Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan’s ‘Wisdom Book’: A Live Music-Cinema Zoom Performance of a Play in Seven Acts

Description

The discovery of a “wisdom book that was hidden from humanity until its time has come” in the Inayati archives in 2017, prompted Pīr Zia Inayat Khan (b. 1971), the spiritual leader of the Inayati Sufi community, to issue a path-breaking declaration. He admitted the first woman to the Inayati spiritual and genealogical lineage (silsila): his aunt Pīrzādi-Shahīda Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan, who was executed at Dachau in 1944.

Called Aède of the Ocean and Land, the discovered “wisdom book” is the only play Noor-un-Nisa wrote. Told in the light of the twelfth-century Sufi classic “The Conference of the Birds” by Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār (d. c. 1220), it retells one of the great foundational stories of Western civilization, Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, the journey of the Greek hero Odysseus being seen as an allegory of Inayat Khan’s spiritual journey in the West. The play has seven acts, each corresponding to one of the valleys in ʿAṭṭār’s famous story, which have to be crossed by the birds of the earth in their yearning for the divine. Similarly, in Noor-un-Nisa’s story, Ulysses’ heart transforms in the course of his journey, as he becomes a renunciate with a Sufic vision of detachment.

In this paper, I use the example of the live music-cinema Zoom performance of Aède performed on the day after the anniversary of Noor-un-Nisa’s death (ʿurs) on 13 September 2020 to explore the role of Aède in Inayati teachings today. Directed by Elli Papakonstantinou with music composed by Shirish Korde, the visual and auditory language employed in this virtual performance drew on classical South Asian as well as contemporary American and European sources.

Keywords: Sufism; Inayati Sufism; Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan; women in Sufism; plays; music-cinema.

Period	5 Jul 2022 → 7 Jul 2022
Event title	ESSWE 8 Western Esotericism and Creativity: Art, Performance and Innovation, 2021 Meeting of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE), University College Cork, Ireland
Event type	Conference
Location	Cork, IrelandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International