Apple cider vinegar Is Pilates for you? 'Ambient gaslighting' 'Main character energy'
NATION NOW
Pakistan

Salman Ahmad: Pakistan's answer to Bono lives in U.S.

Steven P. Marsh
The (Westchester County, N.Y.) Journal News
Tappan's Salman Ahmad, founder of the multi-million selling Sufi band Junoon.

TAPPAN, N.Y. — Unwanted attention from overeager fans is something many successful rock musicians have to deal with from time to time.

But how many rockers can say they’ve been targeted by terrorists?

Salman Ahmad, a guitarist who founded the multi-million-selling Sufi rock band Junoon and a longtime resident of Tappan, is one of them — not so much for his music as for his humanitarian efforts in the land of his birth, Pakistan.

Ahmad, 52, makes frequent trips to Pakistan as a polio goodwill ambassador for Rotary International. It’s a job that lets him use his status as a rock star to shine a light on an infectious disease that has been eradicated almost everywhere but Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan.

As it turns out, extremists in Pakistan have a problem with that.

Priyanka Chopra on Bollywood and Indian stereotypes: 'That's not all we are'

“Earlier this year the police and intelligence service said that I’m on a list,” Ahmad told The Journal News by Skype from Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city. It wasn’t the sort of list that anyone would strive to join. It was a hit list.

“I’m too vocal about polio and militants don’t like that,” Ahmad says.

Ahmad’s life in Tappan is quite different. There he’s not recognized as the man behind Junoon’s massive hits, like Sayonee.

In Tappan, he’s just another neighbor. He’s the dark-haired, bearded, hat-wearing guy who taught music for the last seven years at Queens College’s Aaron Copland School of Music. Or he’s the guy whose wife, Samina, is a physician, or the father of three boys, all products of Orangetown public schools like their dad.

Rock & Roll Jihad

Ahmad was born in Pakistan and lived there until age 11, then returned to attend medical school as a young man. He stayed in Pakistan until 2002; the 9/11 attacks prompted him to move to New York to be near his father.

So Pakistan is familiar territory for Ahmad. But every visit — on this trip he expects to be there at least until World Polio Day on Oct. 24 — reminds him of the vast differences between his two worlds.

“This seems like another parallel universe here, with the power outages and death threats and all,” Ahmad says of Pakistan. Yet “it still feels like home.”

“When I come back to New York, I feel this is where I should be, and then when I come here [to Pakistan], I feel also that this is connected, too’” he says when asked where he feels most at home. “I’m the rare species which has to fall into the cracks of places.”

Power outages are inconvenient — making it difficult to connect with him for this interview, for instance — but they’re nothing compared to death threats.

“I have taken precautions, but, you know, you can only protect yourself so much,” says Ahmad, who joined the battle against polio in 2014, after a stint working with the United Nations in a similar role in the war on HIV and AIDS.

He knows that more than 90 anti-polio workers have been killed by militants in Pakistan.

“What the militants would say was this is a Western conspiracy,” Ahmad says. “The militants said this entire focus on polio has nothing to do with polio, it’s just basically trying to trap militants, trapping the Taliban” or that it’s a conspiracy to sterilize Muslim men.

“It’s shameful that Pakistan, which eradicated smallpox, can’t get rid of polio,” Ahmad says. But he’s hopeful that the goal is near. There are just 13 active cases of polio in Pakistan now, he says, “and we’re going to stop transmission means that their fear tactics are failing.”

Ahmad spent his teens in Tappan after his father was transferred to New York by his employer, Kuwait Airways. “It was the 1970s, and Rockland County. I was the only brown overweight Muslim kid in my school. I had no friends,” he insists.

Tappan's Salman Ahmad

“I remember when I was 13 years old, I was at the bus stop and Danny Spitz came up to me and said he said to me, ‘Sal, Sal, Sal,‘ he said, ‘Dude, you’ve gotta get cool.’

“And I said, ‘Cool? What do you mean?’ And he took this red ticket out of his back pocket and he said, ‘If you buy this ticket from me you shall become cool.’”

The ticket that Spitz — who went on to play lead guitar in thrash metal band Anthrax — was for a Led Zeppelin show at Madison Square Garden in June 1977.

It was a night that changed Ahmad’s life forever: “I saw Jimmy Page on stage and I just said that’s what I want to do for the rest of my life.”

After that, Ahmad says, he spent most of his free time locked in his room, practicing the guitar until he was good enough to get involved in the local garage band scene. Another member of that scene was Brian O’Connell, a Tappan native who reconnected with Ahmad 10 years later and went to Pakistan to play bass in Ahmad’s most successful band.

Ahmad became schooled in the ways of extremism in his late teens, when his parents sent him back to Pakistan to study medicine — he trained at King Edward Medical College in Lahore — in a futile attempt to short-circuit his growing desire to become a rock musician.

“When I was 18, in medical school, I had my guitar smashed by extremists,” referring to a frightening episode in which he was playing in one of the seven underground bands he started in Pakistan.

“I didn’t want to die,” he says of the incident, which he recounts in greater detail in his 2010 autobiography, Rock & Roll Jihad: A Muslim Rock Star’s Revolution.

“But then also you feel that these guys want to muzzle me. And the connection that I have to my guitar and to music is a very strong visceral connection” that he says could not be muzzled. He was too intent on making “a difference to people’s lives through the music.”

Tappan's Salman Ahmad, founder of  the Sufi rock band  Junoon, talked to students in 2010 about his efforts to help Pakistanis in his native country.

He’s tried to do that with the last of the bands he started in Pakistan: Junoon. The name is an Urdu word that “borders between madness, uncompromising passion, and a pit bull mentality,” he says.

Ahmad just finished recording a new Junoon album that's slated for release in November. It includes a collaboration with Peter Gabriel on the title song Ahmad wrote for Open Your Eyes, an HBO documentary released in July that tells the story of an elderly couple from Nepal who underwent a procedure to restore their sight.

The band’s sound, which melds Westernized power rock with south Asian sounds and socially aware lyrics, led a New York Times rock critic to call him  “a figure like Bono of U2.” It’s a label that has stuck for years, even now as the band celebrates the 25th anniversary of its first album.

But in Rockland, things are different.

“That’s the coolest thing. I can just be who I am in Rockland,” he says. “Samina and I go to the movies. I play in my sons’ garage band. In fact, the musicians who play with my sons, they also jam with me … It’s great just to be yourself and reconnect to the reason you picked up the guitar, and follow baseball, and the presidential campaigns.”

New City-based journalist Steven P. Marsh blogs about music and the performing arts at www.willyoumissme.com.

Featured Weekly Ad