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I started to pay attention to Junoon again in 1996, when they became megastars with ‘Jazba-e-Junoon’, the Coca-Cola-sponsored recording of the official Pakistan team song for the Cricket World Cup, and more or less simultaneously Ahmad started looking to Sufi Islam in an attempt to find a sound for Junoon that wasn’t merely derivative of Western rock. My own interest in the mystical side of Islam had started at university when I took a course on Sufism and learned how absurd I had been to think subversion via music came in the form of boys in denim singing pop songs in which they pledged their heart to Pakistan.

In the Sufi paradigm, God is the beloved and the mortal is the supplicant/lover – the relationship between the individual and God is intensely personal and does not admit the intercession of ‘religious scholars’ or ‘leaders of the congregation’. Small wonder that the Sufis have almost always stood in opposition to those who claim to be the guardians of religion. But the deep-rootedness of Sufi Islam in Pakistan has often meant that the orthodoxy don’t dare take it on – through the Zia years, the great singers in the Sufi tradition, such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Abida Parveen, continued to perform, both in public gatherings where the crowds could exceed half a million and on state-run TV. Every note leaping from their throats was a rebuke to the orthodoxy. It wasn’t until university that I saw the brilliance of those singers – particularly of Nusrat, who was a worldwide phenomenon by the nineties. You didn’t need to understand a word he sang, or feel any religious stirrings, to be struck to the marrow by one of the greatest voices of the century.

Nusrat and other qawwals were such a potent force in Pakistan that it’s not surprising that Junoon’s attempt to encroach on Sufi musical ground deeply divided listeners at first. But within a few years, the term ‘Sufi rock’ was no longer something spoken with inverted commas hanging around it. Much as I loved the music, though, I was sceptical about the relentless Coke-sponsored marketing that went alongside it. It didn’t sit too well with the Sufi idea of stripping away the ego.

Of course, there was no reason why musicians singing Sufi lyrics should live by Sufi rules. But Ahmad, who now affected the fashionable garb of a long-haired, bead-wearing, goateed mystic, spoke extensively about his immersion in Sufism. The critical acclaim for Ahmad’s music began to fade at the start of the new millennium, and yet halfway through the decade he was more visible than ever before – performing at the UN, talking up Indo-Pak friendship, promoting HIV/Aids awareness, appearing on TV, playing at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. It is hard to separate sense of mission from marketing in all this. Whatever he has done in the last few years, and whatever he does in the future, Ahmad’s legacy is Sufi rock, that electrifying blend of the deep-rooted mystical side of subcontinental Islam and contemporary, cutting-edge, rocking youth culture.

I
n Salman Ahmad’s autobiography,
Rock & Roll Jihad
, it is unsettling how often he writes of receiving messages and signs from God, and of his certainty that he is doing God’s work through his music. His old friend and former Vital Signs bandmate Junaid Jamshed would doubtless disagree. I still vividly recall the moment in the late nineties when I returned to Karachi after an absence of several months and one of my friends said, ‘Have you heard about Junaid Jamshed?’ I hadn’t given him much thought for some years; other groups, not only Junoon, had come along since and eclipsed those pioneers of pop. ‘He’s become a fundo.’

Junaid Jamshed? The man who wanted Karachi’s teens to pour some sugar on him? Surely not. But yes, my friend said when I questioned them – he had joined the Tablighi Jamaat, a proselytizing movement, which believed in following the example of the Prophet in the most literal ways – the length of your beard; the clothes in your wardrobe; the Arab inflection of your pronunciation; the exact words you used to say goodbye. The Tablighi Jamaat had been among the groups to benefit from the state sponsorship of Wahhabi Islam in the Zia years, though they always insisted they were completely apolitical.

Rumour had it that some personal crisis had propelled Jamshed into the arms of Tablighi Jamaat, who promised a clear path to salvation. There was no way of knowing if that was truth or conjecture. All I knew was that one day I turned on the TV and there was a man I didn’t instantly recognize, with a long beard and white skullcap, quoting from the Quran. Nothing he said was objectionable; he spoke of peace, and the importance of education, and other perfectly right-minded things. But it filled me with despair.

Jamshed himself couldn’t seem to decide how easily this mantle of righteousness sat on him. For six years, we all watched as he vacillated between pop star and proselytizing man of faith. He declared he was quitting the music business. Then he refashioned his beard into a neat goatee and appeared with Vital Signs at a tribute concert for Nazia Hassan, who had died tragically young from cancer almost twenty years after burning up screens in the ‘Disco Deewane’ video. When questioned, Jamshed claimed that there was nothing incompatible in Islam and pop music. Later still, he would insist that the U-turn at that concert was a sign that he had not yet been strong enough to do the right thing. At the time, he rationalized, he’d had four international concerts lined up, as well as a new album he’d already recorded, not to mention a one-year contract with Pepsi … it just hadn’t been the right time to sever his ties with pop music, the pressures were too great. Once free of contractual obligations, Jamshed again declared pop music haram (forbidden) and soon after took to recording religious songs of praise.

Today, Jamshed’s life is divided between proselytizing for Tablighi Jamaat, recording religious albums and running a very successful designer label – J. (Jay Dot) – with stores in the glitziest malls of Pakistan, and branches soon opening in the UK. According to his MySpace page, it is no problem to reconcile his religious devotion with his designer stores. As he reminds us, ‘Our Prophet Muhammad, peace be with him, was also a merchant who sold cloth.’

There are other ways in which religion can pay. Last year, Jamshed appeared on TV speaking with a tone and urgency that suggested he was about to reveal some deeply important spiritual truth. His message: contrary to rumours, Lay’s potato chips are made using only halal products. For this TV spot, which ends with Jamshed munching on a potato chip, he was reportedly paid 2 million rupees (
£
26,000 – though the comparatively low cost of living in Pakistan makes it a much larger amount in real terms).

