So writes a poet (Omar Khayyám) whom Inayat Khan claims as a Ṣufi, and who at any rate seems to have had Ṣufi intervals. Unmixed spiritual prayer may indeed be uncommon, but we may hope that prayer with no spiritual elements at all is still more rare. It is the object of prophets to awaken the consciousness of the people to its spiritual needs. Of this class of men Inayat Khan speaks thus,-- 'The prophetic mission was to bring into the world the Divine Wisdom, to apportion it to the world according to that world's comprehension, to adapt it to its degree of mental evolution as well as to dissimilar countries and periods. It is by this adaptability that the many religions which have emanated from the same moral principle differ the one from the other, and it is by this that they exist. In fact, each prophet had for his mission to prepare the world for the teaching of the prophet who was to succeed him, and each of them foretold the coming of his successor down to Mahomet, the last messenger of the divine Wisdom, and as it were the look-out point in which all the prophetic cycle was centred. For Mahomet resumed the divine Wisdom in this proclamation, "Nothing exists, God alone is,"--the final message whither the whole line of the prophets tended, and where the boundaries of religions and philosophies took their start. With this message prophetic interventions are henceforth useless. 'The Ṣufi has no prejudice against any prophet, and, contrary to those who only love one to hate the other, the Ṣufi regards them all as the highest attribute of God, as Wisdom herself, present under the appearance of names and forms. He loves them with all his worship, for the lover worships the Beloved in all Her garments.... It is thus that the Ṣufis contemplate their Well-beloved, Divine Wisdom, in all her robes, in her different ages, and under all the names that she bears,--Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mahomet.' [Footnote: _Message Soufi de la Liberté_ (Paris, 1913), pp. 34, 35.]