November 15, 1976

This letter contains a number of names, one of which I can not identify. Thank you reader who knows the identity of Azim in this context and can identify him for me. The others in the order presented are Vasistha [Philip Davenport], Mother Krishnabai [Papa Ramdas’ consort at Anandashram in Kanhangad, South India], H.I.K. [Hazrat Inayat Khan], Amin [Stan Quance] Amina [Katherine Erickson], Murshida Vera [Corda], Wali Ali [Meyer], Jamshed [Richard Tillinghast], Fatima [Pat Lassar Jablonski], Shabda [Kahn], Krishnadas [Duncan Pierce] and Surya [Singer].

Hurkalya

November 15, 1976

Dear Mansur, Beloved One of God,

Allah mu barak!

Thanks for your card of November 8. Your typewriter keys need cleaning; why not buy yourself one of those rubber hunks and get to work?

Newsworthy items:

VASISTHA sent a letter the other day which included a moving account of his interview with Mother Krishnabai.

AZIM plans to direct H.I.K.’s “Amin, the Faithful Trustee” on February 5 to celebrate our founder’s URS. The Tarot Opera may be drawing some actors away from other projects, so I will ask Pir to announce at his upcoming seminar that Azim needs personnel for the play.

THE LOCAL SHEIKHS met yesterday for the first Sangitha class in over a year. In attendance were Amin and Amina, Murshida Vera, Wali Ali, Jamshed, Fatima and myself. The meeting was held at Mentorgarten; we shall be on a monthly schedule, rotating from house to house. When Vasistha and Shabda return, we will have a sizeable class. Krishnadas also, when he can make it down from Allah’s Acres.

I PLAN to begin a program of Darshan once a month on Saturday mornings, as well as to inaugurate a monthly class for Cherags.

WALI ALI’S School concentration will begin in earnest on January 10. The first quarter’s brochure of classes is due from the printer this week. Wali Ali, Fatima, Surya, Jamshed and others are among those teaching classes.

Confidentially, Wali Ali plans to arrange for a special Peyote Healing Ceremony to be held the night of Murshid’s URS, as he will be in the neighborhood of Santa Fe and Lama Foundation for teaching. Mureeds from both places are very much interested in this, and of course I am too. I’ll be tuning in just after our URS celebration concludes here in the Bay Area.

Poems keep coming, alhamdulillah!

I must go and Xerox a letter now, then take a nap.

All love to you and yours,

Om Sri Ram! Jai Ram! Jai Jai Ram!

Moineddin

Along with the letter was a clipping from a column by Dick Alexander in The San Francisco Chronicle with an item circled concerning “Sixty to 70 poets and other writers gathered at Epstein’s Book Store in Iowa City, Iowa, this weekend for a 24-hour charity “readathon,” with proceeds going to the Iowa Review, a literary magazine. ‘It couldn’t happen anywhere else,’ said author Vance Bourjaily, who developed the idea. ‘I can’t think of any other place where you could get 60 to 70 poets, playwrights, essayists and writers of fiction together.’ Obviously, the news of San Francisco’s North Beach, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, City Lights Book Store and the Beat crowd hasn’t yet reached Iowa.”

Moineddin sent this without comment, knowing that Mansur was himself enrolled in Vance Bourjaily’s Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa. As a recent resident of Iowa City, Moineddin was no doubt smiling at the expressed thought that those in the backwater of Iowa City had never heard of City Lights Book Store and the Beat crowd.