In Pakistan and India, rock star Salman Ahmad plays to crowds of hundreds of thousands, filling cricket stadiums with fans obsessed and screaming his name. The goateed, long-haired musician can’t walk the streets without being besieged for his autograph. His every move is tracked on blogs maintained by devotees.

The founder of Junoon, South Asia’s best-selling rock band, Ahmad, 41, has been called the founder of “Sufi rock,” a style that blends the traditional qawwali music of the region’s Sufi shrines with guitar riffs that someone the likes of Led Zeppelin or Santana might play. His band has sold more than 25 million albums – a number that places him in the realm of Janet Jackson and Nirvana and makes him no stranger to MTV India’s No. 1 spot.

Rocker Salman Ahmad jams at a recent reunion concert for his band Junoon in Dubai, Saudi Arabia. In Urdu, "Junoon" means obsessed. (Courtesy Salman Ahmad)

The glow of fame in New York, however, is a different story, and since Ahmad moved here three years ago, he has found himself playing to a bevy of smaller, more academic audiences. As if to explain, posters outside university lecture halls label him the “Muslim Rock Star.” He only sometimes finds his CDs buried in “World Music” bins at record stores. And the multicultural organizations that host his shows often request pre-concert talks so he can tell who he is and what he’s about to play.

It’s a contrast, but Ahmad was the one who chose it. He moved his family here not only to provide them some breathing space and anonymity, but because his heart told him he needed to come. He’s in America, he said, to build bridges after Sept. 11 and to add his Sufi-influenced tolerant outlook to the worldwide discussion on the future of Islam.

“It’s been a roller-coaster ride,” said Ahmad, reflecting. “But I can better see Pakistan and South Asia from this perspective. And I’m trying to get where more mainstream America can find out what I’m about.”

Ahmad’s approach to rock ’n’ roll has been compared to Bono, and his band’s to U2: Their lyrics aren’t about women or sex, but about greater matters of peace, health and healing. Banned in Pakistan for several years in the late 1990s because of songs challenging government corruption and the nuclear race with India, Ahmad was later appointed a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador. He has used his most recent releases – about AIDS prevention and reconciliation after India and Pakistan’s historic 1947 split – to raise money for victims of last fall’s earthquake in Kashmir.

The credit for that social-justice outlook, Ahmad said, goes to Sufism, the mystical tradition within Islam and the dominant form of Islam in South Asia. There, Sufis seek God or spiritual truth directly, through a wide range of beliefs and rituals – such as meditation, music, ecstatic dancing and poetry – and practitioners include not only Muslims but Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and most anyone else who wants to join in.

With love as a central theme, Ahmad said, peace and tolerance follow.

“It’s like all the time being inside and thinking about the beauty and truth in the universe,” he said. “You acquire an ability to see with the heart. Religion, color – they just melt.”

A visitor to any of the Sufi shrines that dot India and Pakistan’s landscape will hear, on Thursday or Friday evenings, the sounds of traditional Sufi qawwalis – Urdu or Punjabi praise music played on tablas, or hand drums, and harmonium, a hand-pumped organ. Decades ago, singers such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Abida Parveen made qawwalis commercially famous; Ahmad took them one step further in the merge with rock ’n’ roll.

Ahmad’s Sufi leanings come not from growing up in a Sufi-following family. With much of his childhood spent in the United States – in Rockland County, N.Y., because his father worked for Pakistan International Airlines – Ahmad was turned on to Sufism only after returning to Pakistan for medical school. After completing his degree and joining a well-known Pakistani pop band called the Vital Signs, he found himself unfulfilled until he met Nusrat at a benefit concert about 15 years ago. Discovering the depth and meaning of Sufi tradition, he spent two years studying with Nusrat, learning to merge qawwalis with his Aerosmith-sounding guitar.

“The Sufi idea came through music and I was stung. Obviously there was something in me waiting to be wounded,” Ahmad said. “It kind of blew my mind. I had just associated Sufis with religion. Then I was so blown away by the poetry, by the voice.”

Describing himself as musically “born again,” Ahmad now uses the words of the Qur’an and Sufi poets Rumi and Bulleh Shah when he writes. While not a member of any particular Sufi order – the mystics are grouped together in certain lineages, almost like monastic orders in the Catholic Church – he describes the composing process in the same spiritual terms Sufis use to describe their zikr, or meditation.

“Once I got into music I had all these questions about where melodies come from, where inspiration comes from, where creativity comes from,” he said. “When I write, I get possessed. I get struck. I have no concept of time.”

