In an interview with Tabish Hashmi on Hasna Mana Hai, legacy qawwal Mujadid Amjad Sabri harked back on his experiences with media exploitation as a child after the passing of his father, the renowned Amjad Sabri, in 2016.
Mujadid began by admitting that his whole family has been subjected to this ordeal. “Not just on channels, but even when we’d return home after a shoot, a reporting team would be waiting for us there,” he revealed. “We moved to Lahore for this reason. Between 2016 and 2017, I don’t think we spent a moment alone at home.”
The acclaimed Sufi singer was shot dead by motorcycle-borne gunmen in a central Karachi neighbourhood. Amjad, aged around 45, was travelling from his home to a television studio to attend an iftar transmission, when a motorcycle pulled up alongside his white Honda Civic and the two riders opened fire.
With Amjad’s family left mourning, the harrowing incident sparked an outpouring of grief nationwide. Mujadid was only thirteen years old at the time.
“Now, the people also weren’t at fault since they only wanted to show love,” he acknowledged in the interview. “But yes, we have been exploited from the media’s end. We would be asked invasive questions like, ‘Do you miss your father?'”
He then revealed that he once directly called out a host on a popular channel, though that part didn’t make it to the final cut. “I asked him if his father was alive, to which he said yes. Then I said, ‘When he leaves you, then I’ll ask you if you’re grieving or not’,” Mujadid recalled.
“It was honestly just a few interviews like this, but other than that, people have been kind. After we moved to Lahore, we spent about five to six years away from all this,” he added.
In 2024, Mujadid recalled tragic memories from the incident in an interview on TCM Originals on YouTube. “My leg was bandaged up, and we were all on his bed playing Ludo. Then just forty minutes later, there was a knock on the gate. It was an elderly man we didn’t know, and he said that our father had just been assassinated,” he shared.
After the period of mourning subsided, many spoke to the family about how the late maestro helped them. “Everyone knew him as a jolly man, and he was so down to earth, and sensitive to others’ problems,” Mujadid reflected.
