Eqbal Ahmad

Eqbal Ahmad (1933 – 11 May 1999) was a Pakistani political scientist, writer and academic known for his
Eqbal Ahmad
anti-war activism, his support for resistance movements globally and academic contributions to the study of
the Near East.[1] Born in Bihar, British India, Ahmad migrated to Pakistan as a child and went on to study Born Eqbal Ahmad
economics at the Forman Christian College. After graduating, he worked briefly as an army officer and was 1933
wounded in the First Kashmir War in 1948.[2] He participated in the Algerian Revolution,[3] then studied the Gaya, Bihar, British
Vietnam War and U.S. imperialism, becoming an early opponent of the war upon his return to the U.S. in the India
mid-1960s.[4] Died 11 May 1999
(aged 65–66)
While highly regarded in radical circles of South Asia and left-wing circles more generally, Ahmad was a
controversial figure. According to Pervez Hoodbhoy, warrants of arrest and death sentences were put on him Islamabad,
during successive martial law governments in Pakistan. Although he was indicted in 1971 on charges of Islamabad Capital
conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger (who was then President Nixon's National Security Advisor), the case Territory, Pakistan
was eventually dismissed. Kabir Babar called Ahmad "one of the most outstanding thinkers ever to originate Spouse Julie Diamond
from the Subcontinent. His analyses of the major political events and trends of the 20th century were noted for
their astuteness and predictive power." Edward Said listed Ahmad as one of the two most important influences Children 1
on his intellectual development,[5] praising the latter's writings on South Asia especially as informative. Military career
Allegiance  Pakistan
Early life and education Service/ Pakistan Army
branch
Eqbal Ahmad was born in the village of Irki in the Gaya District (now Magadh Division) of the Indian state of
Bihar. When he was a young boy, his father was murdered over a land dispute in his presence by a hindu Years of First Kashmir War
group. During the partition of India in 1947, he and his elder brother migrated to Pakistan on foot.[2][6][7] service
Rank Second Lieutenant
Eqbal Ahmad graduated from Forman Christian College in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1951 with a degree in
economics. After serving briefly as an army officer, he enrolled at Occidental College in California in 1957, as a Rotary Fellow. In 1958, he went to
Princeton University, where he studied political science and Middle Eastern history until earning his PhD in 1965.[1][2]

During his time at Princeton, Ahmad travelled to Tunisia and Algeria as part of his doctoral dissertation. In Algiers, he supported the revolution,
leading to his subsequent arrest in France. Ahmad went on to teach at the University of Illinois and at Cornell University until 1968. During this
time, Ahmad also became a prominent fellow of the anti-war Institute for Policy Studies.[1][8]

His vocal support of Palestinian rights during the 1967 war led to his isolation within the academic community, causing him to leave Cornell. From
1968 to 1972, he worked as a fellow at the University of Chicago. During this time, Ahmad became a strong activist against the Vietnam War, which
lead to his being charged as part of the Harrisburg Seven in January 1971. After the trial Ahmad was acquitted of all charges in 1972.[9] He moved
to Amsterdam in 1973. In 1974, he founded and directed the Transnational Institute,[10] until 1975. In 1982, he
moved back to the United States and joined the Hampshire College as a tenured professor and taught there
until becoming Professor Emeritus in 1997.[11]

In 1990, he began splitting his time between Islamabad and Amherst and also began writing for Dawn, and
worked unsuccessfully to establish a liberal arts college named after Ibn Khaldun in Islamabad.[8][12] Ahmad
was one of the most prominent left-wing academics in both Pakistan and the United States. His legacy is that of
strong opposition to militarism, bureaucracy, nuclear arms and ideological rigidity, while a strong supporter of
democracy and self-determination.[1][12] Even though a little-known figure within Pakistan, Ahmad bestowed a
Eqbal spent a year studying
strong legacy within intellectual circles both in and outside the country.[13][14][15][16][17]
American history at Occidental
College.
Career
From 1960 to 1963, Ahmad lived in North Africa, working primarily in Algeria, where he joined the National Liberation Front and worked with
Frantz Fanon and some Algerian nationalists who were fighting a war of liberation against the French in Algeria.[2][18] He was offered an
opportunity to join the first independent Algerian government, but refused in favour of life as an independent intellectual. Instead, he returned to
the United States. Eqbal Ahmad was fluent in Urdu, English, Persian and Arabic.[1][2]

