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The Inayatiyya, also known as the Inayati Order, is an organisation resembling a Ṣūfī ṭarīqa (lit., way, hence order) that promotes the “universalist” Sufi Message of Inayat Khan (ʿInāyat Khān, 1882–1927). It is descended from the Sufi Order established by Inayat Khan in London in 1917, which is the oldest Ṣūfī organisation in the West. The Inayatiyya is derived in part from the Chishtī ṭarīqa, named after the city of Chisht in Herat province but originating in India in the seventh/thirteenth century with Muʿīn al-Dīn Sijzī (d. 627/1230) and developed especi…

Inayat Khan (ʿInāyat Khān, 1882–1927) was an Indian-born Ṣūfī who established “universalist” Ṣūfism in the United States and Europe and was the originator of the Sufi Order, now the Inayati Order. 1. Biography Inayat Khan was born on 5 July 1882 in Baroda (now Vadodara), then the capital of an independent princely state in India, into a family of successful musicians connected to the court of the House of Gaekwar. He studied music with his grandfather, Mawlā Bakhsh (d. 1896), learning to play the sitar (sitār) and the veena (vīńā). He also studied Ṣūfism, joining the Chishtī order u…

Rabia Ada Martin (1871–1947) was an American Ṣūfī and follower of Inayat Khan (ʿInāyat Khān, d. 1927) who established “universalist” Ṣūfism in the United States. Martin was born in San Francisco, California in 1871 to Russian Jewish parents who named her “Ada.” After a personal crisis in 1899 she embarked on a spiritual search and joined the Martinist Order, a popular French-based esoteric order. In 1911 she attended a lecture on Indian music at the Hindu Temple in San Francisco that was given by Inayat Khan, an Indian …

Omar Ali-Shah (1922–2005) was an English spiritual teacher who led a universalist Ṣūfī group called the Tradition, which was especially popular in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America. He was the brother of Idries Shah (1924–96), author of the popular The Sufis (1964). Omar Ali-Shah was born in 1922 and brought up in England by his Scottish mother and his Indian-born father, Ikbal Ali Shah (1894–1969), a prolific writer on “oriental” topics and a descendant of an Afghan military commander, Jān Fishān Khān (d. 1864). Omar Ali-Shah worked…

René Guénon (ʿAbd al-Waḥīd Yaḥyā, 1886–1951) was a French philosopher and Ṣūfī who established Traditionalism,a school of thought that brought many Westerners to Islam and Ṣūfism. 1. Biography Guénon was born in 1886 in Blois, France and moved to Paris to complete his education. He participated in the occultist milieu of the period, finally as a member of the Église Gnostique Universelle (Universal Gnostic Church), a small occultist group that had been established in 1890. In 1909 he published the first issue of the church’s new journal, La gnose (“Gnosis”). He met the Swedish Ṣūfī…

Freemasonry (Ar. māsūniyya, Tk. masonluk, farmasonluk, Pers. frāmāsūnrī), also known as masonry, is a worldwide initiatic society that became established in much of the Muslim world during the nineteenth century but is found today only in in such relatively liberal countries as Turkey, Lebanon and Morocco. While the principles of freemasonry are public, details of rituals are secret, as is information concerning membership, although secret recognition signs allow freemasons to identify one another. There is no generally accepted characteriz…

Ibrāhīm al-Rashīd b. Ṣāliḥ al-Dunqulāwī al-Shāʾiqī al-Duwayhī (1813–74) was a Sudanese ʿālim (religious scholar) and Ṣūfī shaykh (master, lit. “elder”) and the source of the Rashīdiyya, a group of Ṣūfī ṭuruq (orders, sing. ṭarīqa) named after him, which spread widely across several regions of the Muslim world, from the 1860s to the First World War. The Rashīdiyya is one of the major groups of ṭuruq within the Aḥmadiyya-Idrīsiyya, itself a widespread group of Ṣūfī ṭuruq founded by the Moroccan mystic Aḥmad b. Idrīs al-Fāsī (d. 1837). Born in al-Kurū, near Marawī, in northern Sudan…

Martin Lings (Abū Bakr Sirāj al-Dīn, 1909–2005) was an English Ṣūfī, scholar, and poet. He is known especially for his biography of the prophet Muḥammad. He was a Guénonian Traditionalist and a leading figure in the Maryamiyya ṭarīqa (Ṣūfī brotherhood). Lings was born in Manchester and read English at Magdalen College, Oxford. After graduating with a B.A., he was appointed in 1935 to teach Anglo-Saxon and Middle English at Vytautas Magnus University in Lithuania; while in Lithuania he discovered the works of the French philosopher and…

This term is used to refer to religious movements in the West which describe themselves as “Sufi” but are part of the landscape of Western esotericism more than of Islam. Such a use should be distinguished from the standard use of the term in Islamic studies, where it denotes a particular group of Sufi orders which arose in the Islamic world between the 18th and 19th centuries and which has no important connection with the West. Persons and groups in the West describing themselves as “Sufi” may be placed into one of three categories: Islamic Sufism, non-Islamic neo-Sufi…