Shotguns and Munaqqabes Along the Arabian Sea | Norient.Com 5 Oct 2021 01:51:14
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Shotguns and Munaqqabes along the Arabian Sea | norient.com 5 Oct 2021 01:51:14 Shotguns and Munaqqabes along the Arabian Sea by Mark LeVine Maybe it was the 13-hour time difference. Maybe it was arriving at 6 a.m., after two nearly sleepless nights in coach, at an airport that had recently been attacked by terrorists, where – at least at the arrival lounge – it seemed that hardly anyone spoke 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. https://norient.com/stories/pakistanrock Page 1 of 25 Shotguns and Munaqqabes along the Arabian Sea | norient.com 5 Oct 2021 01:51:14 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 ground breaking 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 to no end 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 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 Northwest 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 semi-feudal 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 https://norient.com/stories/pakistanrock Page 2 of 25 Shotguns and Munaqqabes along the Arabian Sea | norient.com 5 Oct 2021 01:51:14 censoring albums or prohibiting concerts) during the 1970s through early 1990s. Even today, musicians find it difficult to find forums in which to play, especially bands that play the harder styles of rock and metal. 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 upwards 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 the 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 U.K. (It’s worth noting that Western rockers have recently picked up on this idea. As Cheryl 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 make-up, and do it completely guerrilla style… It’s really really exciting to just go out and shoot, like how Bob Dylan shot ‹Don’t Look Back› – it’s just a guy with a camera and you’re performing the song.» 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 the time of writing. Junoon remain the gods 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 then 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 co-founder, was born in Pakistan, but he lived in upstate New York from the ages of 11 to 18, during which time he was lucky enough to see Led Zeppelin perform during its last U.S. tour, in 1977. When Jimmy Page https://norient.com/stories/pakistanrock Page 3 of 25 Shotguns and Munaqqabes along the Arabian Sea | norient.com 5 Oct 2021 01:51:14 came on stage through a haze of smoke wearing a white satin dragon suit and playing a double-neck 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 convinced 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 Leopard. But Junoon were 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.