Salman Ahmad

At 60 years old, Salman Ahmad physical status not available right now. We will update Salman Ahmad's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

He has been teaching a class on music titled "Islamic Music and Culture of South Asia", as a guest faculty at Queens College. This year, he started his second semester as a guest faculty. On 1 March 2008, Ahmad performed with Yale Strom (a world leading Klezmer artist) at Temple Beth Sholom in Roslyn Heights as part of another "Common Chords II" concert celebrating Muslim and Jewish Music. Together with Strom, Ahmad leads the multi-faith ensemble Common Chords, whose members include Chatterjee, dhol player Sunny Jain, bassist Mark Dresser, vocalist Elizabeth Schwartz and others. In 2016, his new song "Kaise Bolun" from an upcoming Bollywood movie "Rhythm" starring Adeel Chaudhry has received enormous negative feedback from his fans on social media through showing their discomfort over song's music and video. According to people, they never expected such kind of music from legendary Salman Ahmad.

Televised in around 100 countries, Ahmad and his band Junoon performed with artists from all over the world at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert in Oslo, Norway, on 11 December 2007. He also played at the Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony on 9 December 2007, where he was joined by tabla virtuoso Pandit Samir Chatterjee.

Ahmad and his band Junoon suffered political censorship in Pakistan during the administration of Benazir Bhutto in the 1990s, partly due to a song denouncing political corruption. In 1998 during the administration of Nawaz Sharif, Junoon was again banned in Pakistan, because they protested against the nuclear power tests in India as well as their own country by saying, "Why escalate the arms race when people still need water? Why see our neighbors as enemies when we are so close to each other?"

Ahmad played at the Roskilde Festival in 2000 under the banner of Freemuse, just a couple of years after the ban. As a musician who faced censorship in his home country, Ahmad says that "there is no conflict between my faith and my music, you can be a Muslim and play electric guitar".

In 2006, during a Freemuse conference in Beirut he was part of one of the rare occasions where music and religion was taken seriously and where discussions on music and Islam focused on theology and not just social and cultural patterns. About this he said, "I've taken part in Freemuse dialogue meetings and press meetings. They have always been great meetings places for musicians, researchers and journalists and I've always felt that understanding the motivations behind and the mechanisms of censorship have been in focus – not just condemning censorship. Having said that, we, the artists, should always be ready to defend our colleagues when the rights to freedom of expression are attacked, and thus we need an organisation such as Freemuse to help us do this."

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