Chapter One

THINK CRITICALLY AND TAKE RISKS

GANDHI AND PARTITION

One of the critical events of your childhood was the murder of your father.

That played an important role, because apart from leaving a very deep scar on me as a child, unconsciously I must have absorbed certain conclusions about life. One was that class is more important than blood relationship and that property is more dear to people than friendship or loyalties. Because in the murder of my father some relatives themselves were involved. They felt their property rights were threatened by his politics. . . . He was involved with nationalism and gifting lands, thus setting bad examples.

When you look back at that fifty-year period in South Asia, with Mahatma Gandhi, the Quit India movement, and then the partition of India into two countries and the subsequent bloodbath, in retrospect, was there any way out of that?

I think so. When two communities have actually coexisted with each other for seven hundred years, it is impossible not to find ways out of separation. I just don’t understand why the leadership of India, both Muslim and Hindu, and including Gandhi, failed to ensure India its historical continuity of two communities, one Hindu and the other Muslim, continuing to live side by side. There were tensions in this relationship, as there are tensions in all relationships. But by and large these two peoples had lived collaboratively with each other, and in the process a lot of things had grown. A civilization had grown. Urdu, a new language, had emerged that was syncretic of what Muslims brought and what they found in the subcontinent. It became a common language of communication. New art forms and a new sort of music had emerged. Northern Indian music is quite different from the old southern Karnatic tradition.

Partition could have been avoided. But as the great poet and writer Rabindranath Tagore had foreseen, not unless Indian anti-imperialist movements also understood the necessity of avoiding the ideology of nationalism. We rejected Western imperialism, but in the process we embraced Western nationalism lock, stock, and barrel.

Nationalism is an ideology of difference. Therefore, Gandhi is at least as responsible for contributing to the division of India as anyone, including Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, if not more so. There is a remarkable conversation that is now available to us between Tagore and Gandhi with Tagore warning Gandhi, “Look, the politics that you are introducing in India is going to divide the two communities.”1

What about Gandhi’s use of Hindu terminology and the trappings of Hinduism and concepts such as Ram Rajya (the rule of Ram) and his use of bhajans, devotional music. Do you think that contributed to a sense of unease among certain Muslims?

It did. But lest Gandhi is understood as a sort of Hindu communalist, which is the Pakistani nationalist line against him, I should say that he was above all an anti-imperialist opportunist. It is that streak of opportunism in Mahatma Gandhi that led him to pursue a politics that spiritualized and sectarianized the politics of India. Let me give you two examples.

Gandhi on his return to India from South Africa in 1915 was already deeply committed to a policy of passive resistance. The ideas of ahimsa, nonviolence, and satyagraha, passive resistance, had already developed in his mind during his years in South Africa. So, he arrives in India and hits the national scene with meteoric effect. His rise was dramatic. By 1916, Gandhi was already a national figure.

The first major cause he picked up was saving the caliphate in Turkey. It’s one of the spookiest moments in modern Indian history. There in the Middle East, the Ottomans are falling apart. Turkish nationalism, led by the Young Turks and finally by Kemal Ataturk, has no use for the Ottoman sultan. They are throwing the sultanate away. In India, Muslims portray the collapse of the Ottoman sultanate as a product of British machinations. They start an anti-British movement in the name of saving the caliphate in Turkey. Mahatma Gandhi jumps into the fray. You have this massive movement in which Muslims are totally mobilized and Gandhi is leading it along with the Ali brothers, Muhammad and Shaukat, and the Congress Party has thrown its support in behalf of the caliphate movement. Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad, who would later become a major figure in the Indian National Congress, also becomes a leader in this movement. Jinnah warns Gandhi, “Don’t do this. This is using religion in politics. This is using religion or appeals of religion to mobilize against the British. One day it will backfire on us.” He used that famous phrase: “Mr. Gandhi is spiritualizing Indian nationalist politics.”

Later on, Gandhi takes on all these Hindu symbols. Not because they’re Hindu symbols but because they were the symbols of the majority people. Therefore, they had the most power to mobilize. In the process, the Muslim community got very frightened that its own cultural traditions and the common culture that was being produced was being shunted aside. It wasn’t so much because Gandhi was a Hindu or a communalist, but because he was an anti-imperialist opportunist who would do anything within the framework of his nonviolent philosophy that would mobilize the masses.

It seems to be a harbinger of things to come as well and has an enormous contradiction inherent in it, in that Gandhi on one hand is a critic of one imperial system, the British Raj, yet he is supporting a decaying and disintegrating other imperial system, the Turkish Ottoman Empire. How was he going to undermine the British Raj by supporting another imperial construct?

He would undermine the British Raj by getting the Muslim population of India mobilized, knowing that Hindu-Muslim unity was very central to the success of the anti-colonial movement. To him this was a moment to speak on behalf of an issue that had captured the Muslim imagination to show to the Muslims of India, “Look, we are on your side, too. I can support your cause.” What he was not thinking of . . . was the long term. What would be the impact of this? Jinnah did think of it. . . . 

Tagore felt, for example, that Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement would also tend to divide the Hindus from the Muslims, that it would create deep fissures in Indian society. You can see Tagore’s thinking in his novel The Home and the World, which Satyajit Ray made into a film with the same title.2

In 1920, Tagore argued that nationalism tends to create emotions of exclusion and separation based on differences and not commonality. Nonviolence as an organized, emotive drawing on religious symbolism would also divide and sow seeds of violence in India. So the roots of violence would lie in the very nonviolence that Gandhi was mobilizing on such a large scale. So Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement, the burning of imported goods, would hit classes unequally. Poor Muslims in Bengal would be hit differently from middle-class Hindus who dominate Bengal.

In mid-July 1921, the two men met in Tagore’s house in Calcutta. Gandhi says, “But Gurudev, I have already achieved Hindu-Muslim unity.” Tagore replies, “When the British either walk out or are driven out by us nationalists, what will happen then?” Gandhi: “But Gurudev, my program for winning swaraj [self-rule] is based on the principle of nonviolence.” Tagore: “Come, Gandhiji, come. Look over the edge of my veranda. Look down there and see what your so-called nonviolent followers are up to.” Then he shows him the bazaar where clothes are being burned by the non-cooperation activists. Tagore asks: “Do you think you can hold our violent emotions with your nonviolent principles? No, I don’t think so. You know you can’t.” On these themes he would go on arguing for the next two years with Gandhi.

What happened twenty-six years later, in 1947, was in some remarkably prescient ways seen by Tagore as coming. The poet knew better than the Mahatma.

Nevertheless Gandhi and his movement were able to attract some prominent Muslims. For example, you just mentioned Azad. There were Badshah Khan and others. What accounts for this?

