In the Name of God
News: As Pakistan grapples with Islamic extremism, one of the country's biggest rock stars is confronting the mullahs with music. Will Rohail Hyatt's controversial new album make him a marked man?
July 18, 2007
|
|
In 1987, Pakistan's preeminent rock band, Vital Signs, released a patriotic pop tune called "Dil Dil Pakistan." The song, whose name means "Beloved Pakistan," was a huge hit and became like a second national anthem. The BBC named it the world's third most popular song of all time. It also made Rohail Hyatt—who founded Vital Signs, played keyboards in it, and cowrote the song—a national icon.
Hyatt's career, however, could soon take an unpopular, and potentially dangerous, turn. He has just produced and recorded the soundtrack to a film called Khuda Kay Liye ("In the Name of God" in Urdu), which opens July 20. The movie, directed by Shoaib Mansoor, who also penned the lyrics to "Dil Dil Pakistan," tells the story of a young rock musician who gets brainwashed by a radical mullah, hangs up his guitar, dons a shalwar kameez, grows a beard, and goes to live in a mosque.
The plot draws on Hyatt's own experiences. After Vital Signs broke up in the early 1990s, lead singer Junaid Jamshed retired from music and joined a conservative Islamist group. "When we saw Junaid being consumed by fundamentalism, we fought really hard," says Hyatt, a 40-year-old with shoulder-length hair and an aging rocker's air of invincibility. "But for a person who thrives on attention, it's a very difficult thing to give up. Junaid has more fame today, as a mullah, than he ever had during Vital Signs."
Jamshed's path reflects a recent shift in Pakistani culture. Pop stars have almost disappeared. Neither "Lollywood," the Lahore-based film industry, nor MTV Pakistan has found secular artists comparable to Vital Signs in its heyday. "Vital Signs used to sound so modern compared to other stuff," says music critic Nadeem Paracha. "Rohail was a huge Pink Floyd fan, and as the main producer and composer, he steered the band's innovative sound." With pioneering bands like Vital Signs gone, the cultural void is being filled by the most unlikely of pop heroes: mullahs. If you want to see rock-star treatment, just go to a rally for Muttahida Majles Amal, a coalition of Islamist parties. At one I attended last year, I found myself tapping my foot to a reggae-ish groove that turned out to be a tribute to the head of the country's biggest fundamentalist party. After the rally ended and armed guards escorted the mullahs to their idling vehicles, several dozen teenage boys chased the cars down the street, yelling, "Allahu akbar!"—"God is great!"—and chanting the chief mullah's name.
"This movie isn’t about pop music versus the Koran," explains Hyatt, who says he rediscovered his faith in Islam during the course of filming. "It’s about a horrific interpretation of something beautiful." An increasingly powerful and unchecked class of mullahs is misleading Pakistanis about the true message of Islam, he says. "Your dress and the length of your beard aren't what makes you a good or bad Muslim."
One recent evening, long past midnight, Hyatt sat in his home studio in Karachi, facing an array of flat-screen monitors, Roland keyboards, and various mixers. He wanted to share a few rough scenes from Khuda Kay Liye. "The big taboo subject is that, according to the fundamentalists, music is absolutely prohibited in Islam. This movie makes a major argument against that. There is no law that says Islam is against music," he said. "There is such massive hypocrisy behind this mullahism. They somehow know all the lyrics to all the popular songs, but they still say music is corrupting."
He played the film's final scene, in which the main character, after a sort of epiphany, returns to the radical mullah's mosque. This time, he is wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap. He spins his hat backward and belts out the azan, the call to prayer. "He's saying to this mullah: 'You can't take over our faith!'" Hyatt explained. While the refrain "Allahu" echoes, a clubby beat starts up underneath. "I think it’s artistic work, but it is impossible to tell how these guys are going to react, whether they will find certain things offensive or not."
At the time, the film had not received the official clearance that all Pakistani films must receive before being released. "We still don’t know if it’s going to get past the censors," Hyatt told me. "But I think [President Pervez] Musharraf has seen it, and he’s the boss." It now appears that Musharraf's government, a key American ally in the war on terror, has given Khuda Kay Liye its tacit blessing.
But it still looks like the film could be destined for a rocky premier. On July 3, Pakistani newspapers reported that Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the head of Islamabad's pro-Taliban Lal Masjid, or "Red Mosque," had declared the movie blasphemous and wouldn’t allow its release. That same day, fighting broke out at the mosque between Ghazi's followers and an assortment of Pakistani security forces. After an eight-day siege that left Ghazi and more than 100 people dead, Musharraf appeared on national television to announce that there would be "no more Lal Masjids"—rogue madrassas that function as jihadist recruiting centers.
Ghazi may be dead, but there are still plenty of Pakistanis who share his strict Islamist views. I asked Hyatt if he fears becoming the next Salman Rushdie. "I don’t want to put my family at risk," he replied. "But I believe in this movie. I have been a musician and seen the way these mullahs feel towards people like me. I am not the victim. Religion is the victim. And I have an opportunity to do something about it."
Nicholas Schmidle is a Pakistan-based writer and fellow at the Institute of Current World Affairs.
varun.