The Inayati-Maimuni Order
admin | July 17, 2018
WHEREAS the sacred traditions of the faiths of Beni IsraelJudaism, Christianity, and Islamderive from the prophecy of Abraham, who "was the first to bring the knowledge of mysticism from Egypt, where he was initiated in the most ancient order of esotericism"; AND WHEREAS the early Sufis of Islam were deeply studied in Judaica (Isra'iliyyat); AND WHEREAS Rabbi Abraham Maimonides observed, "the ways of the ancient saints of Israel ... have now become the practice of the Sufis of Islam," and developed a school of Hasidic Sufism in thirteenth-century Cairo; AND WHEREAS Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan founded, in London in 1914, the Sufi Order in the West, a new order of universalist Sufism rooted in the transmission of four unbroken lineages: Chishtiyya, Suhrawardiyya, Qadiriyya, and Naqshbandiyya; AND WHEREAS Hazrat Inayat Khan appointed Pir Vilayat Inayat-Khan as his Sajjada-nishin, and Pir Vilayat has in turn appointed this faqir as his own Sajjada-nishin; AND WHEREAS in California in 1975 and New York City in 1976, invoking the names of Melchizedek and Abraham, Pir Vilayat and Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi performed mutual initiations, bestowing the titles of Shaikh and Kohen l'El Eliyon respectively; AND WHEREAS as a duly authorized Sufi Shaikh and Hasidic Rebbe, Reb Zalman has masterfully integrated the authentic traditions of the Sufis and the Hasidim, in the manner of a "merging of two oceans"; NOW, THEREFORE it is with jubilation of heart that I hereby recognize the establishment of the Maimuniyya, as a new order of Hasidic Sufism, reviving the tradition of the Egyptian Hasidic school and bearing the initiatory trans mission of the Sufi Order in the West, whereby it is vested with the baraka of Hazrat Inayat Khan and the fourfold chain of Pir-o-murshidan preceding him