First of all, the most religious Muslim leaders remained on the side of the Indian National Congress and Gandhi. In addition to Maulana Azad, there was Maulana Hussain Ahmed Madani. These were all great religious scholars. It would remain an ironic and relatively unexplained fact of modern Indian history that the idea of Pakistan was very strongly opposed by the Islamic religious scholars of India. The reason for that was, among others, an argument on the part of the ulema, the religious scholars of Islam in India, that nationalism was an anti-Islamic ideology, because nationalism proceeds to create boundaries where Islam is a faith without boundaries. It interferes with the universalism that is the Koranic commitment of Islam. It is a universal religion that will not be subject to drawn boundaries.

Second was a class problem. Most of the proponents of Muslim nationalism, of Pakistani nationalism, were westernized, middle-class people. The ulema, the religious leadership, was threatened by the rise of this middle class, which in terms of class, educational outlook, training, and culture was different from them. So they tended to separate from it.

If Gandhi were the sectarian symbol of the Indian Congress Party, would it be fair to characterize Jawaharlal Nehru as its secular leader?

Gandhi was neither sectarian nor a symbol of sectarianism. Some of Gandhi’s politics, some of the culture that he produced, unconsciously, unknowingly, and unintentionally contributed to the rise of sectarianism, both on the Muslim side and on the Hindu side. He himself was never party to it. Sectarians on both sides, Hindu as well as Muslim, hated him because they saw him as a universal figure. Gandhi was murdered by a member of a militant Hindu fundamentalist party, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. While Gandhi dies saying, “Hé, Ram” [“Oh, God”], he was killed by a man who thought he was following Ram.

Nehru was a highly westernized nationalist leader, fairly clearly committed to a secular India under the Indian National Congress. I have deep respect for Nehru as a person. Having said that, I think we have to admit that under Nehru a couple of things happened which I had expected him to avoid.

India’s president in those early days, Rajendra Prasad, took upon himself to revive, rebuild, and celebrate the reopening of the temple in Somnath in the state of Gujarat. It had been destroyed by Afghan invaders in the tenth century. Nehru went along with it. He shouldn’t have. It’s not the business of the state to start correcting historical wrongs done a thousand or two thousand years ago. It’s not the business of the state to correct historical rights and wrongs of a religious nature.

I didn’t realize this phenomenon until almost 1990. I was researching what would become an extraordinary event in Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh in 1992, the destruction of the historic Babari mosque. The militants who were proceeding to destroy the Babari mosque continued to remind me that this had been done by the Congress Party, too, correcting historical rights and wrongs in the rebuilding of the temple at Somnath.

What’s going on in the pre-1947 period in terms of British imperial machinations? Are they seeking to rule by dividing the communities?

That’s the nationalist argument and belief, that Britain actually sought and helped divide India between Pakistan and India. I do not read the history that way. The British did divide India along communal lines, especially between 1757 and 1920. Therefore, no actual break occurs in Britain’s overall posture of divided rule. It continued. Separate electorates were established. When Muslims would resist British rule, as they did between 1757 and 1857, they were discriminated against in favor of bringing up Hindus. When Congress became organized, more Hindu nationalist figures were there than Muslim ones. Then they favored Muslims against the Congress. So there was a whole set of divide-and-rule policies that the British followed for nearly two centuries.

I don’t think it extended, though, to actually choosing to draw the line between Pakistan and India. What happened is that you had a succession of two viceroys. Lord Wavell came in first and soon was recalled and replaced by Lord Louis Mountbatten. Wavell appears to have made the needed moves to save some sort of unity of India under some agreement between the Muslim League and the Congress. Mountbatten, who was the next choice of Britain’s Labor government, really carried out a policy of speeding up the division of India without waiting to see if it could be saved or whether the bloodshed that everybody expected to occur could be avoided. Why did he precipitate partition of India? It’s an interesting question. I have not been able to find enough material to disprove the British thesis that he was driven by personal ambition more than British policy. But the truth remains that Britain’s policy first created the basis for the division of India, a policy of divide and rule over a long period of time, and when the crisis came to a head, Britain did very little to save the unity of India.

Just to back up a little bit chronologically, what kind of impact did German and Japanese attacks on British power during World War II have on the nationalist movement? Did this prove to Indian nationalists that the empire was vulnerable?

Not really. A bigger impact than World War II was the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese war.

That’s Tagore’s position.

It’s Tagore’s position also. The Russo-Japanese war was the first war in a hundred years in which a non-Western army had thoroughly defeated a Western one. Japan defeated Russia. People had for about a hundred years been told with the massive weight of literature, songs, novels, everything, that they were colonized because they were inferior. They were colonized because they were racially backward, because they were scientifically backward, because they were organizationally backward, because they were backward in their knowledge of warfare and strategy and tactics and weaponry. Then suddenly seeing that an Asian power had turned around and beaten a Western power, that had an impact. Lord Curzon was then the viceroy in India. In his memorandum to Downing Street, he wrote that the reverberations of Japan’s victory over Russia were like a thunderclap through the whispering galleries of the East.

World War I had a huge impact. India fought on the British side. Our soldiers fought bravely. They fought on the European front. They experienced on the battlefield two things: their equality with British and European soldiers, and the practice of inequality on the part of the empire. On the battlefield they were every day recognizing that they were equals, but they were also experiencing patterns of racial discrimination. Therefore they came back from World War I burning with anger. They and their relatives in many ways gave the push to the nationalist movement. The mass sympathy with the nationalist movement in India occured after World War I.

Let’s jump now to August 1942, when Gandhi launches the Quit India campaign. There would be no more cooperation. India would not support the British effort to defeat Germany and Japan. Churchill is the prime minister. He responds to the announcement with: “I have not become His Majesty’s First Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire to a half-naked Indian fakir,” referring to Gandhi. Why this is so crucial is that the entire Congress leadership is incarcerated, leaving the field open to Jinnah.

It’s even more than that. In retrospect it seems to me that the Indian National Congress, and especially Mahatmaji, committed a blunder. Nineteen forty-two was a very difficult year for Britain. London was under heavy bombing. The British fight against fascism was at its climax. It was fairly touch and go. Japan had invaded India. One member of the Congress leadership, Subhash Chandra Bose, had already gone over to the Axis and was organizing an Indian National Army under the Japanese flag.

Gandhi and the Congress leaders were totally justified in saying to Britain, “We will support the war effort, but in return you must give us a promise of independence after the war.” But insofar as Britain was not willing to concede that, it was a tactical blunder to have launched the Quit India movement.

Jinnah, who was then the leader of the Muslim League, simply refused to go along. He did so for two reasons. Number one, he was a die-hard anti-fascist. Jinnah couldn’t imagine—he was also more Anglicized than Gandhi—doing anything that would hurt the British at that particular moment. And secondly, Jinnah was also very opportunistic. This was for him an opportunity to get British support for his demand for Pakistan. Britain had not been terribly kind towards him before. So on both counts, Congress made a mistake.

Jinnah, as represented in the book Freedom at Midnight and the film Gandhi,3 comes over as a dark, unsympathetic character.

