Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Dimitri Ehrlich, Shambhala Sun, May 1997.
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan is a soft-spoken man. Despite his ability to sing, without a microphone, in a voice of such power and grace that he is now South Asia's most popular musician, in person his words tumble out in whispers, disappearing into his ample chest.
The Pakistani singer is perhaps the world's greatest living master of qawwali, a mystical Sufi music in which the voice coils upward like a snake being charmed out of a basket, raising listeners to a kind of spiritual ecstasy.
Qawwali is among those forms of music in which religion and sex seem most closely intertwined: for while Khan's lyrics are all based on Islamic law, his voice, accompanied by a party of tabla drummers and harmonium players, has a quavering orgasmic quality that drives listeners wild, causing them to shower the stage with money and dance in a manner that would be considered most unbecoming by the ayatollahs of this world.
Although Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan has recorded more than a hundred albums and enjoyed
widespread popularity in Pakistani communities around the world for many years, it is
only recently that Western audiences have begun to discover his work. His profile in the
United States began to soar after Peter Gabriel performed live with him and helped
distribute Khan's albums in the West. More recently, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam sought
Khan out for a collaboration that appeared on the soundtrack of the movie Dead Man
Walking.
A few days after attending the MTV Video Music Awards with Peter Gabriel, Khan sat
down with me in the dimly-lit lounge of a hotel in midtown Manhattan, attended by an
interpreter and manager. Although he is not a particularly tall man, he weighs several
hundred pounds, with a protuberant mid-section that's difficult not to notice. But his
hands look like they belong on a little girl, ending in wispy fingertips, and one finger is
adorned by a jade ring the size of a grape. His watch, a sleek black and gold number
from Cartier, would be at home on the wrist of an oil sheik. His eyebrows are barely
existent, and he has a giant, smooth forehead with fiery eyes weirdly planted a bit higher
in the skull than normal.
As his vast corpulence settled into the couch, his beige gown draping the floor, he
seemed kingly, unearthly, and decidedly out of place in the middle of New York. Sitting
there in the shadows, occasionally rubbing his eyes with evident exhaustion, Khan spoke
softly and without any hint of his awesome lung power. His presence went largely
unnoticed by passersby, who were unaware of the musical legend in their midst.
