Heavy Metal Islam (28 page)

PAKISTAN

Shotguns and Munaqqababes Along the Arabian Sea

M
aybe it was the thirteen-hour time difference. Maybe it was arriving at 6:00 a.m., after two nearly sleepless nights in coach, at an airport that had recently been attacked by terrorists, where—at least in the arrival lounge—it seemed that hardly anyone was speaking a language I could understand. Or the fact that from all the news reports, conversations with friends, and even the tension on the plane, it was clear that Pakistan was entering another one of those violent periods that have defined its short history.

Landing in Islamabad, I was literally on the opposite side of the Earth, as my five-year-old son, Alessandro, pointed out to me a few days before I left, when he traced the longitudinal line from California over the North Pole and down (roughly) to Pakistan. Even Iraq, a far more violent and depressing place today than Pakistan—as of early 2008—somehow felt more familiar to me. At least I could speak Arabic. Pakistan was definitely not in my cultural and historical comfort zone. Yet the Himalayas were only a couple of hours away; for all I knew, the Buddha had walked not too far from where I was standing. And, quite probably, so had Osama bin Laden.

I had come to Pakistan on the trail of a friend and kindred spirit, Salman Ahmed of the Pakistani supergroup Junoon. Salman was home in upstate New York, preparing for a stint as artist-in-residence at Queens College. My journey was to find out how and why Salman, and Junoon bandmates Ali Azmat (vocals) and American Brian O’Connell (bass), managed to do what few artists I’ve met in the Muslim world—or anywhere else for that matter—have done in quite a long time: create a powerful, truly groundbreaking new form of rock ’n’ roll, and use their fame to offer a direct challenge to a corrupt and despotic political and economic system.

It depresses Salman deeply that Pakistan today is in even worse shape than when Junoon first made its musical stand against the system in the mid-1990s. Indeed, the country seems to be more frayed than at any time since the eastern half of the country split off to form Bangladesh, almost two generations ago. A generation before, in 1947, the establishment of Pakistan had been accompanied by great bloodshed between Indian Muslims and Hindus and one of the greatest population transfers in world history. It also saw the creation of a country out of four regions—Punjab, Sindh, Baluchistan, and the North-West Frontier Province (part of Kashmir is also under Pakistani control)—that had very little in common culturally and linguistically.

At the root of the push to create a separate Muslim state for the Muslims of India was the belief by the community’s leaders that Muslims would never be more than second-class citizens in a Hindu-dominated state. Creating a “spiritually pure” (
pak
) Muslim country (
stan
) that could link together the various ethnic groups of northwestern and eastern India was considered the best answer to this problem by the majority of India’s Muslim elite. Offering a cultural alternative to the materialism of the Western culture bequeathed to India was also an important consideration for Pakistan’s founders.

The drive to create a unique culture also provided a political and spiritual foundation for contemporary Pakistani music. In fact, the ideology behind “Pakistan” was far more successful as a catalyst for developing Pakistani music than it was in uniting the country’s disparate peoples into a coherent nation. A semifeudal economic system, ethnic discrimination, and rampant corruption led the Bengali province of East Pakistan to split off from the more powerful western half of the country and establish Bangladesh in 1971. Similar problems have continued to plague the country since then, whether under the dictatorships of Zia ul-Haq or Pervez Musharraf, or the more “democratic” regimes of Ali Bhutto, his daughter Benazir, and her rival Nawaz Sharif.

The Passion of Pakistani Rock

Pakistan’s corrupt and violent rulers did produce one good thing, albeit inadvertently: Pakistani rock. Rock ’n’ roll in its various forms has flourished in Pakistan despite official prohibitions against the music (whether through censoring albums or prohibiting concerts) from the 1970s through the early 1990s. Even today musicians, especially bands that play the harder styles of rock and metal, find it difficult to find forums in which to play. Hotels, university halls, a few public theaters, and army bases (which are supposed to be free of the conservative religious sentiment that is opposed to rock music) remain the only venues where most metal bands can perform.

Yet out of this difficult soil a large and vibrant music scene has grown. In a reversal of the standard practice in the United States or Europe, in Pakistan bands tend to record their own music in home studios, then follow up by recording inexpensive but, thanks to digital technology, professional-quality videos. These are sent to MTV Pakistan, The Musik, or upward of a dozen other music video channels. Based on viewer response, the video might make it into heavy rotation, at which point a record company will pay a flat fee for the rights to sell a band’s album. This leads to more-frequent and bigger concerts and, if everything works out just right, tours across Pakistan, India, the Persian Gulf, and the UK. (It’s worth noting that Western rockers have recently picked up on this idea. As Sheryl Crow explains, “It’s an interesting time because you used to make a video for a million dollars with a great director. Now you spend $10,000, if that, with no hair and makeup, and do it completely guerrilla style.)”

Rock ’n’ roll would never have taken root, at least in its present form, without Junoon. The band is everywhere, despite being more or less split up as of this writing. Junoon remains the god of Pakistani pop music. The band’s name is spoken of by other rock musicians in Pakistan with the kind of reverence—and occasionally jealousy—that was once inspired by the Beatles and Rolling Stones.

