Ahmad, a 1981 Tappan Zee High School graduate, is the lead guitarist and songwriter of Junoon, an immensely popular Pakistani rock band that has called through its Western music and Urdu-language lyrics for the South Asian nation to modernize and finally make peace with India.

He is also the focus of "Junoon: The Rock Star and the Mullahs," a documentary airing 9 p.m. Thursday on PBS (Channel 13 locally) that examines the state of the political and religious conflict.

Within the last year, religious parties have been elected to power in two of Pakistan's provinces, both bordering Afghanistan. Some have speculated Osama bin Laden and members of his al-Qaida network have been hiding in Pakistan's northern mountains.

Government leaders there have begun to implement sharia law, or Islamic law.
So far, that's meant the total ban of music and movies and the return to traditional dress for men and women. Some see disturbing similarities to the rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

In the documentary, Ahmad interviews religious leaders, students in hard-line religious seminaries, a fellow musician and ordinary citizens to understand the clash within Islam and Pakistan.

Ahmad concluded Pakistanis aren't seeking a stricter interpretation of Islam, but what they perceive as security. In fact, they have derisive nicknames for the religious men, known as mullahs, calling them Mullah Electricity or Mullah Irrigation, referring to progress the mullahs want to halt.

However, Ahmad said the mullahs have been successful in convincing ordinary, mostly uneducated people that America is on a crusade against Islam and they alone can protect them. The invasion of Iraq, and the images of dead Iraqi women and children broadcast back to Pakistan, only helped their cause, he said.

"The more the war on terror looks like a war on Islam, the more the mullahs will be strengthened," said Ahmad, who moved to Pakistan after graduating from high school to study medicine before becoming a musician.

The fundamentalist Islamic parties are opposed by those who take a moderate view of Islam, people such as Ahmad or Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who seized control in a bloodless coup in 1999. In a contradiction that typifies Pakistan, Ahmad said the majority of citizens support Musharraf's vision of a liberal interpretation of Islam, yet the leader of the state has become increasingly unpopular for his decision to assist the United States in the war against terror. Many Pakistanis now refer to him as "Busharraf."

To date, nearly 500 people suspected of having ties to al-Qaida have been arrested in Pakistan and most have been handed over to U.S. authorities. In return for Pakistan's support, President Bush recently pledged $5 billion in aid to the country over the next five years.

Stephen Segaller, the executive producer for Wide Angle, which produced the documentary, said Americans should be keenly interested in how Pakistan's internal struggle turns out. For one, he said, Pakistan is the world's only nuclear-armed Muslim nation.

Also, Pakistan, home to 120 million people, is one of the few countries in the Islamic world that practices some semblance of democracy with its many political parties. The irony is that people winning those elections belong to the most hard-line of the religious groups.