Ameena Begum

Who was Ameena Begum?

Ameena Begum was the wife of Sufi Master Inayat Khan and the mother of their four children Noor-un-Nisa, Vilayat, Hidayat and Khair-un-Nisa. The family settled in Suresnes, near Paris. She left a collection of 101 poems called "A Rosary of one hundred and one beads". Some poems were lost in the war of 1940 but 54 have been preserved and were published in 1998.

Hidayat Inayat Khan wrote: "In 1926, Hazrat Inayat Khan gave my Mother an exceptional initiation as "Pirani", which was only to be given to her. That special initiation was not to be given to any one else in the Sufi Movement, either in the present or in the future". Hazrat Inayat Khan said in his Autobiography that without Ameena Begum's help he would never have been able to bring his Sufi Message to the Western world.