When he returned to the United States, Eqbal Ahmad taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago (1964–65) and Cornell University in the school
of Labour Relations (1965–68). During these years, he became known as one of the earliest and most vocal opponents of American policies in
Vietnam and Cambodia.[2] From 1968 to 1972, he was a fellow at the Adlai Stevenson Institute in Chicago.[1] In 1971, Eqbal Ahmad was indicted as
one of the Harrisburg Seven, with the anti-war Catholic priest Philip Berrigan, Berrigan's future wife, Sister Elizabeth McAlister, and four other
Catholic pacifists, on charges of conspiracy to kidnap Henry Kissinger. After fifty-nine hours of deliberations, the jury declared a mistrial, in
1972.[2][6][8]

Eqbal Ahmad's friend, author Stuart Schaar suggested in a book on Eqbal Ahmad that he had warned the US against attacking Iraq in 1990. He
had correctly predicted that Saddam's fall would bring in sectarian violence and chaos in the region.[2] Eqbal Ahmad had also interviewed Osama
Bin Laden in Peshawar in 1986. In the early 1990s, he had predicted that considering the ideology of Osama Bin Laden, he would eventually turn
against his then allies US and Pakistan.[2]

From 1972 to 1982, Ahmad was Senior Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. From 1973 to 1975, he served as the first director of its overseas
affiliate, the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. In 1982, Ahmad joined the faculty at Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts, a
progressive school which was the first college in the nation to divest from South Africa. There, he taught world politics and political science. In the
early 1990s, Ahmad was granted a parcel of land in Pakistan by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's government, to build an independent, alternative
university, named Khaldunia University.[8]

Upon his retirement from Hampshire in 1997, he settled permanently in Pakistan, where he continued to write a weekly column, for Dawn,
Pakistan's oldest English-language newspaper.[2][8] He continued to promote social democracy for Muslim countries like in the Scandinavian
countries to prevent extremism, poverty and injustice in those countries.[2]
Eqbal Ahmad was the founding chancellor of the then newly established Textile Institute of Pakistan, a textile-oriented science, design and
business-degree-awarding institute. The institute professes to be driven by the values Eqbal Ahmad stood for and awards its most prestigious
honour, the Dr. Eqbal Ahmed Achievement Award, to one graduate unanimously deemed by the faculty as reflective of Eqbal Ahmad's values
at its annual convocation.

Death and legacy

Eqbal Ahmad died of heart failure on 11 May 1999 at an Islamabad hospital in Pakistan, where he was being treated for colon cancer.[1] He had
married Julie Diamond in 1969, a teacher and a writer from New York and they had one daughter, Dohra.[1]

Since his death, a memorial lecture series has been established at Hampshire College in his honour. Speakers have included Kofi Annan, Edward
Said, Noam Chomsky, and Arundhati Roy. Ahmad was admired as "an intellectual unintimidated by power or authority". He collaborated with
such left-wing journalists, activists, and thinkers as Chomsky, Said, Howard Zinn, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Richard Falk, Fredric Jameson,
Alexander Cockburn and Daniel Berrigan. Ahmad influenced several left-leaning activists including Chomsky, Zinn, Abu-Lughod, Richard Falk,
Pervez Hoodbhoy, Cockburn, Said and Roy. Ahmad is credited for his insight into Islamic terrorism; he publicly criticised global support for the
Islamic fundamentalist groups in Afghanistan.[1]

Noam Chomsky in an article, after Ahmad's death in 1999, described Ahmad as a "treasured friend, trusted comrade, counsellor and teacher" and
said that Ahmad describes with warmth and feeling the Islamic Sufi tradition that he remembers from his childhood in a village in Bihar, where
Islamic Sufi admiration among the public united Hindus and Muslims. Simple and unpretentious, 'they preached by example', living 'by service
and by setting an example of treating people equally without discrimination'. The Sufis appealed to the most oppressed, offering 'social mobility, as
well as dignity and equality to the poor'. Sufis regarded the idea of nationalism as an anti-Islamic ideology that 'proceeds to create boundaries
where Islam is a faith without national boundaries. Eqbal Ahmad describes himself as a 'harshly secular' person and an 'internationalist' but he
was quick to praise elements of religious thought and practice that he found admirable among the Islamic Sufis.[18]

Eqbal Ahmad saw Islam as concerned, above all, with the welfare of common people. Eqbal's leftism was his humanity and this only reinforced the
pride he took in being a Pakistani in a challenging time.[19] He brought wisdom and integrity to the cause of oppressed peoples all over the
world.[1]

[Ahmad was] perhaps the shrewdest and most original anti-imperialist analyst of the post-war world, especially in the dynamics
between the West and the post-colonial states of Asia and Africa.

