Blues for Allah

>> Salman Ahmed of Junoon, Pakistan’s biggest rock band, has a prescription for peace

SUFI WITH A SIX-STRING: Junoon’s Salman Ahmed

This month marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the qawwal, or Muslim devotional singer, who became Pakistan’s most recognized cultural export. His memory is particularly resonant to Salman Ahmed, guitarist, songwriter, producer and founder of Pakistan’s leading rock band, Junoon (the Urdu word for “obsession”).

In the early ’90s, while Junoon was building momentum, Ahmed moonlit as guitarist for the king of the qawwals. “I think the last time I performed with him was in 1996, at a stadium in Karachi, for 20,000 people,” he says, over the phone from New York, where he teaches at the City University. “That same night, it was the cricket world cup, Pakistan had just lost the quarterfinals to India, and the whole country was in a state of shock. That night, I was thinking, ‘Holy shit, who’s gonna come to this gig?’ But 20,000 people came—to begin with, very subdued, like somebody had died in the family. But his voice just lifted everybody up. It was a catharsis, man. It destroyed the wall between the audience and the performer. Same thing that rock ’n’ roll does, it takes you to a more transcendent, joyous plane.”

Music’s porous borders and possibilities for cross-pollination were never lost on Nusrat, who worked with rockers like Peter Gabriel, Eddie Vedder and Rick Rubin. Ahmed continues that tradition of upending tradition with Junoon’s stirring strain of “Sufi rock,” blending panoramic blues-rock riffs and sweeping synths with Muslim musical principles, political potency and the transcendental spirit of Sufism, Islam’s progressive, mystic sect.

“Nusrat’s view was that music is an ocean, and all the rivers and streams should lead into it. He said to me, ‘Look, God loves diversity.’ That really changed my worldview of music because, growing up, we always looked at qawwali as a sacred art form, it had to be kept pure, you can’t mix rock with it. It was spending that time with him that opened my mind completely—like blue skies.”

Hep to Zep

Nusrat wasn’t the first to do so for Ahmed. “I was 11 years old when I moved to the States,” he recalls, “and I had no idea about rock ’n’ roll. My first concert was Led Zeppelin at Madison Square Garden, and it completely blew my mind. I saw Jimmy Page on stage with a two-headed guitar and dragons painted on his pants, with these laser lights hitting him, and I was transformed. Oh my God! I want to be that! And if you listen to Zeppelin’s music, there’s so much Arabic and Indian folk elements in there. They were mining a lot of the music that I grew up with.”

Ahmed returned to Pakistan for medical school, but upon graduation, he chose to “put down the stethoscope and pick up a guitar,” as he puts it.

“It shocked a lot of people—are you out of your mind? How are you going to earn money? I took that stand because, at that time, Pakistani society was under a military dictatorship. Ziad Al Haq was a religious extremist, he was allied to the U.S. fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, but what he’d done to his country was that he’d taken it back 100 years, culturally.”

Recognizing that healing his homeland would take more than two pills and call in the morning, Ahmed chose a different prescription. “I found that music was a way—starting with just playing secret gigs for six or seven students in Lahore, in a matter of two or three years, it snowballed. There was so much hunger and thirst for music, and I realized, you could be a rock star, but also, music could bring social change to the country.”

Buddies with Bono, butting heads with Bhutto

Today, Ahmed’s efforts for change reach beyond Pakistan. He’s become a go-to guy for the American media seeking a sympathetic Muslim voice (Google “Youtube” and “Junoon” for worthwhile documentary clips). He’s all buddy-buddy with Bill Clinton and Bono, and hooked up to so many UN goodwill projects (notably in the fight against AIDS—check junoon.com for more on that) that one wonders where he finds the time to rock.

While his perspective’s gone global, Ahmed’s never lost sight of his homeland, which is now—what with Musharraf’s grip slipping, the reverberations of the Red Mosque siege and disgraced former prime minister Benazir Bhutto angling to get back in the game—at a very tense point in its history.

“The extremism that you see right now is a symptom, not a disease in itself. The disease is two main things—that in six decades [since Pakistan’s founding], the gap between rich and poor has become dangerously wide, and that gap is widened by the lack of good, quality education for all Pakistanis.

“I’ve had my run-ins with Benazir, I was banned by both her and [former prime minister] Nawaz Sharif because I wrote a song called ‘Accountability.’ What that showed was that politicians and the military, the establishment, have put themselves before the people. Until they realize that they’re there to serve the people, not rule them, this volatile situation will continue to hang like a dark shadow over Pakistan.”

If that dark shadow has a silver lining, Ahmed’s the type to see it. “I’ve always been optimistic. I mean, I started a rock band in a country where rock music is considered blasphemous. If you go by the weather forecast, and it says, the next 10 years, it’ll be raining, what are you gonna do? Just hunker down in your house, or take an umbrella and try to go through life? I want to go out and bring change. I realize that I’m just one person, but if enough people have that optimism, that they can make their small changes in the world for the good, I think the world can turn around.”

With Josh, the Bilz feat. Kashif, Noori,
RDB, Zameer and Falak at l’Olympia on
Saturday, Aug. 18, 6 p.m., $40-$75