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Petama Counsellor November 'Personalities of God's Servants - 2 from Hazrat Inayat Khan: 'Message Papers of 14. Juli 1925' |
And we on earth, with our limited conception of their lives and of the lives of the others distinguish them as ‘mine’ and ‘thine;’ take one and deny the other. If before a Christian, Buddha was very highly spoken, he will doubt. First of all he will deny, then will ignore if he was very exacting. And if before a Buddhist the same thing was spoken, he will have the same idea or perhaps more. For they are most devoted. When before a Jewish believer you will speak about Muhammad in comparison to Moses, he will be horrified. And do you think a Muslim will stand a comparison of Moses to Muhammad? He will stand with his sword: ‘How dare you say that these two personalities can be one and the same or equal!’ The difference for them will be as between false and true. ‘One is true, the other is false. Mine is right, yours is wrong.’ This has been the condition of the world all the time, and this is the condition of the world today. And however much we may think that we can progress without religion, it is impossible. That progress will always prove to be fatal. When there is an outer progress and absence of inner progress, it is not a complete progress. We cannot progress without raising our religious ideal. And when it comes to raise it, then we say, ‘Yes, I will raise my religious ideal in my own faith.’ Well, all have raised it already in the past, and yet they all kept divided. And human beings have always fought in the name of religion, abused their faith, and acted wrongly towards one another, being the creatures of the same God. And if we go still deeper we shall find that their teachings do not differ very much, and if there is a difference it is either difference of terms or difference of the way people have understood it. They have given guidance for that time and for the time to come till another such Message was to be given. So the difference is not in the teaching. And when we find differences, it is because we want to find differences. What we want to find we shall find. When we want to find a fault we can find a fault with the best person, and when we want to find some good we can find some good in the worst person. And now coming to the personalities. If Solomon was king and Buddha was a beggar, if Moses rode on horseback and Muhammad sat on a camel, that makes little difference. For when a person judges a personality, he judges according to his ideas. Each person having his own ideas, there will be a thousand judgments about one person. And then when you trace back the legends and stories about the lives, sometimes they fit in with your ideas, sometimes they do not fit in with your ideas. Sometimes you hear them from their worst enemies, sometimes from best friends, sometimes it comes in such a poetry that you think there was never such a human being, there never can be. And another time, when you hear it from an adversary, you think this was the worst person you can ever think of. The more we shall widen our understanding, the more we shall see the wide world. The more we shall come to study life the more we shall see this fact: that those high personalities, we cannot take them from what history says. If a person who looks at it favorably says, ‘This is the best personality in the world; never God could have created another one like this.’ One says, ‘This was the son of God.’ The other says, ‘This was God Himself.’ But these differences belong to each individual as they think, as they conceive of it. In reality when we see what is behind it we see a divine magic, a divine personality which struck directly to so many and indirectly to those who were not struck directly. And those who have come to understand their particular saviour, master, teacher thoroughly, they have arrived at forgetting that outward distinction of the teacher, recognizing what is behind it - the divine personality which is One and the Same, whether in the past, present, or future. Be not therefore surprised if a Sufi recognizes that personality and names that personality with the name that may be taught to him, perhaps from his parents, in his family, as the great ideal of religion, and gives to the same personality all other recognized names which other people recognize in the same way. He gives the same personality those names; it is natural. There was a time when the idealizing of the king was such that they gave the king the title of all the great heroes and kings who existed in history, recognizing in that particular king the greatness which is recognized by other people of their kings. But then you may say it is making our ideal the ideal of others. What does it matter? It all unites you with the others, and others are united with you. If this will go on that millions and millions of people are divided just now as they are, some as followers of one religion, others as followers of other religions, there will never come a real Inner unity among humans. They ought to unite in their ideal. But, you will say, can we not unite in God? Yes, we can unite in God. But we do not unite in God. God for us is in the abstract; we want a personality in which to unite. And that personality, seen in its reality, is behind the veil of names and forms known to different creeds. If the Sufi Message brings Saum and Salat to be given in the world to Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu alike, that they can stand in the congregation shoulder to shoulder in the worship of God and may not miss the name of their teacher, one day they will waken to the truth. They automatically will come to that idea that the personality which is really divine has all these names and more names which are perhaps unknown. Therefore there was an argument once with a mureed who said, ‘There are some who can stand milk and there are others who can stand wine; and there are some who can read Saum and Salat, and there are others who are perhaps prejudiced against one name or the other. What may be done for them?’ This argument I bring before you because you will have to face this difficulty always, as I have to face this difficulty continually. In the first place by feeling the prejudice of that person you will keep him backward in progressing through the Sufi path. The sole object of this path is unity. But by arguing with him too much you will only antagonize him. Therefore in the case of an individual, as the essence of Sufis is freedom of thought, you will leave the choice to that person. Nevertheless, my workers and mureeds will remember that on Saum and Salat the whole building of the Sufi teaching stands. And if it has not that foundation of uniting all different faiths, this building will not stand upon partial and divided ideals. It wants a strong foundation, for this is not a question of a particular theory, a speculation or doctrine. This is a question of uniting the races and nations and people who are divided in their faiths. Nor in moral principle, nor in philosophical basis nor in truth, only on the point of different personalities as their leaders.
(Maheboob Khan, Hazrat Inayat Khan‘s brother, has composed music to a row of aphorisms of Hazrat Inayat Khan in the middle of last century, as this ‚How Shall I Thank Thee‘. Mohammed Ali Khan, Hazrat Inayat Khan’s cousin, has sung this song around the year 1956 in a concert in Zürich – here you can listen to it) (these E-book are free of all charge - use their treasures well!) |
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