Having a much loved national hero as the brand ambassador of the Tableeghi Jamaat was a win-win for those who masterminding the growth of born-again religiosity across Pakistan.
(AP Photo) My interest in Junaid grew as he morphed, changing from the frontman of the most popular group ever to becoming one of the country’s most well-known Islamic preachers, a televangelist whose popularity from his rock days lent him a new and loyal following in a Pakistan where people were becoming increasingly radicalised. In this Decemphoto, a vendor shows a DVD of Pakistan's Junaid Jamshed at a stall in Islamabad, Pakistan. Before them we had seen Nazia and Zoheb, the Benjamin Sisters, an Alamgir, each of them giving a new voice and personality to pop music but presenting it in the style of national television: young singers, microphone in hand, earnestly singing into the screen as they swayed ever so respectfully from side to side. Bursting onto the pop/rock stage in the newest way Pakistanis had seen, his band Vital Signs quickly picked up a mass following hundreds of thousands of culturally starved Pakistanis rising out the 11-year long ashes of Zia-ul-Haq’s martial reign. The issue of martyrdom aside, Junaid’s death hits almost everyone experiencing the headiness of youth in Pakistan during the 1980s and early 1990s.
But that martyrdom is not on offer for the 47 other people who crashed and burnt in collective innocence alongside him, makes the mass public mourning for his soul ever more hollow. Had he died alone in a solo accident, the voices calling for his martyrdom might have been a tad less grating. I have been trying to drown out the voices hailing Junaid Jamshed as a martyr who died in the due deliverance of God’s message to the people.
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