Editor’s Note: This profile was written for Newsweek Pakistan in June 2011. The subject passed away on May 30, 2026.
The trouble with describing Izzat Majeed is deciding where to begin.
A radical student turned academic turned businessman, Izzat Majeed has now turned his energies to music production. The polymath is also a published poet and a major investor in the left-leaning publishing house, Quartet. He lectures on the history of Islam and gained international recognition for his open letter to Osama bin Laden in the wake of 9/11 that accused the Al Qaeda leader of fundamentally misreading the religion. His latest venture is the Lahore-based Sachal Studios, a record label that fuses classical Punjabi music with American jazz.
Peering out from behind his half-moon spectacles, between precarious stacks of books in an elegant, oak-lined office in London’s Mayfair neighborhood, it is hard to picture this serious-looking man as a Maoist student-activist. Or as a multimillionaire businessman. Or indeed as a record label boss. Maybe it’s because he’s surrounded by The Cambridge History of Islam in six hefty volumes and Terry Eagleton’s Why Marx was Right, but he has the air of a professor in a well-endowed Oxbridge college. Yet despite his bookishness, he has a showman’s penchant for the ornamental: a bell-shaped gold watch on his wrist, large rings, bracelets, and a collection of Mont Blanc pens scattered across his desk.
We are a stone’s throw from the Ritz, in an area known for its investment managers and hedge funds, discreet brass plaques and whitewashed Georgian porticos. In short, an unlikely place to interview someone about fusion jazz music.
When we met, he was in an effusive mood. Sachal Studios’ reinterpretation of the Dave Brubeck classic, “Take Five,” with the lead guitar part played on the sitar, had just reached 50,000 hits on YouTube. (The recording would go on to attract millions of views worldwide, top jazz charts, and become the signature work of the Sachal Studios Orchestra.)
Full of good humor and self-deprecation (“I bummed around Oxford … I never worked a single hour in my life!”), Majeed’s career belies a heavy dose of ambition. After spending 10 years in Saudi Arabia as an adviser to the oil ministry, he set up an investment fund, then bought Union Bank, turning it into one of Pakistan’s largest, before selling it and setting up Sachal, while running a new investment company.
And while Majeed says that the studio is just “making music because I like it,” building a label from scratch and employing classically-trained musicians to make American jazz records takes no small amount of dedication. The fact that the studio shares a name with his only son also suggests his commitment to the project. That commitment would eventually culminate in international tours, performances at major venues including Lincoln Center, and the acclaimed documentary Song of Lahore.
After Majeed convinced his creative partner Mushtaq Soofi to quit his job as a television producer in 2002, they established Sachal as a straight classical label. Dissatisfied with the quality of commercially produced music coming out of Pakistan, they started to record traditional Punjabi folk musicians, including Humaira Channa, Mehnaz Begum, and Indian singer Hariharan, flying many of them to the world-famous Abbey Road Studios in London. In 2005, Majeed decided to bite the bullet and build his own four-story studio in the congested heart of old Lahore.
With the facilities in place, and despite some initial skepticism from Soofi, Majeed decided to broaden the repertoire to Jazz and Bossa nova, including “The Girl from Ipanema,” arranged for classical instrumentation. What seemed an unlikely experiment in 2011 would ultimately become one of Pakistan’s most successful cultural exports. “Take Five” is the latest product of this unlikely concept.
When I suggest that there are political implications of fusing American and Pakistani music, especially in the current environment, he shrugs it off. But as a politically active youth, and “foaming at the mouth Maoist,” growing up in the turbulence of the late 1960s, he admits that Jazz was then an important plank of America’s foreign policy: soft power before the term was ever coined. Against a backdrop of protests against Ayub Khan’s military rule and activists from the newly-founded Pakistan People’s Party making vociferous demands for a socialist economic program, the American State Department sent a series of musicians, including Dave Brubeck, to play gigs in Lahore, part of a program called Jazz Ambassadors, a bid to spread anti-Communist influence in the subcontinent.
