Salman Ahmad Rocked The Colfax Avenue Store!

From a PBS interview Salman did with Jeffrey Brown:
JEFFREY BROWN: Rock 'N' Roll Jihad. Now those are words that don't usually go together. What's it mean?

SALMAN AHMAD: Well, when I was thinking of a book title, I thought my passion is rock 'n' roll and the struggle to attain, sort of search for that passion is the Jihad and those two words together -- passion and struggle -- also expand into what's been happening in the world, you know, in my world. You know on 9/11 Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda hijacked the word Jihad and, you know, made it into another thing completely, which was ugly, you know, dark, fear inspiring, so I'm hoping that through this book journey, people will be able to see, you know, what Jihad means for me and perhaps for a lot of other Muslims as well.

JEFFREY BROWN: That message that you're talking about is one we don't see all that much. Or we don't hear about it. We hear more about clash. What do you see, you go back to Pakistan often now, what do you see happening there? You know, we talk about it on the program all the time with political analysts and politicians, generals sometimes, what do you see?

SALMAN AHMAD: Yeah, well, last year the Taliban circulated a cell phone video of a 17-year-old girl who's being flogged and, you know, it was a gruesome video and that was in a sense a question being put to the entire Pakistinian population, that this is the vision of Islam that these guys have. Are you good with this? And when that video was run on news channels in Pakistan, there was a moment where there is a general disgust, when people realize you know what these people don't speak for Islam, they don't speak for Pakistani culture. If you win the people, you win this war against the extremists. And I think President Obama's speech in Cairo, that's a hit song. People say, well, it's one speech, but you know the thing is words have great power, if he can put action to those words of mutual respect and mutual interest. That needs to be done much more I think.

JEFFREY BROWN: And your way is through and will continue to be through rock 'n' roll.

SALMAN AHMAD: Absolutely. And writing.

See the whole interview, with video, at: http://to.pbs.org/dwUGl4