The band Ahmad pulled together in 1990 with Pakistani Ali Azmat and later Brian O’Connell, a boyhood friend from New York, drew its name from that concept – Junoon in Urdu means “obsessed” and its fans are called Junoonis, or “obsessed ones.” The group hit its stride in 1995 with a CD called “Inquilaab,” or revolution, and a song called “Ehtesaab,” or accountability, followed by a music video featuring a horse dining at a fancy hotel – a stab at then-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s husband, who owned polo ponies. A few years later the band toured both India and Pakistan with hits from their album “Azad,” which means freedom.

Parallel to the group’s rapid rise in success was an increase across India in the popularity of Sufi music, a trend both Swaminathan Kalidas, India Today magazine Arts Editor, and Sohail Hashmi, a documentary filmmaker, attribute to Muslim-Hindu violence in Ayodhya in 1992 and Gujarat in 2002. The nation was seeking calm in the midst of religious tumult and Sufi groups like Junoon – singing of harmony and acceptance – spread a message that soothed that need, the Delhi-based critics said.

The popularity of Sufi music continues today, but Junoon does not: The band decided to call it quits after more than a decade and after Ahmad and O’Connell each moved back to New York. Citing too many years together and needs to explore new avenues, Ahmad said one of the main reasons the group broke up was so he could get beyond that fame kept him from doing the work he likes most.

“I felt frustrated with what I was doing with Junoon. I was in this rock ’n’ roll circus. People were affected by my celebrity,” Ahmad said, so much so he felt he couldn’t get out his social-justice message.

Sept. 11 made him realize, more than ever, his role: “For most Muslims it was the lights being turned on, somebody asking the question, ‘Are Muslims inherently violent?’” he recalled.

He knew it was up to him to answer the question.

Living again in Rockland County, his boys enrolled in the same middle school he attended and his wife Samina, also trained as a doctor, serving as his manager, Ahmad has been at work on his solo album, “Infiniti,” released last year, and two documentaries for the BBC. The first show, “The Rock Star and the Mullahs,” tells the story of a tour Ahmad made of northwest Pakistan after increasingly fundamentalist Islamic leaders attempted to ban music in all forms. The second, “It’s My Country, Too,” features his interviews with Muslim Americans on life in post-Sept. 11 America.

In February, Ahmad performed at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar, and in March, he joined former Junoon members for a reunion concert in Dubai, Saudi Arabia. At the end of April he’ll be honored by the Muslim Public Affairs Council for his use of music to promote peace. He’s also slated this summer to perform in Central Park.

It’s a busy lineup, but the shows Ahmad most looks forward to, he said, are the ones on small university stages where only a few audience members may know his name.

“That’s where I find myself in my element,” he said. “Doing unplugged storytelling concerts, telling how the Sufi tradition and Sufi music translate into the 21st century.”

If a recent performance at Nassau Community College on Long Island is any example, Ahmad is talking about meeting crowds of 20-somethings who live lives far from Pakistan, far from understanding the complexity that is Islam. Students who, if they’re paying attention, will meet through music the Sufi outlook Ahmad hopes can open doors between East and West.

Backed by a tablas drummer who beats out rhythms on the floor, Ahmad – clad in stonewashed jeans, a black V-neck shirt, wooden necklace and backward baseball cap – will pluck out qawwali ecstasy on his guitar strings, his knee lifting and head shaking in pure rapture as the audience slowly rises to its feet. Students from the South Asia who already know his music may lead, but soon others will join in unabashed, full-arm, above-head hand-clapping and bangra-influenced fancy footwork. Cell phones will snap pictures, friends will ride friends’ shoulders, cries of “Pakistan Zindabad” (“Long live Pakistan”) may even be heard.

Ahmad plans to be here for the next 10 years at least – enough time, he hopes, to show that Islam, especially Sufi Islam, has more to offer the world than bloodshed and war.

“The world separates and polarizes, yet Sufism sees everyone as one,” he said. “Sufism is for me a long-lost bridge people have to find. It allows me to look at someone else – black, white, green, red, Jewish, Christian, Muslim – and see them as human.”

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“Masjid Mandir” – “masjid” referring to a mosque, and “mandir” to a
Hindu temple – is a track off Salman Ahmad’s recent solo effort
“Infiniti.” The lyrics, in Urdu, are those of 17th-century Sufi
poet Bulleh Shah: “You can destroy a mosque. You can tear down a
temple. But don’t break a heart because the heart is the real house
of God.”

Junoon (.mp3)

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan – the most popular and most-recorded
traditional Sufi singer ever – performed traditional qawwali music
on tablas, or hand drums, and harmonium, a hand-pumped organ.
Nusrat taught qawwalis to Salman Ahmad in the early 1990s. His
influence can still be heard in Ahmad's work.

