Rock against religious fanaticism

How a smashed guitar brought an epiphany for a Pakistani student with rock’n’roll dreams

Herpreet Kaur Grewal
The Guardian

Salman Ahmad

One day in 1982, a Pakistani medical student named Salman Ahmad was playing guitar at a student talent show in a Lahore hotel when a young religious fanatic dashed on stage. He snatched Ahmad’s Gibson Les Paul from round his neck and smashed it, because he thought rock music was an affront to Islam. It was, Ahmad says, a profound moment in his life. “For me to feel like I wanted to smash my guitar, it would have been a political statement,” he says. “The idea of getting on stage is to steal the show. I didn’t even finish my show and my guitar was being smashed by somebody else. It took me four years to decide whether to pursue music after that. I didn’t want to play music if people wanted to kill you for playing guitar.”

Salman-Ahmed

While we had lost sight of the fact that Junoon is an entity still alive as a band, Salman Ahmed has clued us in. The self-styled sufi rocker whose book Rock & Roll Jihad: A Muslim Rock Star’s Revolution was released in North America by Simon & Schuster on January 12 and in Pakistan on January 15, is on a quest to bridge differences based on belief through “the universal language of music”.

The book “tells the remarkable tale of Salman Ahmad, a Pakistani doctor who became the first Muslim rock star,” and “serves to show how music and art can be a powerful force to end cultural conflicts and bring humanity together.”

Salman is spearheading this noble cause all by his lonesome, bearing the tremendous responsibility of being the world’s first Muslim rockstar with great élan.

Salman Ahmed – Love can you take me back

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