Description
Spiritual Liberty
Volume V, The Sufi Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan Centennial Edition
by Hazrat Inayat Khan
Includes the following books:
- A Sufi Message of Spiritual Liberty
- Aqibat: Life after Death
- The Phenomenon of the Soul
- Love, Human and Divine
- Pearls from the Ocean Unseen
- Metaphysics
A Sufi Message of Spiritual Liberty is Hazrat Inayat Khan’s first book, and the only didactic work he would ever personally write. With the exception of a few aphoristic collections, all subsequent books published under his name are the records of his oral discourses. A Sufi Message of Spiritual Liberty closely mirrors the conceptual universe of Indian Sufism. The subsequent books are lecture compilations of the London period assembled by two prominent early disciples, Sherifa Goodenough and Zohra Williams.
Aqibat: Life After Death offers an early foretaste of themes developed comprehensively in The Soul Whence and Whither, illustrated with personal anecdotes, all of which touch upon the supernatural in some fashion.
Like Aqibat, The Phenomenon of the Soul anticipates the content of The Soul, Whence and Whither. When read meditatively, The Phenomenon of the Soul has the power to stir the inmost self to a startling recollection of its true nature.
In Love, Human and Divine, the subject is ‘ishq (passionate attraction), the central concern of the Sufi School of Love, or mazhab-i ‘ishq, whose major exponents include Farid ad-Din ‘Attar and Jalal ad-Din Rumi. A particularly charming component of Love, Human and Divine is its retelling of the stories of Laila and Majnun, Shirin and Farhad, and Yusuf and Zulaikha, who are to the Persianate world what Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, and Dante and Beatrice are to the romantic imagination of the West.
In Pearls from the Ocean Unseen, replete with biblical references, Hazrat engages with the Gospels alongside references to Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. The intention is to look for common ground between the world’s great religions, even while acknowledging their differences. The book begins with the statement that, “Sufism is not a religion, but may be called a super religion.” This is reminiscent of Rumi when he says, “The religion of love is distinct from all creeds / God is the religion in which lovers believe.”
In Metaphysics, the subject again is the soul, but with a more systematic examination of the soul’s relationship with the body, the mind, the heart, and the spirit. For Hazrat, the body is not—as it is in certain currents of Greek and Gnostic thought—a prison for the soul. Instead, the body is the vehicle of mind, while the mind is the vehicle of the soul.
