ARABIC-L: GEN: The Guardian (London): Eqbal Ahmad

[Dilworth B. Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Fri 14 May 1999
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1) Subject: Edward Said: Eqbal Ahmad & the Cause of Oppressed Peoples

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1)
Date: 14 May 1999
From: Muhammad Deeb <mdeeb at gpu.srv.ualberta.ca>
Subject: Edward Said: Eqbal Ahmad & the Cause of Oppressed Peoples

The Guardian (London), May 14, 1999

HEADLINE: Eqbal Ahmad;  He brought wisdom and integrity to the cause of
oppressed peoples

Edward Said

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 mur dered 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 uncompro mising 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 out
lines 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.

Edward W Said

Eqbal Ahmad, political scientist and peace activist, born 1933; died May
11, 1999

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End of Arabic-L: 14 May 1999