On the 7 December 2016, a regional flight PK661 took off from Chitral Airport in the northern regions of Pakistan bound for the capital Islamabad. It was a small turboprop aeroplane, which is common for such short and infrequent flights connecting remote areas of Pakistan with bigger cities. It had forty-two passengers, five crew members, and a ground engineer travelling to the destination. Or at least that is what they believed when they took off at 3:30pm. At 4:42pm, the plane went down in the hills of Havelian near Islamabad. The pilot had made a distress call about an engine failure, but fate had already written something else for them. There were no survivors.
All tragedies are equally tragic in essence, but they feel even more tragic if they involve someone you know, or someone well known and loved. Returning on this flight was Junaid Jamshed, a celebrated pop-singer later turned religious preacher. A few days before this flight he tweeted some pictures with the caption, ‘Heaven on Earth, Chitral. With my friends in the path of Allah’. He was someone who found success and celebrity twice in one life. He was one of the most recognised faces and voices in Pakistan, most well-known for his 1987 super-hit national song, ‘Dil Dil Pakistan’ (My Heart Pakistan).
The song rose to widespread success and came to be seen as the second national anthem of the country. No national event could be imagined without this song not being played on TV or performed by someone. It was probably the most common song sung by school children on different national days and events. Like the national anthem, every child knew it. A 2002 global poll of 150,000 people by BBC rated this song, the third most favourite global song. The nominations included artists like Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Beatles, Googoosh, and Bob Marley.
Pakistani columnist Nadeem Paracha charted the history of this song and noted that when the producer of the song, well-known TV and film director Shoaib Mansoor, sent it to the censor board of Pakistan’s national TV channel, PTV, they shot it down. The song had a catchy pop tune based on western instruments and its video was shot in a hilly area, where the denim clad group was shown riding their bikes and jeep. The censor board was aghast at this and sent it back with comments like ‘pop and patriotism do not mix’ and noted that the ‘boys were behaving like hooligans on bikes’. There was a reason for it, Pakistan was still under the Islamist military dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq which continued until his death in 1988. During this tenure, female newscasters were told to cover their heads and all content was supposed to be Islamically appropriate.
The rest of this article is only available to subscribers.
Access our entire archive of 350+ articles from the world's leading writers on Islam.
Only £3.30/month, cancel anytime.
Already subscribed? Log in here.
Not convinced? Read this: why should I subscribe to Critical Muslim?