So far, publicists, I wouldn’t say historians, have been very unkind to Jinnah. He remains the victim, even today, of polemic on the one hand and of the failure of successive Pakistani leaders who have made a mess of Pakistan as a country. Jinnah was not the kind of visionary that Gandhi was. Nor the kind of attractive, tender, cultured, literary, good-looking, emotionally volatile personality that Nehru was. Jinnah had none of that. Jinnah was a Cartesian, Victorian, and urban barrister who was deeply committed to constitutionalism . . . and to rational discourse and politics. He was somewhat distant from the masses. Jinnah was very much like most of his British contemporaries, a liberal constitutionalist. What is really interesting about him is the passage that he makes from a very deeply committed secular nationalist politician whose role in the Indian National Congress was so key that all of them used to describe him as the “ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity.” By 1933, he had become a proponent of Muslim interests only, and then as late as 1940 he launched the demand of Pakistan and seven years later actually achieved it. What is forgotten about him is that in all but eight years of his life he was committed to the unity of India.

Jinnah becomes the first president of independent Pakistan. Not longer after that, he dies.

It was about a year later. He was very sick and was dying of cancer. But everything that he had said and done during that year suggests—and this is a point I have been making a great deal in Pakistan—a vision of Pakistan as having open borders with India. It suggests a vision of Pakistan at peace with all its neighbors. I don’t think he imagined what has happened now. To give you a little interesting aside on this: Jinnah was a very rich man. He was a very successful lawyer. For about seventeen years he practiced in England and made a lot of money. In his will, which he drafted, most of his money went to Indian institutions and very little to Pakistani ones. That’s an interesting fact.

Jinnah was a remarkably careful investor. Surprisingly, all the investments he made during 1945 to 1947—except two, a small property in Lahore and a big but relatively inexpensive property in Karachi—were in India, not in Pakistan, in areas or in companies that would become Indian and not Pakistani, even in his own imagination. So he was a more interesting figure than propagandists have made him to be. Stanley Wolpert’s biography of Jinnah is very good.4

What’s your assessment of Muhammad Iqbal, the poet and philosopher? He died in 1938. In Pakistan he is celebrated as the national poet.

Muhammad Iqbal was unquestionably a genius and a great poet. He brought Urdu poetry and to a lesser extent Persian poetry into history. Before Iqbal, Urdu and even Persian poetry belonged in the domain of literature, separated from history, and had but a tangential linkage to it. Iqbal brings Urdu into history, and in that sense somebody like Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who died in 1984, is a successor poet.

There is a second great quality to him. He turns, he gives, he stretches, not as much as Faiz would later do, the Urdu language and Urdu poetry. He not only changes its subject into social subjects, subjects other than love, but he changes to some extent its structure. He invests it with power, with anger, with emotion other than that of love. In that sense he broadens the scope of Urdu’s poetic discourse.

He is also an original thinker, very much in the German tradition. But his philosophical outlook is not quite as interesting as the fact that he is one of the last great mystics. And his mystical poetry I think will last a very long time.

Recently I was doing a documentary on nationalism for the BBC.5 I had wanted to put in one segment that doesn’t appear actually in the film, unfortunately, which is that Iqbal Day in Pakistan is celebrated officially as the founder’s day, precisely because he is projected as the man who conceptualized Pakistan. He’s the founding father in some ways. He imagined Pakistan before Jinnah thought of it.

At the same time he’s the poet who said, “Sare Jahan Se Achcha Hindustan Hamara.”6 “In the whole world there is no country better than our India.”

Exactly. But you have this phenomenon of his being portrayed in Pakistan as the father of Pakistani nationalism. In India, on Republic Day, January 26, the Indian army beat the retreat to “Sare Jahan Se Achcha.” And the Indian Parliament, I am told, failed to adopt it as the national anthem by two votes. So India ended up with a Tagore song as its national anthem. Bangladesh also ended up with a Tagore song as its national anthem. So Tagore, an anti-nationalist, ended up providing the national anthem to two countries of South Asia. Iqbal has ended up as providing no national anthem whatsoever, because the only one that he wrote that could have been adopted would have been India’s.

Back to the politics of India and partition. Are there any analogies to be drawn between the British withdrawing, as you suggest, rather abruptly, from the subcontinent and withdrawing from Palestine, withdrawing from Ireland and in each case leaving a very unhappy and problematic political legacy.

So little has been written on this. My sense is that World War II exhausted Britain’s imperial will. There is a lot of speculation . . . in the Middle East and India and Pakistan about the extent to which Britain planned its withdrawal and the ways in which it wished to hand things over to America and play second fiddle to American imperialism, using the United States as a kind of proxy. I don’t believe so.

From 1914 to 1939, you begin to notice a holding pattern. It is a desire to keep what you have by partly manipulating reality and partly brute force. . . . Britain doggedly controlled the areas where energy resources were concentrated, because coal had already become completely unimportant to their economy and to power, and in World Wars I and II they had come to a rather deep, respectful realization of the importance of oil. They seemed to care about two things: oil and English people. So, wherever there was a large English colony, such as Kenya, they hung on. Where there was oil, they hung on. Places like India, they cared much less about.

I have this vivid memory of my brothers saying in 1946 that the worst that can happen would be for the British—these were all nationalists, you understand—to pull out prematurely, not because they were going to give us independence, but they did not even have the staying power to ensure an orderly withdrawal. What we witnessed in 1947 and then again in 1948 was a hurried, unthought-out, irresponsible, and frankly cowardly withdrawal.

Is there any reliable figure on the number of people that perished during the partition of 1947?

No reliable figures. What we do have is an idea that the original estimations were wrong. Originally it was said that four or five million died. No. The number of deaths was minimal in view of the size of the catastrophe. Less than half a million died. But remember, twenty-two million people were displaced, moved from one place to another. To date it remains the largest migration in recorded history.

THE STRUGGLE OVER KASHMIR

That legacy lives on in the subcontinent with wars and an arms race and the ever-vexing issue of Kashmir.

Three wars: 1948, 1965, and then again in 1971 to 1972. Continued conflict over Kashmir, which is costing the Kashmiri people enormously. . . . Continued arms race, which is now nuclear. And worse: India and Pakistan are both now engaged in missile development. The logic of proliferation and the arms race becomes much worse with missiles. Because you can produce one family after another of more advanced, more powerful, longer ranged, blah, blah, blah missiles.

But you know, something that is not often recognized . . . is how these migrations between India and Pakistan have produced communities which are still struggling to settle and come to peace with their new surroundings. It created an environment of social conflict.

The Indian government steadfastly refuses to acknowledge the right of Kashmiris to self-determination. They say that issue was settled in 1947, when the Maharaja of Kashmir acceded to the Indian Union.

That’s the official position of India. Pakistan has a similar one, but with much less lethal effect. The Pakistan government’s position is that the Kashmiris were given the right to exercise their self-determination by choosing between India and Pakistan. This right was written into the United Nations Security Council resolution of 1948. So Pakistan is insisting that there should be a referendum or a plebescite on the basis of the U.N. resolution, which would force the Kashmiris to choose between India and Pakistan.

