Heavy Metal Islam (31 page)

Peshawar and the surrounding tribal areas are often described as lawless and chaotic, but they are the epitome of order compared with the chaos and extremes of wealth and poverty that coexist in Lahore. The city feels like a crumbling former imperial capital, except that Lahore had already faded from glory before the British arrived almost two centuries ago.

Certainly the potent mix of poverty and spirituality shaped the music that came out of Lahore, including, most famously, Junoon. “My environment growing up in Lahore was a mix of poverty, violence, and religious extremism,” Salman explained. “Because of this situation, the songs I wrote naturally yearned to express freedom, love, and hope.” Not everyone responds to poverty and violence with love and hope, however, as the Taliban’s growing power demonstrates. But it’s undeniable that Junoon inspired many Pakistanis to look to the best of their culture and religion as the way to climb out of difficult circumstances.

I met one of the Junoon-inspired young Pakistanis the evening I arrived in Lahore. Ali Roooh is a young singer with a chic yet ruffian look, and a husky, versatile voice. Yet he’s not a typical musician. Ali completed an MBA and worked as a customer-service specialist for multinationals like Shell and Citibank before quitting his job to focus on recording his first album and videos.

“We have no human development here. You can work for decades and not advance a centimeter in your life. And what happens when you can’t get ahead no matter how hard you try? You give up and join al-Qa’eda.” Ali, who comes from a respected religious family, shares Salman Ahmed’s Sufi roots, and like him, he feels strongly that music is the best way to educate and motivate people to demand a better future. “But you have to find the right formula to reach people,” Ali explained, as we listened to some of his new songs in the control room of Mekaal Hassan’s Digital Fidelity Studios. Mekaal, who was producing Ali’s new album, has worked with Junoon and almost every other major rock group in Pakistan. With a degree from the Berklee College of Music in Boston and years of recording and touring under his belt, Mekaal is recognized as one of the two or three best guitarists in Pakistan.

As we spoke, Mekaal put up a rough mix of Ali’s newest song, “Mehfilay” (
mehfil
means any group of people gathered together for a single purpose, like playing music, having fun, or engaging in criminal activity). The song takes on the corruption of his society today in the same way Junoon’s “Ehtesab” did a decade ago. Ali was taking a big risk, coming out with a song that strongly criticized the government. But growing up with a single mother who obtained three master’s degrees and rose to the senior ranks of Pakistan’s Atomic Energy Commission have made him quite determined to do his music his way, even after his mother disowned him for the unforgivable sin of quitting his high-paying job to pursue his musical dreams.

Mekaal has been far luckier getting support from his family for his music. He was a guitar prodigy, which is not surprising since his father, Masood, helped bring jazz to Pakistan in the 1950s after falling in love with it during a stint with the U.S. Army in Germany. As a child, Mekaal went to sleep listening to Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sarah Vaughn, among others.

Mekaal’s jazz-infused upbringing gave him the perfect fulcrum on which to balance his other two loves, heavy metal and Qawwali music. The three have been blended in an inspiringly innovative way in his latest project, the Mekaal Hassan Band. While his guitar playing ensured the group an early taste of notoriety, what makes the band truly special is the unique combination of jazz, hard rock, and traditional Pakistani melodies, courtesy of the band’s nay (flute) player, Mohd Ahsan Papu, who for years performed with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Their vocalist, Javed Bashir, is considered by many to be one of the few singers who can lay claim to being Nusrat’s heir.

As I stood in the studio listening to the band rehearse, the bond among the musicians was infectious. Mekaal’s hyper-distorted sound was somehow balanced by Papu’s flute, while Bashir’s vocals soared up and down in the trademark Qawwali style made famous by Nusrat. Mekaal knows how good he and his band are, and he doesn’t suffer fools kindly. His long curly hair and constant smile mask a shrewd businessman and musical entrepreneur. “I could have stayed in the U.S. and made a career there,” he explained as his father nodded in agreement. “But I came back to use music to show that Pakistan isn’t what we imagine it to be.”