That Jamshed was outspoken about his religious faith wasn’t in itself worthy of comment. In the Pakistan I had grown up in almost everyone identified as Muslim; to do otherwise meant you were either of the 3 per cent of the population belonging to other religious groups, or had adopted a contrarian attitude. But one of my friends aptly put her finger on why the particular form of Islam espoused by the former pop star was so disquieting: ‘In our grandmother’s generation, when people became more religious, they turned devout. Now they turn fundamentalist.’

F
rom his early days in the Jupiters, to his huge success as the voice of Junoon and, recently, his critically acclaimed solo career, Ali Azmat has always been the man who most lived up to the idea of the rock star. He remains the most charismatic performer on the pop scene, with a sartorial flair that sets trends, a turbulent relationship with a beautiful model, a reputation for brashness and a personality that is an appealing mix of contagious good humour and artistic suffering. When the journalist Fifi Haroon asked Azmat how many girlfriends he’d had, he replied, ‘I’m a lover, not a mathematician.’ While Junaid Jamshed was declaring pop music haram and Salman Ahmad delved into the Quran and Sufism, Azmat just focused on the music. He might have been singing Sufi rock, but he made it quite clear that it was the rock that mattered.

Then, in 2009, the rock star shifted his primary vocation from singer to that of cheerleader.

The man Azmat has been championing – introducing him at public events, singing his praises on TV, featuring him as the resident ‘expert’ on his talk show – is Zaid Hamid, a self-professed ‘security consultant and strategic defence analyst’. An example of Hamid’s strategic thinking was in evidence early in 2010 when he set out a vision for Pakistan’s future. ‘Pakistan will lead a bloc of Muslim nations known as the United States of Islam,’ he declared to an approving, self-selected audience. ‘Any nation that wants to lift a foot will first ask Pakistan’s permission … We have good news for India: we will break you and make you the size of Sri Lanka.’ And on and on it went, describing how Pakistani Muslims from ‘the United States of Islam’ would ensure the security of Muslims the world over.

A few weeks after this televised address, Azmat appeared on a talk show hosted by the model and actress Juggan Kazim; the other guest was the feisty actress Nadia Jamil, who savaged Azmat for his association with Hamid, whom she described as a hate-monger.

Azmat hotly denied this. ‘We’re not against any people,’ he said. ‘We’re against a political ideology called Zionism … there are all sorts of Zionists. There are Hindu Zionists, Muslim Zionists, Christian and Jewish Zionists.’

‘What is Zionism?’ asked Kazim.

‘We don’t even know ourselves what it is,’ Azmat replied, without a flicker of embarrassment. ‘It’s a political ideology where obviously these guys have taken over the world, through whatever means, through businesses …’

Hamid’s star has imploded in the last few months, for various reasons, including a murder case against him and attacks from members of the orthodoxy who saw his popularity as a challenge. But the spectacular speed with which he rose to prominence, and the support he gathered, are very telling about the state of Pakistan. A country demoralized and humiliated by its myriad problems could either turn reflective, or it could simply blame everyone else. Large sections of Pakistan have chosen the latter option. Hamid’s appeal to the young – who made up much of his following – was that while his talk of Pakistan’s glorious future was entirely wrapped in religious-tinged rhetoric, he stayed away from social proscriptions. If the question is ‘What kind of Muslim am I?’ – and in Pakistan that is often the question – the Hamid answer is ‘The kind who fights Zionism everywhere!’ Whether you do so in jeans and T-shirt, and with or without a guitar, is largely beside the point. You can become a Better Muslim without disrupting your social life. What more could a Pakistani rock star ask for?

I
t’s a strange business, growing up. Your teen idols grow up too, and you realize that the vast gulf of years which separated you from them is actually just a narrow ravine, and that you are all roughly part of the same generation. In the particular case of the Pakistani pop pioneers, you also realize that your nation is growing up with you too – the Islamic Republic of Pakistan came into being in 1971, when the former East Pakistan became Bangladesh. Given the youthfulness of the nation, perhaps it isn’t surprising that we of the ‘Islamic Republic of Pakistan generation’ look at each other and seek answers to the question: ‘What do our lives say about the state of the nation?’

Largely, our lives say that polarity and discordance are rife. However, although they are few and sometimes difficult to identify, there are still spaces in Pakistan where difference presents opportunities to harmonize. Aptly enough, one of those spaces is the music studio.
Coke Studio
, to be specific. Corporate sponsorship has been an integral part of Pakistani pop music since Pepsi signed Vital Signs to sing their most famous tune with the slightly rejigged lyrics ‘Pepsi Pepsi Pakistan’. Notably, despite the different paths Azmat, Jamshed and Ahmad followed, they all remained linked to corporate sponsors, a fact that didn’t seem to get in the way of any of their religious or political beliefs.

Now in its third season,
Coke Studio
is a wildly popular TV show featuring live performances from Pakistan’s biggest musical acts, as well as introducing some lesser-known singers. The most glorious thing about the show is the disparate traditions it brings together – pop, qawwali, rock, folk, classical. Qawwals and rock stars duet, the tabla and violin complement each other’s sounds. And the man who makes it all happen? The somewhat reclusive and much sought-after producer Rohail Hyatt, who, twenty-three years ago was one of the four boys in jeans singing ‘Dil Dil Pakistan’ in my living room. More than any of his Vital Signs bandmates or Junoon rivals, he seems aware of one simple and persisting truth: in Pakistan, as all around the world, what we most crave from our musicians is music.

Aamer Hussein