Fifty years later the Kashmiris are more interested in choosing either maximum autonomy from these two countries or independence from them. Pakistan is not conceding that. The difference in the Pakistani and Indian position is that India is occupying the Kashmir Valley. There is a revolt, since 1989. So far about 50,000 people have been killed, mostly at the hands of the Indian military. India’s denial is costing lives and properties, while Pakistan’s old position is not quite as costly but is still outdated. I’ve been arguing in favor of both India and Pakistan coming to an agreement to give the Kashmiris a chance to decide their future. It can be done in such a way that it does not hurt the interests of either Pakistan or India.

Nehru agreed to hold a plebiscite but then never followed through. There were delays and delays and then it never happened.

Under Prime Minister Nehru, India had committed itself to holding a plebiscite and carrying out the U.N. resolution. That promise India has reneged on.

Comment on the issue of linguistic nationalism in Pakistan and India. In Pakistan there has been the introduction of more Persian and Arabic words and terms. In India the common language is being replaced by a more Sanskritized Hindi.

Less and less so. But what you have observed is absolutely correct for the first twenty years of independence. Nationalism was trying to create new realities, and it had not succeeded very well. First of all, Pakistani nationalism identified Urdu as its national language, thus causing a major problem. . . . Between 1947 and 1970, more than half of the country was Bengali-speaking, in East Pakistan. Bengali was a developed language, at least as developed as Urdu. It produced such great poets as Tagore and such great novelists as Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. Bengalis wanted to keep their own language. As a result, when the Pakistan government, dominated by mohajir Urdu-speakers, tried to impose Urdu as the national language, Bengal resisted. Far from strengthening Pakistani nationalism, the imposition of Urdu as a national language actually divided the country. It broke up the unity of Pakistan. It contributed to the separation of Bangladesh as an independent country.

Similarly, in India, Urdu has been identified as a Muslim language, and therefore an effort has been made to use more and more Sanskrit words in the old Hindustani. It doesn’t work either, because the absolute truth about Urdu is that it is not a Muslim or a Hindu language. It developed in response to the necessity of two people to discover a common language. It developed out of an honest, genuine, meaningful, creative encounter between Islam and India. Out of that multicultural, multi-religious encounter developed a language that is our common heritage. We call it Urdu in Pakistan. It is called Hindustani in India. What I find interesting is that this language has suffered deeply from the patronage of the state in Pakistan. Witness the resistance of Sindhis to Urdu, of Bengalis to Urdu to the point where they have actually separated. In India it is rooted in the creation of an official language, Hindi, which doesn’t appeal to the hearts of people. The result is that in both countries it has suffered. In India it has suffered from official hostility. In Pakistan this language has suffered from official patronage. And at the base this language is now going through a certain transformation in both India and Pakistan.

For example, Urdu is more widely spoken in Pakistan, but it is different from Radio Pakistan’s Urdu. Its genius is its syncretic structure. It has now taken on Punjabi, Sindhi, Baluchi, and a huge number of English words and absorbed them within itself. Thus it is now functioning as the language of the Pakistani market. While it is dying as a literary language in schools and universities, it is expanding as a spoken language among common people. In India, Urdu is making a massive comeback through so-called Bollywood films. Bombay films, looking for markets, use Urdu. The songs are all in Urdu. The dialogue is in Urdu. So in a very genuine sense, while officials have created myths of nationalist languages, the people are once again creating languages that are more common between India and Pakistan.

Coming back to Kashmir, what solutions would you propose?

I have argued at some length that India and Pakistan must begin the process of finding a solution with the leaders of the Kashmiri movement. Having said that, we need to recall a little bit of the background. Kashmir, since 1948, has been divided between India and Pakistan. On the Pakistani side is primarily a Punjabi-speaking area which we call Azad Kashmir, “Free Kashmir,” with its capital in Muzaffarabad. It has its own autonomous government, and it does exercise autonomy over local matters. Pakistan almost totally controls its foreign policy, defense, and commercial policies. So in a sense its autonomy is very severely compromised.

India controls all of the rest of Kashmir, which divides into three broad parts. There is the valley. Eighty to eighty-five percent of the valley’s population is Muslim. They have over the last two centuries suffered great discrimination, injustice, and oppression at the hands of the maharaja of Kashmir put in power by the British. Both regimes were genuinely discriminatory, to the point where Muslims were really serfs. They couldn’t join any government services. They were not allowed to study. It was very bad. Since 1948, the situation has improved. More Kashmiris have gone to schools and been educated. A sort of Kashmiri nationalism is centered in the valley with its population of about four million. The valley is one identifiable unique component of Kashmir which is the seat of Kashmiriat, Kashmiri nationalism, Kashmiri aspirations.

Then you have Ladakh, which is predominantly Buddhist. Some portions of it are Muslim. India considers Ladakh to be terribly important for its defense because it is next to China. Then there is the large district of Jammu, where roughly 60 percent of the population is non-Kashmiri-speaking Hindus. I think their religion is less important than their ethnicity—they are Dogras, the same people as the maharaja. They have been favored. They speak a different language, Dogri. They feel much closer to India. They do not share the premises of Kashmiriat.

Now keep this division in mind. Kashmir is divided between Pakistan and India. The part under India is the most disputed at the moment. That’s where the uprising is, and that divides into three parts: the valley, Ladakh, and Jammu. My proposal is that we seek an agreement which leaves the Pakistani part under Pakistani control. Jammu and Ladakh, which do not share the premises of Kashmiri nationalism, should be left under Indian sovereignty. The valley should be given independence. But the agreement among the three—Kashmiri leadership, Pakistan, and India—must envisage uniting Kashmir with divided sovereignty. Unite the territory, keep sovereignties divided, which in our time is fairly possible. Remove the lines of control, remove border patrols, make trade free among these three, make India, Pakistan, and the independent Kashmiri government jointly responsible for the defense of this mountain area.

Kashmir at the moment is a bone of contention between Pakistan and India on the one hand, Kashmiri nationalism in India on the other hand, between Dogras and Kashmiris on yet another hand, and anxieties and fears among Buddhists and Kashmiris on still yet another hand. My proposal would create, instead of a bone of contention, a bridge of peace. Allow each community maximum autonomy with divided sovereignty.

Kashmir would then serve as the starting point of normalizing relations between India and Pakistan. And if India and Pakistan normalize relations, with free trade, free exchange of professionals, and reduction in our arms spending, in ten years we will start looking like East Asia. We are competing with each other with so little money. Four hundred million people in India out of a population of 950 million are living below the poverty line. . . . This condition has to be removed.

Do you think the resolution of the Kashmir dispute could provide that opening to heal the wounds between Pakistan and India?

They can reach agreements on more important issues than Kashmir. Kashmir is more of an emotional issue.

