A 'Bauhaus Evening' with Inayat Khan
Sending Inayat Khan out into the world, his teacher told him to try to harmonize his music and poetry with whatever cultures he might find 'out there', in the West.
This is a re-worked, still-relevant article I originally posted two years ago. It’s still Chapter 91 (of 130) of my still-unpublished nonfiction manuscript, The Will to Style: Radical Utopians of the Weimar Bauhaus 1919-25. (I’ve all-but given-up on ‘analog’ publishing of this book: The state of our trans-continental/global “idea marketplace” looks a little grim, at the moment. (“Justkeepswimming, justkeepswimming….”)
This “Berlin Story” about Sufi musician Inayat Khan has two ‘upgrades’: 1) I removed the pay-wall, since today’s Techocracy is making more of us more-broke than ever; and 2) You can hear my ‘live-tone’ recording of the story. If you listen & follow along with the text, you’ll get some extrta bits of ‘mind-candy, sprinkled-in, here & there.
Thanks, readers/listeners!
As ever,
topper
PS: The actual story doesn’t start until minute 1:51.
Move your curser to that point if you want to skip
over the too-long intro. -ts
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 Khan to travel around the globe; out there, said Sayyed, Khan 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 Khan 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, Khan 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, Khan 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 Khan’s ability to bring everything into harmony, as easily as a singer or musician harmonizes music….
Speaking to his audience of Bauhaus students, Inayat Khan described two East-Asian traditions: 1) the ideas of Islam’s Sufi order, and; 2) as a practitioner of Yoga, the way of the Yogi, stemming from Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain Dharma traditions.
Although he’d been raised as a “mainstream” Muslim, Khan easily drifted into the larger, utopian Sufi idealism, which said that all the world’s religions “have their value and place in human evolution.”
The Yogi and the Sufi represent “the two schools of inner (learning)…that are most known in the East,” Khan told his German audience. The difference between these two ways of learning might best be understood as “the difference between Knowledge (Western Science) and Art (Art).”
“The path of the Yogi is indifference to all things of the world, a retirement into (contemplative) seclusion,” said Khan. “The Sufi’s (path) is to enjoy and appreciate life in all its forms; to be conscious of the divine source;…the Divine Beauty.” To the Sufi, our encounters with art, literature, poetry, dance and music — human engagement in “all forms of Beauty” — are integral to human spiritual- and intellectual (geistig) development.
His family background and skill as a musician suggest that Khan was more Sufi than Yogi. In the 1920s, he emphasized the need for Germans and Western Europeans to change their perspective, and noted a Sufi “Call to all nations for unity, friendship, and understanding of each other.”
Of course, all was not right with the world.
Western materialism and commercialism had risen to the point of ‘the greatest disaster the world has ever seen,’ said Khan, referring to World War I.
“Think how divided is Humanity today,” said Khan. “Nation is against nation; races against races; classes against classes; religions against religions, (and) individuals against individuals.”
Humanity has suffered a harmful lack, he said. In the West, people “lack a strong sense of the Beauty of Life.”
“Man has lost the key to the Art of Life,” he said. “Through their pride, humans have lost the Vision of God. Man’s own interest in himself — his self-love — has brought him to this point.”
“More than ever before in the world today,” people need to hear the Sufi message, said Khan. “For, during these years, materialism and commercialism have increased until they have brought about the greatest disaster the world has ever seen,” he said, referring to World War I, which had just ended three years before.
Art teacher Johannes Itten was the instructor at the Weimar Bauhaus most open to East-Asian ideas. For years, Itten had begun each of his classes with Yoga exercises, teaching his Vienna students how to control their breathing and the movements of their hands while disciplining their minds. (Itten also was an advocate of vegetarianism.) Unfortunately, Johannes Itten had fallen ill on the weekend of Inayat Khan’s visit. The Swiss art teacher did not get to meet the Sufi musician; nor could he attend his 1921 salons in Weimar — as Itten wrote to publisher Eugen Diederich, who had just hosted Khan’s peformances in Jena.1
“[T]he thoughts that (Khan) expressed are exactly the same as what I’ve known and taught intuitively for five years,” wrote Itten. “So, you can imagine how pleased I am to learn of a second person — or even of an entire order — that has been thinking and doing such things for so long a time.”
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SOURCES:
Eric R. Roose, University of Amsterdam. “Dargāh or Buddha? The Politics of Building a Sufiji Sanctuary for Hazrat Inayat Khan in the West” (Journal of Sufiji Studies 1 (2012) 193–223 brill.com/jss DOI: 10.1163/22105956-12341239. Downloaded on 1.Sept.2024.)
Inayat Khan on ‘The Nature of Art’. [Mitschrift von Henriëtte van Tuyll (van Serooskerken) Willebeek le Mair. Nekbakht Foundation. Suresnes/Frankreich, NL.]
Bernhard, Peter. Ein Sufi in Bauhaus. In: Bernhard, Peter, Ed. “Bauhaus Vorträge: Gastredner am Weimarer Bauhaus 1919-1925.” (Gebr. Mann Verlag, Berlin. 2017.) p 233
Itten likely was informed about Khan’s tour through a close friend at the Bauhaus, art historian and writer Bruno Adler, who organized the ‘Bauhaus Evening’ talks in Weimar. Adler also had sold articles to Eugen Diederich for his Modern, activist art magazine, Die Tat (The Deed)….