Murshid

Fazal Inayat Khan, Murshid Fazal was my parent's Sufi Teacher. When I was born I was taken home by my parents to The Khankah which they were caretaking following the break up of the community he formed there. It was also his house. I knew him from then on til we moved away when I was six years old to spend two years in The South Pacific. In 1990 when i was seven we heard of his illness, my mother was preparing to fly home to help him - she was his doctor for years- when they called to say he had passed. That was 20 years ago. and he was the first person I knew who had died. We stayed away, unable to do anything and missing the events immediately following his death and his memorial. To this day I feel more like I left him behind than like he left us, he was just no longer here when we returned, absurd as it seemed.

What can I remember of Fazal?

A belt he gave me, as a baby or at least before I can remember. I was told he gave it to me because I was the first person he saw after deciding to give it away. I have it still, so that is not perhaps a memory, just an object. It is snakeskin and narrow, it can't have been his to wear, it's a small size; it fits me now and I often wear it.

He took us all, kids, I must have been about four, to London without our parents. I remember it clearly as a special occasion, a great sense of importance. An adventure. We went to the cinema! Fieval Goes West, An American Tale, to my mind then I was certain that Fazal was every bit as excited as I. Next the Funfair, all of us went on The Gravity Wheel together even my little sister Brigit, held tight and safe in his arms, of course! No one was 'too young'. The Gravity Wheel is a big deal, it changes which way you think is up. I see in retrospect all kinds of meanings but at the time there was no question of why one did such things, you did them because they were tremendous and it was important to do them. An adventure.

Perhaps he was the first person I perceived as any kind of Authority in the world and it seemed to be strong, his authority, and sure, without ever to me being frightening; but he was also one of my very earliest friends. I knew that I knew him and that we trusted eachother.

I was never conscious as a young child of being treated as such or talked down to at The Khankah by anyone, least of all Murshid Fazal. When I was very young, before he died, i never considered it. I considered it all my business, whatever it was they all did, as much as it was theirs.

His voice in lectures and meetings was a familiar sound. I would fall asleep in Mama's lap while he would speak about all the things he would speak about. It was once so familiar to me that it seems ridiculous that I don't hear it in my mind, perhaps it was too familiar, never thinking it would stop I only remember that i knew it.

I remember that i always felt i understood what he said, whether listening in to meetings before sleep or when he spoke, as he often did directly to me. I don't remember what he said but that it was often as if I had known it before he told me. I always thought that this was funny; to feel like you'd known something for ages, only you'd just found out. I supposed since he could make everyone feel like that that that was because he was Murshid.

They have all told me so many stories of him since then and now he becomes a mystery, but what i most remember is that when I knew him, he seemed quite the opposite.