The division of water, of our rivers, was a much more central issue, because that’s the lifeline of Pakistan and of the Indian part of Punjab and Haryana. But we reached an agreement on water, the 1960 Indus Basin Water Treaty, years ago, and we have honored it. The World Bank played a very central role in bringing about the treaty, one of the few good things that the World Bank has ever done. Today we are not fighting over water any more. In 1996, India and Bangladesh reached a water agreement on the Ganges.7

Except for the die-hard Hindu nationalists in India and the militant Islamic parties in Pakistan, there is no rancor among secular people or among common people between India and Pakistan. In fact, the longer we delay normalization of relations between India and Pakistan and the resolution of the Kashmir conflict, the more we are creating an environment for the spread of Islamic and Hindu militancy.

HIGHER EDUCATION

Tell me about your efforts to establish an independent educational institution in Islamabad.

Higher education in Pakistan has almost totally collapsed. Higher education has collapsed or is collapsing in most third-world countries, including India. In India a sort of effort was made to produce technical education of high quality by the founding of the six Institutes of Indian Technology. There, no humanities, no social sciences are taught. They prepare engineers and a few scientists. Otherwise, the quality of education in India has really drastically declined.

The reasons for the decline of higher education are multiple. One has been the confused and in some ways very uncreative attitude of nationalist governments toward language. On the one hand, these post-colonial states want to impose linguistic orthodoxy suitable to the nationalist mythology. In Pakistani nationalist mythology Urdu, of a Persianized variety, is our official language. In India it is Hindi, of a Sanskritized variety. In Algeria it is Arabic. These are the requirements of the nationalist orthodoxy on the one hand. On the other hand, these are all countries that are organically linked to the capitalist market, meaning they are linked to the imperial metropolis, old or new, either Britain or America, France or America. The result is that they have two sets of standards, one real, the other theoretical.

In Algeria, higher education is supposed to have Arabized. The reality was, the Algerian independent state remained organically tied to France and to the international market. Therefore the local language, Arabic, was devalued. So you have a situation in which you have higher education without a language. You can’t impart higher education without a consistent language policy. That contributed to a decline in education.

Second, we all inherited a colonial system of higher education. These post-colonial governments had no will or desire to introduce an alternative system of education. The rhetoric and the structure they announced was that of independence. The reality was that of higher education based on colonial premises and systems. The educational system in this new setting of post-colonial statehood became increasingly dysfunctional because it came under opposing, contradictory pressures.

Third, the functions of colonial education were different. As Lord Macaulay put it, “We want to train in schools of higher learning Indians who would be good at mediating between the Raj and the population, the large majority of Her Majesty’s subjects.”8 So, this education was supposed to produce not governors or citizens or educators or administrators of an independent state. It was all meant to produce servants of the empire. This we have continued to do to this day. But that is not the expectation from the educational system. Therefore there is this increasing disjunction between expectation and reality.

Finally I should mention the World Bank, which by and large defines the preferences of post-colonial states. It discourages investments in higher education. The World Bank’s line is that third-world countries don’t need higher education, they need more literacy. Its policies are aimed at producing a relatively more skilled pool of workers and not people who can govern themselves.

In Pakistan, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto nationalized all the institutions. This meant bureaucrats started running universities. Police officers make really bad presidents of universities. Ditto army officers. Then Mr. Bhutto was followed by General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq. He needed a constituency. He had none. He needed support of a party. No party was willing to support him except Jamat-e-Islami, which charged a fee: Islamization of higher educational institutions. During the pro-western government of Zia ul-Haq, physics professors could not be appointed if they could not name the wives of the Holy Prophet.

Khaldunia, which is the name of the university I’m trying to establish, aims at reviving higher education in one third-world country. It can’t revive it on its own. It simply can set some examples and show what kind of curriculum should be the curriculum of an independent, self-governing people. It would make an effort to establish some linkages between the past and the future, some congruence between inherited traditions and contemporary knowledge.

What kind of allies do you have inside and outside of Pakistan helping you on this project?

Outside Pakistan are mostly young academics, mostly from the third world, who are living in the United States or in Europe . . . who want to build a third-world institution. I have received something like 150 letters from qualified young people saying, “We read on the Internet about your efforts. We read a story in the Chronicle of Higher Education.9 If we can help, if we can teach, please let us know. Here is my résumé.” So there is that. I have not yet really gone in any serious way to Western funding sources. In Pakistan, very little sympathy or help has come from the landed elite.

That’s doesn’t surprise you, does it?

No. The Harvard- and Oxford-educated members of Benazir Bhutto’s government were the most hostile to my efforts. The business community, especially of Karachi, and also of Punjab, has been supportive.

We have colleges and universities that are graduating ignorants. So you have people with B.A. and M.A. degrees who cannot pass the freshman entrance test at MIT or Harvard or Amherst College. They have actually been given those tests and they can’t pass them. So the business house says, “Look, we have a huge number of B.A.s and M.A.S here, but they’re not employable. They have no skills. They have no knowledge. They are not trained for anything. So why should we employ them?” The World Bank says, “Look how many unemployed graduates you have. So what’s the point of your having higher education?” It’s the same argument.

The business community has been very supportive because they need trained hands, leadership, and leadership comes from higher liberal arts education.

And I take it that it’s named after Ibn Khaldun, the great Arab scholar?

Abdul-Rahman Ibn Khaldun was a fourteenth-century historian and a sociologist. He’s a secular and a scientific figure. He was probably born in Tunis. He grew up in Seville in Spain. He worked, among other places, in Seville, Granada, and in Egypt. He possibly traveled to other parts of the Muslim world. So he’s a rather universal figure.

The reason I have picked to name this university after him is my belief that the Muslim people, or for that matter any people in the world, will not make a passage from a pre-industrial traditional culture and economy to a modern culture and economy without finding a linkage within, finding forms and relationships that are congruent between modernity and inherited traditions. . . . My argument is that we will not be able to fight fundamentalism until we produce a modern progressive secular educated class of people who know the traditions and take the best of it.

FRANTZ FANON, MALCOLM X, NOAM CHOMSKY, AND EDWARD W. SAID

In the course of your life you’ve had some interesting encounters with some rather remarkable figures such as Frantz Fanon in Algeria.

When I met Fanon, he didn’t know yet that he had leukemia, but he knew that he was not well. Within months the leukemia was diagnosed, and after that he was racing to eke out the last drops he could get out of his life. The Wretched of the Earth was written in a really great hurry.10 Algeria transformed Fanon in many ways.

From time to time in the late 1960s, I began to see a certain parallel in the lives of Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X. They were two very different personalities by class and educational background. Fanon was a highly educated man. Malcolm had no education. What struck me is that both attained their political consciousness through racial discrimination. It was a consciousness of race and racism of which they were recipients in white-dominated societies that first politicized them. Their first politics was one of sheer anger and reaction to racism, even amounting to separatism. Both discover the universal in humankind through struggle. It is only by entering the process of resistance that they rise above race in their comprehension of social realities and political struggles. And both begin to see class as more central to defining social and human behavior than race. So ultimately both begin to grasp two things: collectives of oppressed people discover themselves, their strengths and their humanity, through struggle. If you don’t resist, you don’t struggle, you don’t discover it. You don’t even discover your own humanity, much less that of others.

