Editor’s note: This post is written by guest contributor Richard McGill Murphy, editor of Fortune Small Business magazine.

On a recent Saturday evening I drove into New York City to support an old friend, Salman Ahmad of the Pakistani rock band Junoon, and an important cause: Salman’s concert at the United Nations to benefit three million Pakistani refugees displaced by violence in the Swat Valley.

I figured Salman would play some classic Junoon songs. I’d heard that Sting had videotaped a message of support. I knew the Iranian singer Sussan Deyhim was supposed to perform. I’d last seen Sussan 10 years ago, when I booked her to open for Junoon at a concert that I promoted for the band at Symphony Space in Manhattan. Sussan is a brilliant singer who mines a style that she pretty much invented, bridging Iranian folk music, Sufi mysticism and Western performance art. Between Sussan’s tripped-out, electronic Sufi folk and Salman’s driving Sufi rock, I was looking forward to a good show.

The concert was timely, given that Iran and Pakistan are both in the midst of political upheaval. In Iran a broad progressive coalition is fighting a corrupt government dominated by religious fanatics. In Pakistan the religious fanatics are trying to grab power from a corrupt secular government. In both countries the common people are getting screwed, so I thought it was great that Iranian and Pakistani artists were standing up for justice on the same stage.

Salman’s last email to me before the event had said, in capital letters: LET’S HAVE A SUFI PARTY! When I reached the floor of the Assembly hall was packed with a mainly Pakistani crowd sprinkled with other nationalities. Everyone sat at the curving desks normally occupied by U.N. delegates. There were young hipsters in jeans and sunglasses, beautiful Pakistani women wearing saris and shalwar kameez, older men in suits.

Then I heard my name yelled out: RICHARD! Bounding from behind a desk came Sophia Ali, a children’s TV producer and fellow hardcore Junooni. Sophia and met in Delhi back in 1999, when we followed Junoon from Lahore to Delhi for a concert sponsored by the Hindu nationalist BJP, which then controlled the Indian government. It was a typical highwire political act for my favorite Pakistani band. India and Pakistan were then enjoying a period of rapprochement. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee of India had driven from Amritsar to Lahore in a bus where he held frank and cordial discussions (as the diplomats say) with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan. A few weeks later, Junoon returned the favor by performing at a concert celebrating the BJP government’s first year in office.

Everything went smoothly until the concert finale, when Junoon boarded a bus (symbolizing Vajpayee’s “bus diplomacy” initiative) backstage. The idea was that they would drive onstage with the members of the Indian band Silk Route, jump out and perform Junoon’s hit “Dosti” or friendship, signifying the current spate of détente between Pakistan and India.

Sophia and I were both on the bus with Junoon (featuring the original lineup of Salman, singer Ali Azmat, bassist Brian O’Connell and drummer Malcolm Goveas) and the guys from Silk Route. We rolled onto the wooden stage in full view of the Indian prime minister, his cabinet and several hundred well-dressed, poker-faced government officials. And then the front wheels of the bus crashed through the stage. There was an awkward silence, broken by Salman’s irrepressible younger brother Shehryar Ahmad, who was managing Junoon in those days. “That must have been the Kashmir plank,” Shehryar cracked.

Undeterred, Junoon and Silk Route jumped out and sang “Dosti.” A few months later, the Vajpayee/Sharif détente collapsed as Pakistan and India fought a brief, bloody skirmish in the mountains of Kashmir. The architect of that little war, a Pakistani general named Pervez Musharraf, unseated Nawaz Sharif in one of Pakistan’s all-too-frequent military coups. Junoon toured the world. Video camera in hand, I watched them perform in Pakistan, in Norway and across the United States. After 9/11 I followed the band from Karachi to New York, where they became the first band ever to play the U.N. General Assembly.

