A 'Bauhaus Evening' with Inayat Khan
Sending Inayat Khan out into the world, his teacher told him to try to harmonize his music and his poetry with whatever cultures he might find 'out there', in the West.
This is chapter 91 (of 130) of my unpublished nonfiction manuscript,
The Will to Style: Radical Utopians of the Weimar Bauhaus 1919-25.
The Sufi musician Inayat Khan (1882-1927) arrived in Weimar on October 22, 1921. He gave two presentations that weekend, the first being on Saturday at the Bauhaus State School. The following afternoon, Khan addressed a different group in a “salon discussion” at Villa Silverblick, otherwise known as the Friedrich Nietzsche Archive.
Carrying his long-necked sitar, Khan was on a decades-long world-tour, launched in 1910 at the encouragement of his Sufi teacher, Sayyed Muhammad Abu Hashim Madani. Bidding farewell to his favored student that year, Sayyed advised the young Kahn to travel around the globe; out there, said Sayyed, Kahn should do what he could to harmonize the spirit of his own poetry and music with whatever spiritual or intellectual cultures he might find, deep in the West.
Inayat Kahn worked as a traveling musician during the next four years, giving concerts in the United States and Europe. For a time, he was accompanied onstage by his three brothers, Maheboob (Mohammed) Khan (1887–1948); Ali Khan (1881–1958), and Musharraf (Moulamia) Khan (1895–1967). Playing the sitar and other instruments, the traveling band performed the music they’d learned from their grandfather, Moula Baksh, who’d been a sitar-playing ‘rock star’ in his own time. (Baksh was also well-known as a musical/cultural bridge-builder, bringing two different Indian traditions — Hindustani and Karnatic — into greater musical harmony.)
In Weimar, during the eleventh year of his world journey, the 39-year-old Inayat Khan apparently was traveling alone. That night, the Sufi teacher gave students at the Bauhaus school a captivating musical performance, spiced-up with a talk on Eastern spirituality. By this time, Khan’s travels and learning had made him fluent in Western cultures and different fields of study. With great skill, he used Western terms from different scholarly disciplines and clearly explained his Eastern traditions. Either through a translator or speaking in English, Kahn peppered his talks with his own observations of common, everyday experiences that were easily understood and shared by most, if not all of his listeners.
In Germany, Kahn shared his thoughts regarding complicated Western ideas of philosophy, of psychology, and religious belief. Seeing him in Weimar and many other places, his audiences were amazed by Kahn’s ability to bring everything into harmony, as easily as a singer or musician harmonizes music….