Who Brought the Sufis?
Back in the 1940s I was a newly minted Sufi hardly dry behind the ears. I was struggling to come to grips with the challenge of having vowed, for the first time in my life, to obey another person, Murshida Rabia Martin, whom, in addition, I still scarcely knew. Yet I was willing to do my best, because I was convinced that the goal was valid and worth probably all the rest of the goals in my life together, and more besides. I had not been a Sufi for very long when Murshida Martin, my spiritual guide, announced to me and other members of the Sufi Order whom she had gathered together in her San Francisco apartment, that she had finally found the successor to her own teacher, Inayat Khan, who had died many years before. She told us his name, Meher Baba, which meant nothing to me, as I had never heard of him. She went on to recount that she had studied during the last two years, for as much time as she could, with two of this great man’s students in New York, and that they were coming to th
