Thursday, April 22, 2010
One day in 1982, a Pakistani medical student named Salman Ahmad was playing guitar at a student talent show in a Lahore hotel when a young religious fanatic dashed on stage.
He snatched Ahmad's Gibson Les Paul from round his neck and smashed it, because he thought rock music was an affront to Islam. It was, Ahmad says, a profound moment in his life.
"For me to feel like I wanted to smash my guitar, it would have been a political statement," he says. "The idea of getting on stage is to steal the show. I didn't even finish my show and my guitar was being smashed by somebody else. It took me four years to decide whether to pursue music after that. I didn't want to play music if people wanted to kill you for playing guitar."
Ahmad spent the next few years playing cricket – his other passion – to a high standard, alongside the likes of Imran Khan, who later led Pakistan to victory in the World Cup. On a cricket tour of Bangladesh, he met some local musicians in a Dhaka hotel lobby who got him play guitar in exchange for some match tickets. Ahmad says: "I started playing Black Magic Woman and everything just came back and I thought, 'That's my space.' A light bulb went on in my head and I thought, 'If these Bangladeshi kids are enjoying this, why can't we play in Lahore?' Despite the logic that said, 'Become a doctor, it's safer', my junoon [in Urdu, "extreme passion"] said 'No way."
Ahmad, whose autobiography Rock & Roll Jihad was published last week, was born in Lahore in 1963, but his family moved around a lot because of his father's job in the airline industry he lived in Kuwait, London, Denmark and the US, where he fell in love with rock music. Going to see Led Zeppelin at Madison Square Garden in 1977 was "an assault on the senses", he says. "The excitement I felt as Led Zeppelin ripped into its set began at the base of my spine and enveloped first my heart and then my head. I didn't know any Zeppelin songs but it didn't matter. Celtic, Indian, and Arabic melodies combined with the blues with effortless ease."
He bought a guitar and became part of a high-school band, with Jewish and Catholic friends. "I was the overweight, brown kid – the last person on earth, who would be a rock star," he says. Then, when he was 18, his parents moved the family back to Pakistan, where Ahmad enrolled in medical school. But the years in America had left their mark, and Ahmad started playing in public – until a fanatic smashed his guitar.
Four years later, after his spirits had been revived by playing Black Magic Woman in that Dhaka hotel lobby, Ahmad made another choice: to reach out to the youth of Pakistan who were not allowed to listen to rock, under the dictatorship of its then ruler, General Zia-ul-Haq.
Combining classic rock and the blues and mixing it with the mystical music and poetry of Islamic Sufism, he created "Sufi rock". At first it was in clandestine, small-scale bands. But then, after General Zia died in 1988, rock was able to move overground in Pakistan, and Ahmad joined first Vital Signs, then, in 1991, Junoon, who have sold 30m albums worldwide between them. Politicians, celebrities and journalists clamoured to be associated with them because they represented a progressive Pakistan.
Defying death threats, Ahmad fashioned Junoon as advocates of pluralism, tolerance and coexistence. "I wanted a natural meeting ground for the different [western and eastern] sounds, whereas other bands wanted to ape [western bands]," Ahmad says. "I didn't want us to just be the Pakistani Led Zeppelin."
Now 46, Ahmad lives and teaches in New York and continues to resist labels. "Boxes are created – Punjabi, Pakistani, American – by society just to get a sense of order and hierarchy. The reality is in the gaps."
Rock & Roll Jihad is published by Simon & Schuster. Junoon's album of the same name is being released digitally by Nameless Sufi music
Picture: 'Boxes are created by society' … Salman Ahmad. Photo: Farooq Naeem/Getty
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