Both discovered the importance of class and class relationships in the making of societies. The point about Fanon’s chapter on violence, for example, in The Wretched was massively misunderstood and distorted by the reviewers in the United States and also in Europe. They merely saw in it a celebration of violence, which it was not. What it was was an emphasis on the importance of resistance, of struggle in the discovery of one’s own and the other’s humanity, of coming into the fullness of collective self.

A clearer expression of that occurred in Fanon’s earlier work, L’Année Cinquième de la Revolution Algérienne, which has been published in English as A Dying Colonialism,11 He talks about how the Algerian woman achieves the willingness to give up the veil voluntarily when she enters into a struggle and how the veil becomes a symbol of resistance as long as resistance isn’t organized. Clinging to that tradition was the only way they could say no to France and its cultural hegemony.

He does the same thing with the use of radio before and after the Algerian struggle. He shows that the Algerians were rejecting the radio as the instrument of the oppressor, and then they used the radio as an instrument of liberation once they had entered into a struggle. One’s relationship to technology, to social customs, to the very symbols of colonialism, of oppression, changes when you enter into struggle. That was the point he was making about violence, not just simply an indulgence in the beauty of it. He was badly misrepresented, I thought.

His enlightening last thoughts in The Wretched appeared in the chapter entitled “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness.” I still assign that chapter to students when I teach courses on the post-colonial state. He saw with clarity the pitfalls of nationalism, the kind of structure that it will produce, the dependencies that it will develop, the post-colonial state that will be nothing more than a new instrument of imperial domination. He saw it all. And he saw it in the emergence of a collaborative elite which he called “Les enfants dorés de ligne aérienne.” These will be the golden-eyed boys of airlines, of the jets. My last thought about Fanon is, I wish he had lived. He was not yet forty when he died.

Did you actually work with him?

I worked closely with him for about six months. He was heading the information office of the the National Liberation Front (FLN) and editing its underground newspaper, El Moudjahid.

Any observations on his book Black Skin, White Masks?12

If you take Black Skin, White Masks and read A Dying Colonialism or The Wretched of the Earth, or for that matter the editorials that he wrote in El Moudjahid, which have been published as Toward the African Revolution,13 you see the passage of Fanon from race to class, from violence to reconstruction of society, from a distant resistance to reconstruction, from reaction to creativity. Black Skin is a book of anger at racism, the humiliation, the degradation, the devaluation of personality, of humanity that one suffers. It comes out in Amílcar Cabral, in the early works of Leopold Senghor, and in Malcolm X. Malcolm experiences the same kind of transformation, but through a religious experience. That is to say, the experience of going to Mecca for the pilgrimage. It’s quite remarkable. I saw him before he left and after he came back from the pilgrimage, how he had changed.

In Malcolm’s case it’s been suggested that because of performing the haj to Mecca that he went from a narrow, nationalist position to one that embraced a global perspective.

Malcolm was a convert to Nation of Islam racist ideology. In its reaction to the black experience of centuries of white racism that began with slavery, the Nation of Islam rejected the very notion of having anything to do with white people. Nation of Islam was a black nation, not a nation of black, white, and brown people living and working together. It was a black separatist movement. Malcolm X was a minister of separatism.

It was similar to Zionism as an ideology: Jews will be safe and good only if they are able to establish an exclusionary Jewish state. They happen to have done it in Palestine, but it’s that same ideology.

Malcolm was such an open-minded person. What he discovered upon going to Mecca was that Islam was a religion that was anti-racist. Here were Turks, Bosnians, Sudanese, Senegalese, Malians, Pakistanis, Chinese, Scots, and all kinds of people, white, black, yellow, brown, all gathered in one place, eating together, living on the same floor, wearing exactly the same aba [robe]. It shook him. He said, “There is no race here. What is going on?” When he came back he said, “It is possible. I have seen a society at work which had no consciousness of race.”

What he was not fully grasping was that another kind of division was already there—the division of class—which is obliterated during that short pilgrimage during which nobody is allowed to ask, “Are you rich or are you poor?” But that moment to him was quite important. He lost his life as a result.

Incidentally, I met him when I was a student at Princeton. Princeton was the first university in this country, the very first non-black institution to which Malcolm X had come and spoken. I helped organize his visit.

One of the figures who emerges very prominently in the U.S. anti-war movement in the mid-1960s is Noam Chomsky.

In 1964, when the antiwar movement was starting to emerge, he was already a historic figure for his contribution to modern linguistics. . . . In 1967, Chomsky wrote an article in the New York Review of Books titled “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.”14 It was a remarkable piece of work that argued most eloquently that the Cold War had ruined the conscience of intellectuals and traditions of knowledge and inquiry in America and killed the absolutely necessary tradition of questioning, of dissent. It was an indictment of the Cold War, of its impact on the intellectual and cultural life of America, and of the intellectuals who fell into this trap. It had a powerful impact.

So, it’s then that I came to know of him as an intellectual activist. During that period of the Cold War, two articles had a very important impact on the movement. One was Noam’s “Responsibility of Intellectuals.” Another was, quite accidentally, I think, a piece I wrote in The Nation earlier, in 1965, entitled “How to Tell When the Rebels Have Won.”15 This article argued that the United States had lost the war in Vietnam and from this point on all it could do was to kill and that all the killing it will do will amount to nothing. It had an impact. Senators J. William Fulbright and Frank Church immediately used it in the first Vietnam hearings.

So, I had known of Noam. As I’m talking to you, I cannot recall when I met him. I encountered him very much in the same way a person encounters the wind or the air or the rain. It just happened. It was probably such a natural event in my life that I have no memory of it. Meeting Fanon was not so natural. I can recall the exact time.

Before we met, Chomsky and I had belonged to the same community of intellectuals who were against the war. We had spoken most probably half a dozen times or more on the telephone. Somewhere we met.

In December 1970, after I was arrested on charges of kidnapping Henry Kissinger and so on, I was in jail for a bit and then came out on bail. Noam Chomsky was the second person who had flown to Chicago to see me. He stayed over in my very bare apartment on a wooden platform and didn’t complain. We talked a lot. The first one to fly out without having known me too closely, again, just as an anti-war comrade, was Richard Falk from Princeton.

Over the years, Noam and I have become good friends. Unfortunately our lives are so organized that I haven’t seen him very much. But occasionally we do get together.

Chomsky has a singular place in the life of dissidence in the United States today. Why do you think his voice now is seemingly more prominent, not in the mainstream media, but more and more people are reading his books and attending his lectures?

