His band is called Junoon. In Urdu, that means “obsessive passion” – the kind that drives Pakistani rock star Salman Ahmad, often called the Bono of South Asia. The word “junoon” comes from the root “majnun,” which means “totally crazy,” going by Ahmad’s translation. In “The Arabian Nights,” he says, Majnun is a character who falls madly in love with Laila, the inspiration behind the “Layla” in Eric Clapton’s song about crazy passion.
“Even I don’t know what my junoon is,” Ahmad says. “It’s that whisper which comes from the heart. It might not have wings, but it has the power to fly. People see it as impulsive, but it’s more intuitive.”
His intuitions have served him well. Through his baritone and his acoustic guitar, he has found a way to bridge bitter divides – the clash that keeps Westerners and Middle Easterners apart, as well as the conflict within Islamic sects. His concerts in South Asia often draw tens of thousands of screaming fans. On a more stately occasion, he provided the entertainment in Oslo when former U.S. vice president Al Gore received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Ahmad recently recorded a best-selling CD with Melissa Etheridge, “Ring the Bells,” and gave a huge concert at the United Nations in the fall to raise money for Pakistan. Even with all that acclaim, there is not an ounce of self-importance in the way he carries himself.
Ahmad was in Washington for meetings with think-tankers and politicos; he even sang for White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and other luminaries gathered at the Kuwait Ambassador’s gala benefit, last weekend. As he arrived at the Bombay Club for the interview, heads turned and eyes followed the strikingly tall, dark-haired man with a trimmed mustache and beard. He was wearing a fur hat with a Davey Crockett vibe, a dark Nehru jacket with an “Imagine Peace” pin, a blue T-shirt and a silver charm necklace.
There is something unusually compelling about his combination of total coolness, gentle innocence and self-deprecating humor. At 46, he still has a child’s heart. At last year’s Brookings Institution conference on Muslim-American relations, in Doha, Qatar, he sort of owned the place: With every appearance, he was immediately surrounded by admiring wonks, wanting to bask in his aura of peaceful energy. There is even a healing quality about him. Perhaps it’s because he has just been dowsed.
Samina, Ahmad’s wife, whom he met and fell in love with at age 17, is a holistic health counselor. Both are, in fact, physicians – though he had always wanted to be a musician, his parents persuaded him to become a doctor. She’s also accomplished in the kitchen and for six years had her own cooking show on television. She was, he says, the Martha Stewart of Pakistan. Samina recently learned to dowse, which is done with a pendulum-like mechanism. “It’s like prayer,” he says. “It uses positive energy from the universe. It’s not distant from the Muslim tradition.”
“I know,” he says with a laugh, “that it sounds like hocus-pocus, and I was skeptical at first. It’s like a spiritual ouija board. It raises people’s energies.” He says it’s certainly hard to describe, and that it’s not like the divining rods that Westerners used to find water. His wife started dowsing him in June, and when she does, he recites a Muslim prayer: I seek refuge in the Lord of Daybreak. He focuses on a specific issue that may be bothering him, making him melancholy or anxious. “It’s a cathartic process,” he explains. “Through prayer and talking, you lift yourself out of it.”
Although he appears not to have a care in the world, he offers a confession: “As all artists are, I’m all over the place. Neurosis, paranoia. But within 30 minutes, Samina can bring the best out of me. It’s incredible. Magic happens when you do it every day.” And they do. When his wife was in Pakistan for three weeks, dowsing her mother, who was recovering from breast cancer, she found time to dowse Ahmad – via Skype – every day.
Ahmad, a Muslim, is Sufi by choice. “The Prophet Muhammad was neither a Sunni nor a Shiite,” he says. “He was just a Muslim.” In Islam, he says, “all you need to believe in is one God. That’s it. True Islam and Sufism is about coexistence, pluralism, love for humanity. The whole thrust of Sufism is a quest for self-discovery, seeking God from within the self.” The problem with Islam today, he says, “is that Muslims have stopped paying attention to the most important instruction in the Quran: seeking knowledge. In the last 400 years, Muslims have switched their brains off. That’s how you get to the Taliban and al-Qaida.”