As I recounted my time in the NWFP, father and son smiled. “The thing is, things are a lot deeper here than they seem,” Mekaal offered. “That’s why I’m not as pessimistic as other people are about our future. The problem is that we’re educating young people to see 50 Cent and think that he’s the West. We’ve managed to get all the bad values of the West without any of the good ones, which makes it pretty hard to bring the two cultures into harmony.”

“Mark, you’ve seen what Lahore is like,” Ali said, picking up on the same theme. “Traditionally, Lahore was a city where everyone helped everyone else. But today everyone—including the Islamists, and don’t let them tell you otherwise—wants to be Western, so they go after the money, even if it means ripping off people. I’m modern, but I’m not Western. I’m Eastern because I still believe in honesty and respect.”

Consciously or not, Ali was channeling the utopian vision of a fully modern yet fully Eastern man made famous by the great Indian Muslim poet Allama Iqbal almost a century ago. Iqbal is credited by most Pakistanis with being one of the fathers of the nation. Not surprisingly, his words were first set to hard rock by Junoon, a band that Ali worships with the kind of reverence one usually sees in the most devout Zeppelin or Dead heads. But Ali cherishes Iqbal even more, as became clear the next day when the two of us drove around Lahore searching for a good CD store (many shops were closed because of threats from firebrand preachers).

As we drove through the impossibly narrow alleys of Lahore’s old bazaar, trying to find a store that would have a good collection of local CDs, I mentioned that I was anxious to see the famed Badshahi mosque, the largest mosque in the Mughal Empire. Ali smiled at my request; I realized why when we entered the mosque complex and came upon Iqbal’s tomb, in front of which Ali stood and prayed silently for at least two minutes. When he was done paying his respects, Ali turned around and motioned to the dome of the massive Sikh temple standing right behind the minaret of the mosque. “Look at that. Sikhs and Muslims prayed right next to each other and it made total sense. We all worship the same God. You can’t even imagine such a geography today.”

Iqbal’s poetry beautifully yet trenchantly explored the realities of life in early-twentieth-century British-ruled India. He spared neither Muslims nor the British for the difficulties his people faced. Junoon endeared itself to Pakistanis by adapting Iqbal’s words (perhaps most famously his poem “Saqinama”) to their music. For his part, Ali felt that the words to another poem by Iqbal, “Shikwa,” which he planned to record, were even more appropriate today: “You reserve your favors for men of other shades, / While you hurl your bolts on the Muslim race. / The tragedy is while kafirs [infidels] are with houris [maidens] actually blest, / On vague hopes of houris in heaven the Muslim race is made to rest!”

It’s not surprising that such sentiments would find a home in Pakistan’s small but powerful extreme-metal scene. Ali Reza, guitarist of the group Black Warrant, explained it succinctly when Ali Roooh and I met him at a KFC not far from Mekaal’s studio (it was guarded, like most “Western” restaurants, by a shotgun-wielding security man). For Ali, this kind of exasperation at the seeming inability of Pakistanis to grasp hold of the future fueled his music. In Black Warrant’s most powerful song, “Corroded Peace,” Ali gives voice to a Pakistan on the verge of imploding. “Bomb those who want freedom / Kill those who say ‘no’ / Love the silence and solace after everyone is dead.” Such depressing lyrics are the standard fare of extreme metal, but when you sing them long enough without seeing any change in your society for the better, it’s hard not to burn out, which is why Ali is leaving Pakistan for a freer future in Australia.

Pepsi, Munaqqababes, and Metalheads on the Arabian Sea

For most bands in Morocco or Egypt, getting a video on MTV is a dream; here it’s a necessity. “I mean, all the guys have videos on TV,” explained Layla al-Zubaidi, who’d met up with Mekaal, Ali, and me in Lahore, where she was organizing yet another conference, this one on women and NGO activism. “Imagine that in Lebanon or Morocco. You can really feel the Indian influence here with the videos and commercialism of the scene. And I’m not sure in the end if, as in Lebanon or America, the videos aren’t going to take over the music, which will really be a shame.”