Three reasons: persistence, consistency, and independence. Chomsky has never slowed down. He has never lost hope. . . . Once he had identified the beast—imperialism—he has pursued it, no matter what coats the beast wore at any given time. Is it the media, is it militarism, is it intervention, is it globalization?

Second, consistency. He has never wavered. He has never fallen into the trap of saying, “Clinton will do better.” Or, “Nixon was bad, but Carter at least had a human rights presidency.” There is a consistency of substance, of posture, of outlook in his work. Consistency of course means repetition. Over the last twenty years, Chomsky has repeated himself a lot, something he doesn’t quite do in linguistics.

But he is teaching many people. I have yet not learned from him this powerful thing—namely, that truth has to be repeated. It doesn’t become stale just because it has been told once. So keep repeating it. Don’t bother about who has listened, who has not listened. He knows that the media and the other institutions of power are so powerful that telling the truth once is not enough. You’ve got to keep repeating different facts, prove the same point.

If you will forgive me for saying it—Chomsky probably wouldn’t like this expression, given how secular a man he is—his power of repetition almost resembles a Sufi chant. Sufis have a rule. They discover a principle, and that principle is repeated. The difference is that theirs was a spiritual principle, and his is a secular one. Theirs was for salvation; his is for liberation. The power of repetition is just extraordinary.

Third, independence. Chomsky is not a Trotskyite, a Leninist, or a Maoist. Chomsky is an anarchist humanist who believes that state power concentrated in fewer hands will produce evil.

Edward Said is another figure that you have been involved with over the years. When did you first meet him?

Some time early in 1968, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod had published a magazine called Arab Affairs. One article in it struck me as being unusually good. It was by Edward Said. Its title was “The Arab Portrayed.”16 It’s a remarkable work of critical reconstruction of what the media and political discourse on the 1967 Arab-Israeli war had done to the Arab as a person and as a people. He connected that to the anti-Semitic discourse of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, concluding that today the Arab, the Palestinian particularly, had become the shadow of the Jew.

I called Ibrahim Abu-Lughod and asked him, “Who is this man?” He said, “He’s a young man, roughly your age. He teaches English literature at Columbia University.” I said, “If you see him, let him know that I really liked his article.”

We met in 1968. I recall that incident in the introduction to your book of interviews with Edward.17

THE PALESTINIAN QUESTION

This was a period of heightened activity.

There was a big meeting organized by Arabs living in the United States, soon after the emergence of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). The PLO had fought off an Israeli attack at the Kerameh refugee camp in Jordan. That minor victory in a minor battle assumed a very large meaning in Arab and Palestinian emotion because it had come after the extraordinary defeat in the 1967 war. The great hopes of Palestinian people had become linked to the PLO as an armed liberation movement. That year also marked the climax of the Vietnam War. Armed struggle had reached the height of its appeal in the third world and in left circles around the world.

Some Arab students invited me to give the keynote address at this conference. . . . Some of the PLO leaders were also there. I argued that armed struggle was supremely unsuited to the Palestinian condition, that it was a mistake to put so much emphasis on it. I argued that armed struggle is less about arms and more about organization, that a successful armed struggle proceeds to out-administer the adversary and not out-fight him. And that the task of out-administration was a task of out-legitimizing the enemy. Finally, I argued that this out-administration occurs when you identify the primary contradiction of your adversary and expose that contradiction not only to yourselves, which you don’t need to do so much, but to the world at large, and more important, to the people of the adversarial country itself.

I argued that Israel’s fundamental contradiction was that it was founded as a symbol of the suffering of humanity . . . at the expense of another people who were innocent of guilt. It’s this contradiction that you have to bring out. And you don’t bring it out by armed struggle. In fact, you suppress this contradiction by armed struggle. The Israeli Zionist organizations continue to portray the Jews as victims of Arab violence.

I’m interested that this was what you wanted to project in this conference, coming off your first-hand experience in Algeria where one million Algerians were killed in a revolutionary struggle.

Yes, but precisely because of that. If I hadn’t gone through the Algerian experience, I wouldn’t have reached this conclusion. After seeing what I saw in Algeria, I couldn’t romanticize armed struggle. The costs to the people of Algeria were very high. OK, they agreed to pay the cost, but it was high. Also, I knew what many people would not recognize even today, which is that the Algerians lost the war militarily, but won it politically. They were successful in isolating France morally. So the primary task of revolutionary struggle is to achieve the moral isolation of the adversary in its own eyes and in the eyes of the world. . . . 

For example, in 1968 I said, “This is a moment to fit ships in Cyprus, fit boats in Lebanon and say, ‘We’re not going to destroy Israel. That is not our intent. We just want to go home.’ Reverse the symbols of Exodus. See if the Israelis are in a mood to sink some ships. They probably will. Let them do so. Some of us will die. Let us die.” . . . When I had finished, there was considerable discomfort on the part of the young Arab students. They were shocked: the expert on guerilla warfare, the man from Algeria, the anti-Vietnam War leader is arguing the exact reverse of what we believe in. They were very gracious, so nobody hooted me or anything, but there was coldness. A man walked up to me and said, “I’m Edward Said. I want to thank you for what you have done.” I knew from his article that I was meeting someone who had a very fresh and original mind. Since then we have been very close friends.

Back up a little bit and pursue another line for just a moment. You said you wrote an article for The Nation in 1965. You were still a young guy. How did you feel in terms of authenticity and authority as someone born in India, migrated to Pakistan, educated in the United States, goes to Algeria, to be talking on these kinds of issues to an American audience? Did you have any hesitation there?

I never hesitated. . . . I felt that racism was a universal question. And the fight against racism was a universal challenge.

In 1964 or 1965, we had a small meeting of faculty and students. . . . The Tonkin Gulf Resolution had been passed. The Vietnamese had attacked the American base in Pleiku. The bombings of North Vietnam had just started. The process of escalation of the war in Indochina had just begun.

There was some discussion about what we could do. Since we had just come out of the tradition of sit-ins in the civil rights movement and we were living at a time of great conformity to the ideals and assumptions of the Cold War, we felt that a teach-in would be just the thing to do. It would be an act of resistance to tell the truth. . . . 

Subsequently I got a visit from the FBI. Two men came. They showed their cards. They first asked me if I was a citizen of the United States. I said, “No.” They said, “Don’t you feel that as a guest in this country you should not be going about criticizing the host country’s government?” I said, “I hear your point, but I do want you to know that while I am not a citizen, I am a taxpayer. And I thought it was a fundamental principle of American democracy that there is no taxation without representation. I have not been represented about this war. And my people, Asian people, are being bombed right now.” Surprisingly, the FBI agents looked deeply moved and blushed at my throwing this argument at them. They were speechless. Then I understood something about the importance of having some congruence between American liberal traditions . . . and our rhetoric and tactics.

To further pursue the argument that you were making at the 1968 conference to Arab Americans, liberation struggles need to morally isolate the adversary. I’ll give you that, with a qualification: It has to be an adversary that subscribes, at least on a rhetorical level, to liberal democratic traditions.