Man Qunto Maula (.mp3)

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Stacey Samuel leapt before the Taj. (Carolyn Slutsky)

Wobbly toy cobras in cheap bamboo baskets. Peacock feathers tied into fans. Snow globes swirling glitter around a two-inch Taj Mahal.

“I give you cheap. Just take a look,” insisted one of some two dozen vendors who thrust a bazaar’s worth of kitsch into the faces of student journalists this morning. We were making our way through the streets surrounding the majestic Taj, India’s most-visited tourist site.

“You want postcards?” said one determined man who trailed the pack with a ratty set of torn-from-a-book paper rectangles. “200 rupees? 100 rupees? OK? OK? OK?”

Not yet a full day into our stay in Agra, we found ourselves sucked into the swirling chaos of a place that stakes itself on profits made from those who live afar. Home to both the Taj Mahal and the majestic Agra Fort, Agra is abuzz with tourists – a situation that gives the place a more commercial veneer than the temples, mosques and churches we’ve visited thus far. Our tour guide estimated that the Taj complex receives 5,000 visitors a day.

“Folks, we’ve got to hurry. The sun is rising,” Prof. Sree Sreenivasan repeated to coffee-seeking stragglers as we boarded a bus marked “TOURIST” about a half-hour before light was to take hold. Outside the windows, men squatted by small fires and women swept leftover pink Holi dust from streets as we proceeded in receding darkness to see the Taj at the most striking time of morning.

Built by Moghul emperor Shah Jahan following his favorite wife’s death in 1631, the Taj Mahal houses the tombs of both wife and husband and took 22 years to complete. The Muslim ruler employed a slew of elephants and some 20,000 workers – both Muslim and Hindu – from all over India and the Middle East to work its stone and exquisite carvings. Many descendents of those first builders still work at the Taj and live in Taj Ganj, the neighborhood that borders the complex grounds.

We ended a long line of security checks and pat-downs near a small swarm of entrepreneurs who take the photographs that the Taj is known for – the gimmick angles that make a person appear to be holding the building’s base with his bare hands, or pinching its tip with her forefinger and thumb.

“OK, madam, jump,” one cameraman told student Amanda Millner-Fairbanks as she attempted a different pose, a leap off a bench captured to look as if she’d bounced all the way to the top of the famous dome. “Like this, like this,” he said, demonstrating, hopping like a frog.

The next hour and a half were spent traipsing the Taj grounds while wearing white shower cap-like booties on our shoes – an innovation introduced complex-wide last year for foreign tourists whose feet are unaccustomed to the Indian tradition of shedding footwear while trodding stone walkways. Wearing the booties means you can keep your shoes on but cover their dirt – making it possible to both keep feet clean and show respect for the tombs at the same time.

The cost for the booties is included, along with a bottled water, on the “foreigner ticket” – a cost of 750 rupees, or about $17. Admission for an Indian citizen is much less – 20 rupees, or less than 50 cents.

“When Indians from villages come here, they have 10 to 12 people in their families and cannot spend more than this,” our guide for the day, Akshay Jain, 27, explained. “They charge 750 rupees for foreigners because they can pay it. In Agra, the only source of revenue is the Taj.”

Until a little over a decade ago, Agra had a bustling leather industry, but it was banned in 1994 after it was discovered that acid rain from the pollution was ruining the Taj’s inlaid stones. Since then, the town has relied even more on the tourist draw to support the guides, guards, gardeners, travel agents, restauranteurs and autorickshaw drivers who make their livings off the crowds.

One of those dependents is Bishamber Singh, 44, a fourth-generation groundskeeper we met as he swept the garden pathways. Singh, a Hindu, has done the same work for nearly 30 years and said it’s his destiny as a member of the Banwari caste to continue. Were he not cleaning the Taj, he’d be cleaning somewhere else, he reasoned.

That the caste system influences present-day tourism operations may come as a surprise to those from outside India, but Singh said his work does have its benefits day in and day out – namely, the stunning view he encounters each day on the job.

For Singh, the best Taj sighting has less to do with the time of day or angle of sun, but when the complex remains sparkling after visits by the masses.

“That’s what makes me happy,” Singh said.

***

It is said in Hindi that each grain of rice is inscribed with the name of the person who will eat it. It must be the case, then, that the jasmine and basmati chawal waiting in our group’s final stops – Varanasi, Sarnath and Mumbai – lacks the names of Prof. Ari Goldman and his 17-year-old daughter, Emma.

Goldman, now known to students and Indians alike as “Ari-ji” (appropriate not only because it sounds like “Ari G.,” but because "ji" is a Hindi honorific), tonight announced that he and Emma will part ways with the group and remain in Agra while Emma recovers from a stomach bug.