The commercialism of the Pakistani music scene is in fact more evident in Karachi, the original capital of Pakistan, and its largest city (at more than 20 million people, it is officially the second largest city in the world). So are the extremes of wealth and poverty, secularism and conservatism that increasingly divide Pakistani society. As I moved through the first-class cabin to my coach seat on the flight from Lahore to Karachi, I walked past four women, all of them in complete purdah, covered from head to toe in black, including gloves. Even their eyes were covered with large, 1970s-era sunglasses. Each woman had a security tag hanging from her veil; they had been inspected and tagged like carry-on luggage.

An hour later I saw them outside the airport in Karachi, and the paradox of their position was clear. A swirling wind blew up their abayas, revealing their clothes underneath. All were wearing expensive designer pantsuits, which matched their expensive handbags and luggage. A brand-new Land Rover came to fetch them. The tone of their “Urdish” (Urdu mixed with English) conversations on their sleek cell phones confirmed their status as among Pakistan’s young and rich elite—the religious counterparts of the partyers Arieb and I had performed for in Islamabad the week before. They were “munaqqababes” (a woman who wears the niqab is calleda
munaqqaba
), equivalent to the young and fashionable muhajababes of Cairo or Beirut.

“Don’t take a cab in Karachi or you’ll be Daniel Pearled,” the bass player for the Karachi-based band Mizraab warned me. Luckily I was the guest of Amin Hashwami, a scion of one of Pakistan’s wealthiest families, who controls a number of industries: hotels, resorts, tourism, welfare, information technology, oil and gas, minerals, pharmaceuticals, real estate, and investments. He had sent a car.

Although he could spend his time either building his family’s empire or living it up with his peers, Amin is more interested in running his new chain of coffee bars, called Coffee Café, where he sponsors jam sessions for Karachi’s best young rock musicians. Amin is a good friend of Salman Ahmed. He regularly lectures in the United States and is a founder of an international group of young Arab, Muslim, and Israeli businesspeople who meet to discuss pragmatic ways of engaging in mutual recognition and conflict resolution, and he helped set up most of my interviews.

Karachi is home to three bands that together define the past, present, and future of metal in Pakistan: Karavan, Aaroh, and Mizraab. Karavan is the godfather of Pakistani metal. The band was established in 1997, but founder and lead guitarist Assad Ahmed has been on the scene since he played guitar with Vital Signs back in the late 1980s. Considered one of Pakistan’s “supergroups” alongside Vital Signs and Junoon, Karavan is one of the few Pakistani bands to sell over a million records, based purely on legally purchased (rather than pirated) copies. At one point the band was pulling in so much money, Assad explained, that he thought little of spending $25,000 to charter a plane from London to New York for a weekend of partying with his girlfriend and fifteen of her closest friends. But these days the band members are more into saving for retirement than spending their hard-earned money on the usual rock-star frivolities (for their upcoming album, the band decided to use art students for the video, both to save on production costs and promote young talent).

Like most Pakistani rock and metal bands, Karavan’s music is, even at its hardest, more grooving than headbanging. Assad’s influences are more Ace Frehley, Jimmy Page, Ritchie Blackmore, and Jeff Beck than the great sitar or sarod masters of his country. Yet his sharp riffs sound far different over the band’s languid, if clearly heavy-metal, grooves than they would over more-traditional metal tracks. “That’s for sure,” said Assad. “Just look at the success of our unplugged album, which has already been downloaded over 200,000 times even though it hasn’t been officially released yet.”

After spending a decade playing closer to the fluff end of Pakistani pop, Assad worked hard to give Karavan as much substance as possible, in both the band’s lyrics and music. Some songs, like “Gardish” (one of their biggest hits from the album of the same name), mix hard-driving riffs with lyrics that tackle the lack of equilibrium in Pakistani society and the dangers facing a culture which seems to be in constant motion, but doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere. On the other end of the spectrum is the balladlike, arpeggio-driven “Yeh zindagi hai,” which describes the campus violence in Karachi during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when thousands of students were killed or disappeared during clashes between secular and religious groups. At a time when violence is again erupting across Pakistan, the song’s admonition to Pakistanis to “break down the walls of hatred and come together as one” is especially relevant.