by Edward Said, The Guardian, 14 May 1999
Eqbal Ahmad, perhaps the shrewdest and most original anti-imperialist
analyst of Asia and Africa, has died, aged 66, in Islamabad following an
operation for colon cancer. A man of enormous charisma and
incorruptible ideals, he was a prodigious talker and lecturer.
He had
an almost instinctive attraction to movements of the oppressed and the
persecuted, whether in Europe, America, Bosnia, Chechnya, South Lebanon,
Vietnam, Iraq or the Indian sub-continent. He had a formidable
knowledge of history, always measuring the promise of religion and
nationalism against their depredations and abuse as their proponents
descended into fundamentalism, chauvinism and provincialism.
Ahmad
was a fierce, often angry, combatant against what he perceived as human
cruelty and perversity. During his last years, he dedicated himself -
quixotically it would sometimes appear - to the creation of an
alternative university in Pakistan, named Khalduniyah after the great
Arab polymath and historian whose comprehensive view of the human
adventure Ahmad sought to embody in a curriculum solidly based in the
modern humanities, social and natural sciences.
Born in the
Indian state of Bihar, he and his siblings left for Pakistan in 1948;
before that, his father was murdered in bed over a land dispute, as the
boy lay next to him, a traumatic event Eqbal would cite when he attacked
material acquisitiveness.
In Lahore, he attended Foreman
Christian College, became briefly an army officer, then went to the
United States in the mid-1950s as a Rotary fellow in American history at
Occidental College, California. He entered Princeton in 1958 with a
double major in political science and Middle Eastern studies. He got his
PhD in 1965 and, during his Princeton years, went to Algeria, joined
the FLN, was arrested in France and established a cultural centre in
Tunis.
During the 1960s, he taught at Cornell and Chicago, and
was among the first fellows of the anti-war Washington Institute of
Policy Studies (IPS). In 1969 he married Julie Diamond, a teacher and
writer from New York, and between 1973 and 1975 he established and
headed the IPS's offshoot in Amsterdam, the Transnational Institute.
Ahmad
was an early and prominent opponent of the Vietnam war, and in 1970 was
tried with the Berrigan brothers on a trumped-up charge of conspiracy
to kidnap Henry Kissinger - on which he and his alleged co-conspirators
were acquitted. In addition to his outspoken support of unpopular causes
(especially Palestinian rights), Ahmad's uncompromising politics kept
him an untenured professor at various universities until 1982, when
Hampshire College, Massachusetts, made him a professor. He taught there
until he became emeritus professor in 1998, dividing his time between
New England and Pakistan.
During these years he travelled all
over the world. Arabs, for example, learned more from him about the
failures of Arab nationalism than from anyone else. In 1980, in Beirut,
he was the first to predict the exact outlines of the 1982 Israeli
invasion; in a memo to Yasir Arafat and Abu Jihad he also sadly forecast
the quick defeat of PLO forces in South Lebanon. He was a relentless
opponent of militarism, bureaucracy, ideological rigidity and what he
called 'the pathology of power'. He was consulted by journalists and
international civil servants about abstruse currents in contemporary
Afghanistan, Algeria, Iran, India, Pakistan, Angola, Cuba, Sri Lanka and
he had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the US.
No one who saw him
sitting bare-foot and cross-legged on a living-room floor, conversing
genially until the early hours, with a glass in his hand, will ever
forget the sight or the sound of his voice as he announced 'four major
points' - but never got past two or three. He loved literature,
especially poetry, and the sensitive and precise use of language,
whether it was Urdu, English, French, Arabic or Farsi.
Ahmad was
that rare thing, an intellectual unintimidated by power or authority, a
companion in arms to such diverse figures as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn,
Tariq Ali, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Richard Falk, Fred Jameson, Alexander
Cockburn and Daniel Berrigan.
Immaculate in dress and expression,
faultlessly kind, an unpretentious connoisseur of food and wine, he saw
himself as a man of the 18th century, modern because of enlightenment
and breadth of outlook, not because of technological or quasi-scientific
'progress'. Somehow he managed to preserve his native Muslim tradition
without succumbing either to the frozen exclusivism or to the jealousy
that has often gone with it. Humanity and secularism had no finer
champion. He is survived by Julie, and their daughter Dohra, a graduate
student at Columbia.
Eqbal Ahmad, political scientist and peace activist, born 1933; died May 11, 1999
