8 More on innovation and changes. Let’s go into the question of Innovation a bit further.

SAM says that his great Innovation that he introduced were the “Dervish Dances.” This follows immediately after a paragraph related to the necessity of finding out how to communicate with “my fellow Americans” & is related to his “job” of teaching Americans to say Wazifa, Kalama & Ziker [the names of God, the Muslim affirmation of faith, also repeated as Ziker, there is no God but God, in Arabic].

So you see how it goes. The expediency of communication leads one to make changes. Subtle one or gross ones nevertheless changes. So nobody gets the “real” thing.

What they get is the message filtered thru the personality of the teacher for the sake of attracting people to the work. But nobody has anything but the reflection in the form of personality. Now SAM was a great “personality” a fact he was aware of & I believe tried to avoid as he saw the dangers inherent in this as he remarked after attending a RamDas meeting in NY on one of his last Eastern US trips. Vilayat I also feel is sincere in this respect that he attempts to direct people to God. Alhamdulillah [Praise be to Allah]. But there is a mix-up which is predicted on the need to attract people to “accomplish” something so to change things for the sake of the culture one is working with at the time. This is what HIK did & I believe this is what SAM did. The question is will you also do the same thing?