And now, eight years later, I was back in that slightly tired, classically modern auditorium that signifies so many different things to different people: universal brotherhood if you’re an old-fashioned liberal; sinister world government for many American conservatives; well-intentioned but often bumbling international bureaucracy for many of us in the political center. I was sitting at stage right with Andy and Emily McCord, both old Pakistan hands and Junoon fans. (Andy, an accomplished Urdu scholar, has translated many of Junoon’s lyrics into English).

We craned our necks as the latest incarnation of Junoon strolled on stage: bassist (and long-time Junoon producer) John-Alec Raubeson, klezmer violinist Yale Strom, tabla virtuoso Samir Chatterjee with his son Dibyarka on dholak, and drummer Sunny Jain. The band started a slow, modal groove as Salman walked down the center aisle, wearing an enormous fur hat over his flowing black hair and strumming furiously on a red electric guitar. He jumped on stage, cranked the volume and blasted out a solo guitar version of “Qaumi Tarana”, the Pakistani national anthem. “This has to be the first time in history that the Pakistani anthem was performed by a Muslim, two Hindus, a Jew, a Christian and a Jain,” Salman told me later. It also evoked Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, except that the patriotic Pakistani audience all leapt to their feet and stood respectfully until the last distorted note had faded into feedback.

Andy and I smiled at each other: another crazy night with Junoon. The rest of the concert did not disappoint. Sussan Deyhim wore an angular white dress and sang a gorgeous, keening Persian solo backed by a multitrack choral recording. An American photographer screened haunting pictures of Swati refugee children that he’d shot in Pakistan over the past year. Sting appeared on video as promised, speaking from his London studio in a wooly sweater, acoustic guitar in hand. Gavin Rossdale, the former lead singer of Bush, sang a heartfelt (albeit under-rehearsed) version of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” which made me think of the Kashmir earthquake of 2005, the last time that the international community got together to help out in the aftermath of a disaster in the mountains of Pakistan.

Salman played three of Junoon’s best songs: the powerful Sufi hymn “Saeen”; “Dosti”, my old favorite from the Delhi bus crash concert; and of course “Sayonee”, the lilting, tragic love song that became a monster hit in India during the South Asian nuclear crisis of 1998, when India and Pakistan both tested nuclear bombs near their common border. Along with a couple of thousand Pakistanis, I stood and sang the dark but weirdly uplifting Urdu chorus, which can be read to express either romantic or political despair: “Beloved, the situation is hopeless and there’s no way out.” (Chen eek pal nahin/ Aur koi hal nahin/Sayonee, Sayonee.)

Midway through the show, Salman screened a horrific cellphone video of Taliban fighters silently flogging a young woman in Swat. The video went viral last year; I’d never seen it, but I had heard the stories behind the video. The Taliban version was that the girl had been whipped for leaving her house unveiled. According to another account, the local Taliban commander had her beaten when she refused his marriage proposal. Either way, it was a cruel and cowardly abuse of power that reminded me forcibly why I’d driven in for this concert in the first place. After the giant screen went dark, Salman delivered his verdict: “In my religion, it’s blasphemy to treat women that way.”

Did the concert change anything in Pakistan? In a broad sense, no. On the morning after the concert, Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorists were still plotting suicide bomb attacks against Pakistani civilians, and three million blameless Swati refugees were still waiting to go home. But Salman did raise some money to help the refugees, including a $50,000 pledge from movie producer and former e-Bay CEO Jeff Skoll. He also succeeded in shining a bright light on a monumental human tragedy that had fallen out of the international news cycle in recent weeks. And he made a bunch of Junoon fans very happy. Driving home to Connecticut that night, I sang the chorus of “Dosti” to myself: May this bond never break/May this love never end/That is my prayer/Keep moving together/Keep growing together/Stay happy together, forever.

The rest is up to us.

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Richard McGill Murphy is the editor of Fortune Small Business magazine. He holds a doctorate in South Asian anthropology and has lived and traveled extensively in Pakistan and Afghanistan. His journalism has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic and many other publications. Murphy co-produced “Islamabad Rock City,” a TV documentary about Junoon that aired on VH1 in 2001. He is currently working on a memoir about his years in South Asia.