Junoon created a style of music, known as “Sufi rock,” which mixes hard-driving guitar riffs with traditional melodies. In Arabic, Persian, and Urdu,
junoon
means “passion” or “obsession.” The name was chosen to reflect the band members’ objective of using music to confront the repressive political, social, and economic realities of the Zia and Bhutto governments. “The band was a specific counter to the legacy of the dictatorship,” Ali Azmat explained to me. “The first political statement that I made was to get a rock band together. I wanted to sing about the social disparity and violence in society and articulate those issues through music.” In short, the members of Junoon saw themselves as “musical guerrillas,” and in response the government did its best to stop the band, banning it for a time, following members, and tapping their phones.

Salman, the band’s cofounder, was born in Pakistan, but he lived in upstate New York from the ages of eleven to eighteen, during which time he was lucky enough to see Led Zeppelin perform during its last U.S. tour, in 1977. When Jimmy Page came onstage through a haze of smoke, wearing a white satin dragon suit and playing a double-necked guitar, Salman knew his future: to take the power and dynamism of Zeppelin’s music and blend it with the beauty and spiritual heights of the Qawwali and Sufi music of his homeland to produce a style of music that the world had never heard before.

Salman’s teenage years were spent literally bleeding into his guitar (that’s what happens when you practice up to a dozen hours a day for months on end). And so it wasn’t surprising that when his parents persuaded him to return to Pakistan to study medicine, he spent as much time jamming and playing in talent shows as he did studying anatomy. “My guitar became my stethoscope and music became my medicine,” he says. It wasn’t easy to heal the nation, however, given the ban against rock albums and concerts. Making matters worse, militants regularly destroyed the band’s equipment at gigs, and even threatened to shoot its members.

Despite the numerous obstacles, by the mid-1990s Junoon was attracting 20,000 or more screaming fans to their shows, the majority of them women. In the process, the band became the first Pakistani group to win the MTV India awards for best rock band, beating out Sting and Def Leppard. But Junoon was always more than just a musical group. With fame came a more urgent sense of mission, which saw them step—literally, in front of a throng of Pakistani and Indian media—over the border between Pakistan and India to promote peace between the two countries. They also took on the nuclear arms race, arguing that Pakistan should be pursuing “cultural fusion, not nuclear fusion.”

Needless to say, a public challenge to Pakistan’s nuclear program was bound to cause problems at home. But whatever backlash they endured was mild compared with the reaction of the government to the band’s 1997 hit “Ehtesab,” which chronicled the corruption of the democratically elected Bhutto government (which had replaced the military regime of Zia al-Huq after the latter’s death in 1988). One of Bhutto’s aides called and asked Salman if he was looking to commit suicide by doing such a song. His reply, as he recounted in a VH-1 documentary about the band, was the perfect synthesis of heavy metal and rebellious activism: “Fuck you, motherfucker”—with two middle fingers added for emphasis. The risks Junoon was taking with its music and politics were clear.

If there could be no Pakistani rock without Junoon, there would be no Junoon without Led Zeppelin and Salman Ahmed’s hero, Jimmy Page. The influence is obvious when you listen to riffs on Junoon songs such as “Ghoom,” “Meri Awaaz Suno,” and “Saeein.” All are innovative blends of hard-driving riffs, “secret” Jimmy Page tunings (although I’m not sure how he learned them, since Page hadn’t revealed them when Salman recorded the songs), and Qawwali melodies Salman had learned as a student of the great Sufi singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

The band’s powerful, no-frills performances also resembled the classic Zeppelin shows of the early 1970s. Yet listening to Junoon, what stands out, paradoxically, are not the hard-rock riffs. Instead there is a softness to Pakistani metal, and rock more broadly, that is quite unique. Not soft in the sense of lacking power, but soft in the sense in which a ta’i chi master speaks of softness as the key to deploying far more power than is possible when the body is rigid.

Most metal bands I’ve discussed in this book, even the Gnawa-inflected scales of “Marockan roll,” stick close to the traditional foundations of metal in their focus on the downbeat (even at ridiculously high speeds) and riffs whose melodies stay within the melodic parameters of traditional European minor scales. Junoon and other Pakistani bands such as Karavan, Mizraab, and Aaroh are too deeply grounded in the more fluid and tonally flexible music of the subcontinent to be limited by these structures. They don’t have the Iranian
koron
as a tonal or political inspiration, but they do have the complex scales of classical Indian music, which offer twenty-two intervals to choose from in constructing the
that
or
raga
—scale—of a particular song.

You can hear the deep subcontinental roots of the band in songs like one of Junoon’s biggest hits, “Sayonee,” which features a catchy acoustic guitar rhythm driven by a tabla groove and a funky bass line, over which Ali Azmat and Salman Ahmed alternate haunting Urdu vocals and a fiery rock guitar solo. Perhaps most famous is the song “Ghoom,” in which Salman plays a Jimmy Page–style red Gibson double-necked guitar in an homage to Led Zeppelin’s “The Rain Song,” with the addition of a hard-edged riff at the bridge. Such eclecticism might make Junoon’s metal credentials suspect to hard-core metalheads, but it’s what gives Pakistan one of the most interesting music scenes in the world.

Metal Rules in the Abode of Islam

Until a month or so before I arrived, Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad (“Abode of Peace”) was considered a refuge for the country’s westernized elite to work and play. Then terrorists struck one of the city’s most luxurious hotels, followed a few months later by a siege of the famed Red Mosque, which left scores of militantly religious students and police dead.