The concerts took place in the now-defunct Nedou’s Hotel and Majeed, who grew up in a neighboring apartment block, often came to watch the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington play live, part of a lively cultural milieu that was bound up in geopolitical strategy. In his lectures, Majeed has advocated the reestablishment of a cultural bridge between Pakistan and the U.S., and has often reiterated the view that the Americans should have offered scholarships and university places to Afghans in the wake of the Soviet defeat. It is not hard to see Sachal Studios’ latest jazz project as an extension of that thinking by other means.
But there is also a desire to create an archival record of classical music, part of a heavy nostalgia for the Lahore of his youth, where he played tabla and gathered with left-leaning intellectuals to read Punjabi classical poetry. As a lecturer at the University of the Punjab during the 1970s, he taught a liberal arts course that spanned literature, philosophy, art and politics.
When Gen. Zia-ul-Haq came to power, the curriculum was heavily curtailed and led to his decision to emigrate. His anger at the direction Pakistan has taken since then manifests itself in a desire to recapture the artistic atmosphere for which Lahore was once famous, something he feels has been eviscerated by “cultural terrorism.” A vociferous critic of Zia’s regime, he regularly evokes the openness of the pre-1977 period: “Lahore was, and is, one of the subcontinent’s great cultural centers, but it no longer commands that recognition,” he says. “Coke Studio is great as a showpiece, but we need to create an environment that produces those artists.”
One of the stories he tells is of a classical cellist who had been forced to open a street stall to make ends meet. Since the opening of the studio, his musical career has been resurrected, and his son is being trained to follow in his footsteps, in the tradition of the gharana. “Sachal is renewing the hopes of musicians,” he says. “Artists have two demands: recognition and dignity.”
When he discusses his own career, hugely successful by any standards, the details are rattled off, modestly and with little consideration: “I abdicated from my teaching post in the 1970s, went to the U.S. because a friend invited me and from there to Saudi Arabia where I was adviser to the Saudi oil minister. Then a few of us got together, created a fund. I moved to London in 1992. The fund was closed and we made a lot of money.” Now, he has interests in real estate and an oil company in the U.S., which is “going very well, thanks to Gaddafi.” The joke that finishes his career precis is characteristic: a refusal to admit that he has played any real part in his very real success.
Similarly, when he describes his father’s numerous ventures, he glosses over them as “a few businesses here and there, enough to make his life comfortable.” Among other things, his father was a Lollywood film producer, and Majeed has affectionately described his father’s films as “crappy,” emphasizing instead that his father’s main concern was not the films produced but the music. Like father, like son. It is only when the subject turns to music that Majeed is truly animated.
When asked which writers have influenced him, he says that he is an avid reader of left-wing poets Pablo Neruda and Miguel Hernández, both victims of oppression from a militarized right. However, despite his avowal of affiliation with radicals and revolutionaries, his speech is peppered with quotes from establishment figures, including the philanthropic industrialist Andrew Carnegie (“He who dies rich, dies in disgrace”), and the arch-Tory British politician Lord Palmerston (“No permanent friends, only permanent interests”). Even as he criticizes Saudi Arabia for its export of “petrodollar madrassas” and “primitive and barbaric” forms of Islam, a framed photograph of Majeed with King Abdullah pokes out among the books, next to one of Majeed with his arms around Bill Clinton.
However, as if to show he is still an angry young man at heart, he takes a stab at Pakistan’s elite: “In cricketing terms, you would say that our generation has ‘retired hurt.’ They are characterized by cynicism. The rich in Pakistan are the most cynical class in the world… They are fashionable Muslims with Gucci prayers and Prada lectures. Most of them have Canadian passports and no loyalty.”
Even his most scathing criticism is carefully crafted and aesthetically pleasing.
Morgan is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University. His research focuses on Islamic thought, Sufism, and political theology in South Asia.