Universal Sufism is a universalist spiritual movement founded by Inayat Khan while traveling throughout the West between 1910 and 1926, based on unity of all people and religions and the presence of spiritual guidance in all people, places and things.
Inayat Khan died in 1927. Leadership of the Sufi Movement he had founded first passed to his brother, Shaikh-ul-Mashaikh Maheboob Khan; in 1948 to his cousin, Pir-o-Murshid Ali Khan; in 1956 to his youngest brother, Pir-o-Murshid Musharaff Khan; and in 1968 to his grandson, Pir-o-Murshid Fazal Inayat-Khan. In the 1980s Murshid Fazal proposed a bifurcation between Sufi Movement and the Sufi Way, which became a specific branch of Inayat Khan’s lineage founded by Murshid Fazal in 1985. For an in-depth description of this history written by Murshid Fazal – read “Western Sufism: The Sufi Movement, The Sufi Order International, and The Sufi Way”. In 1988 Fazal's father Hidayat Inayat Khan became Pir-o-Murshid of the International Sufi Movement. Following the death in 1990 of Murshid Fazal, he was succeeded by the first woman leader of the tariqah (path), Pirani Sitara Brutnell. She died in 2004, naming Pir Elias Amidon as her successor.