TheGuardian:
Rich businessmen, singers of patriotic pop songs and preachers with impeccably hard-line credentials are rarely among those accused of the deadly offence of insulting Islam in Pakistan. But Junaid Jamshed, a crooning evangelical Muslim being investigated by police under the country’s notorious blasphemy laws this week, is all three.
A household name who shot to fame in the eighties as the lead singer of the band Vital Signs, he later set up his own fashion empire and joined the Tablighi Jamaat, a group of itinerant preachers with an especially austere take on Islam.
With his typical Tablighi thick beard and shaved upper lip, Jamshed could not be more different from the profile of most alleged blasphemers: the poor, the politically unconnected and religious minorities.
