Rosary and Cross, Are all but divers tongues of world-wide prayer. [a]
[Footnote a: Whinfield's translation of the quatrains of Omar Khayy��m, No. 22 (34).]
So writes a poet (Omar Khayy��m) whom Inayat Khan claims as a Sufi, and who at any rate seems to have had Sufi intervals. Unmixed spiritual prayer may indeed be uncommon, but we may hope that prayer with no spiritual elements at all is still more rare. It is the object of prophets to awaken the consciousness of the people to its spiritual needs. Of this class of men Inayat Khan speaks thus,--
'The prophetic mission was to bring into the world the Divine Wisdom, to apportion it to the world according to that world's comprehension, to adapt it to its degree of mental evolution as well as to dissimilar countries and periods. It is by this adaptability that the many religions which have emanated from the same moral principle differ the one from the other, and it is by this that they exist. In fact, each prophet had for his mission to prepare the world for the teaching of the prophet who was to succeed him, and each of them foretold the coming of his successor down to Mahomet, the last messenger of the divine Wisdom, and as it were the look-out point in which all the prophetic cycle was centred. For Mahomet resumed the divine Wisdom in this proclamation, "Nothing exists, God alone is,"--the final message whither the whole line of the prophets tended, and where the boundaries of religions and philosophies took their start. With this message prophetic interventions are henceforth useless.
'The Sufi has no prejudice against any prophet, and, contrary to those who only love one to hate the other, the Sufi regards them all as the highest attribute of God, as Wisdom herself, present under the appearance of names and forms. He loves them with all his worship, for the lover worships the Beloved in all Her garments.... It is thus that the Sufis contemplate their Well-beloved, Divine Wisdom, in all her robes, in her different ages, and under all the names that she bears,--Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mahomet.' [Footnote: _Message Soufi de la Libert��_ (Paris, 1913), pp. 34, 35.]
The idea of the equality of the members of the world-wide prophethood, the whole body of prophets being the unique personality of Divine Wisdom, is, in my judgment, far superior to the corresponding theory of the exclusive Muhammadan orthodoxy. That theory is that each prophet represents an advance on his predecessor, whom he therefore supersedes. Now, that Muhammad as a prophet was well adapted to the Arabians, I should be most unwilling to deny. I am also heartily of opinion that a Christian may well strengthen his own faith by the example of the fervour of many of the Muslims. But to say that the Kur'an is superior to either the Old Testament or the New is, surely, an error, only excusable on the ground of ignorance. It is true, neither of Judaism nor of Christianity were the representatives in Muhammad's time such as we should have