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Searching on this Web Site

 

A Few Search Engine Examples:

        mind surface heart     (Searches for articles containing the individual words mind, surface and heart, appearing in any order)

      "mind is the surface of the heart"     (Quote marks are used to specify an exact phrase)

       mind surface -heart     (Searches for articles containing the words mind and surface but excludes any articles containing the word heart)

       mind surface ~heart     (Searches for articles containing the words mind and surface and including synonyms for the word heart)

       Jalal*    (Wildcard character * matches any number of characters, this example finds Jalal, Jalali, Jalaluddin)

       bat*n  (Wildcard character * matches any number of characters, this example finds batin, bateen)

 

Search Engine 1 - for the Spiritual Topics portion of this web site (primarily, but not exclusively, Inayat Khan books and papers):

 


 

Search Engine 2 - Exclusively Inayat Khan books and papers (which may exclude some useful articles about Inayat Khan and/or his philosophy):

 

 

 

Search Engine 3 - for this Entire Web Site (including my personal pages, calculators and technical articles):

 

 

 


General Tips for using this search engine:

Search for the words or phrases which you want to see in your results. You may search for phrases by enclosing the phrase with quote marks, such as "love, harmony and beauty".  (Note, however, that a quoted search phrase must not contain  any apostrophe, single quote or double quote.)

The usefulness of your search will primarily depend upon your choice of search words.  In general, searching works best for words which are uncommon, and/or when using a known phrase (enclosed in quote marks). The search is not case sensitive, so you can ignore capitalization.

Note that some words, such as love, heart or beauty occur hundreds of times in these volumes. Therefore, in such cases you may receive a very large quantity of search results if you only search for one common word. You will have better results if you search for several words which you want to see near each other, such as:  love harmony beauty.

Try it a few times... it takes some practice to get good results.
 

Additional Search Syntax:

The characters  ", *, +, -, and ~ are powerful search modifiers which may be used to fine-tune your search.

The search engine assumes you know the words or concepts which you are looking for. However, if you're a bit unsure of whether you want, for example, results with the word "desire" included or you want results with similar words such as word "longing", then you can simply put a tilde ~ in front of the word (with no space) to tell the search engine to use a thesaurus on that word.

To search for a phrase, or words that must appear immediately next to each other, put the words inside of quote marks. For example, type in the phrase "doors of the heart", click on Search and you will see the context in which Inayat Khan used that exact phrase. When quote marks "       "  are used to specify a phrase which you want to search for, the search phrase must not contain apostrophe, single quote or double quote marks.

You may use an asterisk as a wildcard to match any number of letters. For example, wh* will match why, where, when, whether, or any other word starting with the letters wh. This feature is often useful when the exact spelling is not known.

You may use a + sign immediately in front of any term to indicate that it  must be included in your results, and you may use a - sign immediately in front of any term which must be excluded from your results.

Searches are not case sensitive, so you may ignore capitalization of all the words.

For additional more advanced options, first perform a normal search, and then click on the "Advanced" button on the search results page.
 

Standardization of Spelling:

The printed volumes of the Sufi Message were prepared by a variety of editors over the years, and contained some inconsistent spelling. For example, some editions used the British spelling colour while some used color, some used Koran while others used Qur'an, and so on. Since searching the text is very difficult with multiple spellings of various words, such inconsistencies have been generally standardized using contemporary American English in this on-line edition, except in scripture and poetry. Specific references to the book called "The Bowl of Saki" remain as "saki", while all other uses of the word have been changed to saqi. For more details about the standardization of spelling, please see the end of the Glossary page.


Word List:

If you are unsure of how a word is spelled on this web site, you can enter a few letters of a potential search term to see how, or if, the word appears on this web site:



Or, try one of these options:

Complete list of all words in the Inayat Khan texts  (Another way to find the spelling of any word)

Sufi Message Glossary   (To find spelling and definitions of non-English words)

 


updated 11-Sep-2024