— Edward Said

In a review of The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, Keally McBride praises "his uncanny sense of human nature, and his encyclopedic
knowledge of world history".[3] Kabir Babar wrote that "to study him is to be exposed to the rare phenomenon of academic rigour coupled to a will
to act." Shahid Alam of Monthly Review wrote that "Ahmad provided the most articulate, analytical, and passionate voice from the third world
since Frantz Fanon. Almost certainly, he is also the most astute political thinker the Islamic world produced in the twentieth century."[20]
He was a left-wing secularist, known for his lifelong denunciation and critiques of Western imperialism. Amitava Kumar argued, "As much as Said,
he was a mentor to a generation of thinkers, mostly South Asian [...] notable for "not only the power but also the wide range of his sympathies [...]
He was a committed engineer of emancipation, building imaginative roads, linking issues across continents." He found some aspects of Ahmad's
analysis less relevant in the 21st century but still praised "his commitment to resolving political problems through diplomacy, not war. His writing
on the Muslim world in particular was notable for its critical vigilance and integrity, its resistance to received wisdom."[21] Irfan Husain wrote in
Dawn that Ahmad was too biased in favor of the Palestinians in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but also stated, "Perhaps his most precious gift was
his ability to listen to others in a way most of us don't: he would pay young students the same courtesy of carefully following their argument that he
would extend to the rich and powerful."[22] Muhammad Idrees Ahmad wrote in 2016, "He accurately predicted the consequences of western
recklessness in Afghanistan, and his warnings on US intervention in Iraq would prove prophetic."[23]

See also
List of Pakistani journalists
List of peace activists

Further reading
Confronting Empire (with David Barsamian), 2000, South End Press, ISBN 0-89608-615-1.
The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad edited by Carollee Bengelsdorf, Margaret Cerullo & Yogesh Chandrani, 2006, Columbia University
Press, ISBN 0-231-12711-1
Terrorism: Theirs and Ours (with David Barsamian), 2001, Seven Stories Press, ISBN 1-58322-490-4
Stuart Schaar, Eqbal Ahmad: Critical Outsider in a Turbulent Age, 2015, Columbia University Press, ISBN 9780231171571