Ahmad says Sufis have been given a bad rap, painted as a bunch of hippies, and he launches into a spirited rebuttal. “They produced the poet Rumi, Ibn el-Arabi and Iqbal. They created the whirling dervishes – the dance to seek God. They’ve always been the faith-based community organizers. They do the hard work. The extremists and mullahs fear the potential of the Sufis, so they broad-brush them as just singers and dancers who hang around cafes reading poetry, smoking hash and doing nothing.”
Speaking of hanging around cafes, we pause to look at the menu. He chooses Mulligatawny soup. I order fried spinach, and we share the vegetarian Bombay Thali, a platter containing small portions of popular dishes. He dives into my spinach. “That would be great with red wine,” he says, though both of us are drinking water.
He has a new book out, “Rock & Roll Jihad,” and an album of the same name is on the way. His music is based on, you guessed it, Sufi poetry, and manages to be inspirational as well as commercial. His publishers were against his using the word jihad – or, as he calls it, “the ‘J’ word” – in the title of his book. But, he says, jihad means “self-improvement, taking on challenges in the world, (it is) never about flying planes into buildings.” Ahmad cites Muhammad, who talked about overcoming “nafs” – the ego, all of one’s negative instincts. “Jihad is about positive struggle,” Ahmad insists. “We have to rescue the word back from the terrorists. They’ve hijacked jihad, Islam, Muslim communities. The terrorists and murderous thugs are masquerading as holy men.”
He leans back in the velvet banquette and relaxes a bit. He has endured constant conflicts with Pakistani rulers, past and present, and remains determined to take on corruption where he sees it. He and his wife have become American citizens (when his dad’s job moved the family to the United States, he spent six teenage years in Tappan, N.Y., and he got turned on to rock ’n’ roll), and they are raising their three boys in this suburban hamlet, not far from the big city. “New York stimulates me,” he says. “It’s a great symbol of unity and diversity.”
He was a fan and good friend of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto when she got started in politics and asked to meet this charismatic presence in their native country: “I saw her as the light, but in her heart, she was feudal. Then she went berserk, responsible for mass corruption.” Ahmad wrote a tongue-in-cheek song about her called “Ehtesaab,” or “Accountability.”
It was the first time a rock ’n’ roll musician had taken aim at a Pakistani politician. One of her aides called him and warned him not to bite the hand that fed him. “I told him to [expletive] off,” he recalls. Her government accused him of treason and banned his music from Pakistan for three years. He subsequently played concerts in India to huge crowds, which upset officials even more. “I told them that India and Pakistan need cultural fusion, not nuclear fusion,” he says. Again an accusation of treason. Ironically, it was Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s military coup that brought him back to Pakistan. “His kids were huge Junoon fans,” Ahmad says.
It wasn’t until after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks though, that the Ahmads decided to leave Pakistan and move to the United States. “Both my worlds had collided,” he says. “My faith, my family, split down the center. People wanted to know, ‘Which side are you on?’” Muslims, he says, deemed him a “nut job.” Still, he has great hopes for Pakistan, he says, if it can get out of its colonial mentality and if it can educate “the 100 million young people under the age of 24, before they become brainwashed by the madrasas into becoming suicide bombers.”
Although he spends a lot of time in Pakistan and speaks to politicians from different parties, he says “musicians are an endangered species” in his homeland. Thus he travels with bodyguards. “I know I’m a moving target for extremists. The media hates my guts, especially when I defend America. They want me to choose sides,” he says.
Years ago, before he met Samina, she went on the hajj, a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina that every Muslim must make at least once in a lifetime. Her husband, however, has not. He would like to go with her and his sons some day, but he’s not ready yet. “God wants me to go when I have quieted my demons, so I can go in peace,” he says. When the right time comes, he’ll know. “I trust the whisper in my heart.”
As we finish lunch, he asks to say a prayer for me. He takes my hands in his, kisses them, bows his head and quietly recites the verse from the Quran: I seek refuge in the Lord of the Daybreak. Then he blows gently on my fingers and kisses my hands again.
– The Washington Post