Prof. Sreenivasan and students will continue on to Varanasi and fly to the United States on Tuesday. The Goldmans now plan to return home on Sunday, two days earlier than scheduled.

“In Jewish tradition we have a saying – daiyenu – ‘it would have been enough,’” Goldman told students over their last meal together before the group departed to catch an overnight train. It would have been enough for him, he said, to have had the first half of the semester together in New York. And it would have been enough to have simply gotten everyone to India safe and sound.

The fact that eight days passed with no sickness and a vast amount of learning is something he said he’s thankful for.

The group also bid a temporary farewell earlier in the afternoon to student reporters Shira Schoenberg and Greg Gilderman as the two departed in a car bound for Mumbai. Schoenberg, an Orthodox Jew, needed to travel early to prepare for Shabbat on Friday and to begin reporting in Mumbai’s Jewish community.

Gilderman hopes to recover from the stomach illness that seemed to make its rounds among group members as the rest toured today’s sites. Both will reunite with fellow students when the rest reach Mumbai on Saturday evening.

Despite depleted numbers and a few queasy stomachs, however, the Columbia assembly traveled on tonight, piling into the bus for a ride to the train station 40 kilometers away. There, hired porters stacked carts high with New York suitcases and led the way – extra bags balanced carefully on their heads – for the walk, lit by a full moon, to the next train.

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It’s nearly midnight on a cold, blustery Thursday, but none of the worshippers at Masjid al-Farah seem to be missing the warmth of their beds. They are in another zone of comfort – the warmth that a night of Sufi chanting brings.

Darkness veils the world outdoors. Gusts of wind whip the building. Yet inside the mosque – an unassuming three-story in Tribeca – the circle of Sufi believers attempt to work their way closer to God.

The room is long and narrow. Shadows from high ceilings drape the white-brick walls; lights are low. Red Turkish carpets run the length of the room, layer upon layer meeting at edges where they tend to wrinkle up and require flattening out.

For tonight, someone has arranged a circle of sheepskins at the center of the space. Thirty-some participants sit on top, cross-legged, their feet and bottoms absorbing the furry warmth of wool as an occasional draft works its chill through the air.

Sheikha Fariha al-Jerrahi takes the lead. “La ilaha Ilallah,” she begins, her toboggan-covered head nodding deeply and turning from the right shoulder to the left. Those around her repeat the mantra and soon the circle is a mass of nodding, chanting and swaying.

“La ilaha Ilallah” – or “there is no God but He” – is just the first phrase of praise the group will invoke tonight. Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, encourages followers to seek unity with the divine through meditation and ecstatic experience. In the service called zhikr, or “remembrance,” participants focus on the 99 names Muslims ascribe to God, repeating the words over and over until they sometimes work themselves into religious frenzy.

Many Americans know the Sufis for their most famous order, the Mevlevi, whose spinning dance earned them the title “whirling dervishes” of Turkey. All Sufis are called “dervishes” – the word simply means “poor person” – but there will be no whirling in Tribeca tonight. Like monastic orders in Christianity, each Sufi order has different traditions, and the Nur Ashki Jerrahi order, the group that meets here, is doing “seated zhikr,” a service in which legs keep stationary but upper bodies twist and turn.

Maybe 10 minutes into the incantation – it’s hard to tell time, as the repetition makes minutes stand still – al-Jerrahi senses the need for change and transitions the group seamlessly to its next phrase, “ya Allah,” or “name of power.” Most of those present are white and middle-aged, and that group follows her. A heavyset Jordanian man, the same one who set out trays of dates and almonds for guests three hours before, takes off in a different direction, his Arabic song providing light counterpoint to the others’ heavy chant.

A woman two down from him in the circle adds a third strain of sound: forceful breath that moves in her nose and out her mouth, faster and faster as the group repeats the words more quickly. “Hu,” al-Jerrahi leads, “Hu. Hu.” In translation, “hu” is the breath Allah blew into Adam, the first man.

The swaying becomes more intense. Al-Jerrahi adopts a different pattern and worshippers now move their torsos not only side to side but in a larger orbit all the way around their seated base. The concept of time has lost all meaning. Upstairs, a pot of stew bubbles on a stovetop, but no one downstairs seems to have the upcoming communal meal on their minds.

“Sheikha, I’m thirsty,” one goateed young man had told al-Jerrahi before the service began. Not for water, he’d said, but for God.

“It’s good to be thirsty,” al-Jerrahi replied, touching her heart. Repeating the names of God, she explained, is the way to drink in the love and goodness penetrating the universe.

“All we have to do is accept the invitation,” she said. “May it be that we say ‘yes.’”

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