References
1. Said, By Edward W. (13 May 1999). "Eqbal Ahmad: He brought
wisdom and integrity to the cause of oppressed peoples" (https://ww
w.theguardian.com/news/1999/may/14/guardianobituaries1). The
Guardian (newspaper). ISSN 0261-3077 (https://www.worldcat.org/i
ssn/0261-3077). Retrieved 27 July 2019.
2. Paracha, Nadeem F. (3 May 2015). "Smokers' Corner: Eqbal
Ahmed: the astute alarmist" (http://www.dawn.com/news/1179332).
Dawn. Pakistan. Retrieved 27 July 2019.
3. McBride, Keally (2007). Memmi, Albert; Bonnono, Robert;
Bengelsdorf, Carolee; Cerullo, Margaret; Ahmad, Eqbal; Chandrani,
Yogesh (eds.). "Postcolonial Politics, Pathologies, and Power" (http
s://www.jstor.org/stable/20452575). Political Theory. 35 (4): 517–
521. doi:10.1177/0090591707302203 (https://doi.org/10.1177%2F00
90591707302203). ISSN 0090-5917 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/
0090-5917). JSTOR 20452575 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/204525
75). S2CID 145533035 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:14
5533035).
 4. HOVSEPIAN, NUBAR; Schaar, Stuart (2016). "Review of Eqbal
Ahmad: Critical Outsider in a Turbulent Age, SchaarStuart" (https://w
ww.jstor.org/stable/26378652). Journal of Palestine Studies. 46 (1
(181)): 77–79. doi:10.1525/jps.2016.46.1.77 (https://doi.org/10.152
5%2Fjps.2016.46.1.77). ISSN 0377-919X (https://www.worldcat.org/
issn/0377-919X). JSTOR 26378652 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/263
78652).
5. Schaar, Stuart (1 October 2007). "Teaching Global Justice" (https://o
nline.ucpress.edu/jps/article/37/1/116/53901/Teaching-Global-Justic
e). Journal of Palestine Studies. 37 (1): 117.
doi:10.1525/jps.2007.37.1.116 (https://doi.org/10.1525%2Fjps.2007.
37.1.116). ISSN 0377-919X (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0377-919
X).
6. Profile of Eqbal Ahmad on The Economist (magazine), UK (https://w
ww.economist.com/obituary/1999/05/27/eqbal-ahmad) Published 27
May 1999. Retrieved 27 July 2019
7. Arshad, Sameer (4 November 2012). "Will Nitish Kumar's visit give
a boost to Biharis in Pakistan?" (https://economictimes.indiatimes.co
m/news/politics-and-nation/will-nitish-kumars-visit-give-a-boost-to-bi
haris-in-pakistan/articleshow/17083516.cms). The Economic Times.
Retrieved 9 March 2019.
8. "Biography of Eqbal Ahmad" (https://www.hampshire.edu/critical-soc
ial-inquiry/biography-of-eqbal-ahmad). Hampshire College website.
Retrieved 28 July 2019.
9. "The Nation (Harrisburg Seven trial)" (https://www.nytimes.com/197
2/02/27/archives/it-is-not-a-funny-trial-harrisburg-7.html). The New
York Times. 27 February 1972. ISSN 0362-4331 (https://www.world
cat.org/issn/0362-4331). Retrieved 28 July 2019.
10. "Collection Summary: Transnational Institute Archives" (https://searc
h.socialhistory.org/Record/ARCH02363). search.socialhistory.org.
International Institute of Social History.
11. JACKSON, JUSTIN (1 January 2010). "Kissinger's Kidnapper:
Eqbal Ahmad, the U.S. New Left, and the Transnational Romance of
Revolutionary War". Journal for the Study of Radicalism. 4 (1): 75–
119. doi:10.1353/jsr.0.0037 (https://doi.org/10.1353%2Fjsr.0.0037).
JSTOR 41887645 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/41887645).
S2CID 161134247 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:16113
4247).
12. "Ahmad, Eqbal. – Oxford Islamic Studies Online" (http://www.law.har
vard.edu/programs/lwp/people/staffPapers/emran/Ahmad_Eqbal.ht
ml). law.harvard.edu. Retrieved 1 October 2016.
13. Kabir Babar (22 May 2015). "The intellectual's intellectual" (http://ww
w.thefridaytimes.com/tft/the-intellectuals-intellectual/). The Friday
Times (newspaper) website. Retrieved 28 July 2019.
14. Schaar, Stuart (1 October 2016). Eqbal Ahmad: Critical Outsider in a
Turbulent Age (https://cup.columbia.edu/book/eqbal-ahmad/978023
1171564). Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780231539920.
15. "Remembering Dr Eqbal Ahmad" (http://www.dawn.com/news/6276
62/remembering-dr-eqbal-ahmad). Dawn. Pakistan. 10 May 2011.
Retrieved 28 July 2019.
16. "Profile of Eqbal Ahmad" (http://eacpe.org/about-eqbal-ahmad/). 27
January 2014. Retrieved 28 July 2019.
17. Ahmed, Vaqar (14 May 2015). "Eqbal Ahmad: A memoir of Munno
Chacha" (http://www.dawn.com/news/1181913). Dawn. Pakistan.
Retrieved 28 July 2019.
18. Noam Chomsky pays tributes to Eqbal Ahmad in 2000 after his
death in 1999 (https://chomsky.info/2000____/) Retrieved 27 July
2019
19. Obituary of Eqbal Ahmad on Dawn (newspaper) (https://web.archiv
e.org/web/20091026205203/http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/
Library/9803/eqbal_ahmad/fea_eqbal.html) Published 12 May 1999.
Retrieved 28 July 2019
20. Alam, Shahid (1 February 2007). "U.S. Imperialism and the Third
World" (https://monthlyreview.org/2007/02/01/u-s-imperialism-and-th
e-third-world/). Monthly Review. Retrieved 11 January 2021.
21. Kumar, Amitava (9 November 2006). "A Civilizing Mission" (https://w
ww.thenation.com/article/archive/civilizing-mission/). The Nation.
ISSN 0027-8378 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0027-8378).
Retrieved 31 January 2021.
22. Husain, Irfan (16 August 2015). "REVIEW: Friend of the
downtrodden: Eqbal Ahmad by Stuart Schaar" (http://www.dawn.co
m/news/1200620). DAWN.COM. Retrieved 31 January 2021.
23. Ahmad, Muhammad Idrees (10 March 2016). "Book review: Eqbal
Ahmad: Critical Outsider in a Turbulent Age – a compelling portrait
of a Pakistani activist" (https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-cultur
e/book-review-eqbal-ahmad-critical-outsider-in-a-turbulent-age-a-co
mpelling-portrait-of-a-pakistani-activist-1.162803). The National.
Retrieved 31 January 2021.
External links
Eqbal Ahmad materials in the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) (http://www.saadigitalarchive.org/search/Eqbal%20Ahmad),
Newspaper clippings about articles on Eqbal Ahmad
Eqbal Ahmad, by Edward W. Said, in The Guardian newspaper, UK (https://www.theguardian.com/obituaries/story/0,,296702,00.html)
Obituary. "Eqbal Ahmad, historian and rebel." The Economist magazine, UK, Published May 27, 1999 (http://www.economist.com/obituary/displ
aystory.cfm?story_id=E1_NDRJDG) This is a link to a premium content article

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