Obviously, you couldn’t morally isolate the regimes of Hitler or Stalin. A strategy of moral isolation assumes that the adversary has based its own legitimacy on moral grounds. Gandhi understood this rather well with regard to British colonialism. He understood the contradiction of British colonialism, which justified itself on liberal principles and was violating them. He stood British imperialism upside down on its head.

At the risk of offending some people, between 1967 and now, Israeli society has in some ways worsened. Likud, a right-wing party that has fewer moral compunctions, has now become the major party and has organized a large right-wing constituency such as . . . the Gush Emunim and other settler movements. They are much less susceptible to moral arguments. Centrist Zionism’s primary contradiction was its principles of legitimacy were moral and its practices were immoral. And it is that which had to be fully used. Opportunities were lost in the 1970s, once the PLO had become a quasi-state in Lebanon. An opportunity has returned now, but there are no takers.

Arab governments such as Egypt and Jordan have, for example, committed themselves to peace with Israel. The PLO leadership has committed itself to peace with Israel. The terms of peace have been spelled out in the Oslo agreement. This agreement is extremely unjust, because it doesn’t respond to any of the fundamental issues in this conflict. It offers no compensation, no restitution, no return to the half of Palestine’s population who are now refugees. It offers no settlement of the issue of water rights in the occupied territories. It offers Palestinians no right to self-determination. It offers Palestinians no protection from expanding Israeli settlements. It offers Palestinians no solution or Arabs generally of the problem of Jerusalem, which is as holy to Muslims and Christians as it is to Jews. So in a very genuine sense, Oslo leaves open all the fundamental questions that have defined the Arab-Israeli conflict.

What it does do is to say there will be no war and the two peoples will deal with each other and settle these issues peacefully. In that situation, the government of Israel is taking every step to violate what little there is in the spirit of Oslo by expanding settlements, by encircling Jerusalem, by even starting buildings in East Jerusalem, and by keeping Israeli forces in the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian movement’s only gain—if you call it a gain—is that its leadership has returned to the occupied territories. If Yasir Arafat would take on the role of a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King and announce tomorrow, “I must stop these settlements. They violate the spirit of Oslo. We are committed to peace. You are making war. We do not want to use violence against you. Peacefully we will march against you. We will sit in. We will clog the roads, start a full-scale movement, and discipline the Palestinians not even to throw stones, intifada-style, because Israelis will use and justify bullets against stones. They will use soldiers against children. Don’t even give them that.” Israel will divide. It will divide as a society the way America divided. I would keep it divided until it makes peace.

My argument about what the Palestinian struggle should be about has returned again. But if you don’t have a leadership, then what do you do? I have spoken to Arafat about this line in great detail probably five or six times. He always took notes, always promised to do things, always did nothing.

Is it a kind of Leninist, top-down, hierarchical model?

It’s hierarchical, but not Leninist. Once we use the word “Leninist,” other images come in, such as discipline, austerity, and genuine sacrifice. The PLO took on the slogan of armed struggle, understanding it as merely the use of arms. They took on the slogan of political organization or parallel hierarchy only to distribute patronage. It’s a traditional political Arab organization that runs like Tammany Hall in its worst days. Political bosses stay in control by distributing patronage, using gun-toting as a method for legitimation. Their gun-toting stopped once it stopped serving their purpose.

You attended a meeting in New York with Noam Chomsky and Edward Said and top PLO officials.

In 1975 or 1976, several leaders of the PLO, minus Arafat, were in New York for a U.N. session. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Edward Said, and the PLO delegation at the U.N. called me and Chomsky and asked if we would come talk to these leaders. We both went and gave them our critique of the movement—its preoccupation with armed struggle and its inability to focus American civil society. In very gentle terms, we offered that the United States is a complex society and should be reached in various ways. We emphasized the importance of its political components, of talking to Israelis, including Israeli intellectuals, those who are questioning, doubting. We talked about the importance of talking to the leadership of the Jewish community here and reaching various wings of American civil society. It required a change in the posture and the rhetoric that was coming out of the PLO’s leadership headquarters.

They listened, respectfully. There was one man there, Shafiq al-Hout, who understood and agreed with us. The rest justified their positions. Some gave lectures that were essentially ignorant. Chomsky felt particularly depressed by the encounter. I was beyond depression by that time. I had seen enough. They defeated themselves more than the Israelis did.

It’s in the late 1970s that Edward Said joins the Palestine National Council, the Palestinian parliament in exile. Was he voicing those kinds of misgivings and criticisms internally?

Yes. The closest Edward came to publicly criticizing the PLO’s strategy, tactics, and politics was in some references in The Question of Palestine, which was published in 1979.18 He questioned the use of violence in the Palestinian struggle, which I thought was very courageous at that time. Said, Abu-Lughod, and Shafiq al-Hout were always very keen to have me speak out to Arafat and other top leaders of the PLO, probably because they felt I would speak bluntly. I had a certain reputation in the Middle East, especially among young people and the intelligentsia, as someone who did not make unprincipled compromises. My integrity was not in question to them. They took me to meet Arafat three or four times. I always spoke out and every time I did, Edward openly supported me. The last time was in Tunis.

In 1980, I had made a second trip to the south of Lebanon, where PLO forces were concentrated. . . . The Israelis had already invaded southern Lebanon in 1978. I saw that they would invade again, because the PLO’s posture in Lebanon was much too tempting for an organized army of adversaries. I had written to Arafat saying, “The way you are organized you will not be able to resist for more than five days.” In 1982, the invasion came. Nothing surprised me.

After the PLO had been driven out of Lebanon, I went to see Arafat with Edward and Abu-Lughod. The PLO had been beaten and had left for Tunisia. Arafat was lost and depressed and this time incapable of concentrating on listening to me. He made no pretense, for example, of taking notes, like he used to do. It was too late to go on harping on giving up armed struggle and changing tactics. They couldn’t change tactics anymore or strategy, but they had given up armed struggle anyway. So, at this point I argued with him that his single biggest need was to develop a really clear-cut position, to remove the question of recognition. Announce that you have no problem recognizing the state of Israel. But ask which Israel you are being asked to recognize. Is it the Israel of 1948? Is it the Israel of the 1947 partition plan? Is it the Israel of 1948 that expanded three times more? Is it the Israel of the 1967 war? Is it the Israel of Israeli imagination? Because Israel is the only country today, the only member of the United Nations, that has refused to announce its boundaries.

I said, “Tell us where your boundaries are. Let’s negotiate those boundaries. . . . What are your minimum boundaries of a Palestinian state? Set it down. This is what we want.” Develop a viable, acceptable peace proposal that die-hard Zionists may not accept but the world, as well as decent Israeli opinion, could not afford to reject. One that would offer Israel the security that it publicly claims to want, but which insists on justice for the Palestinians in ways that no one could find unreasonable.

I told him he should develop such a five- or six-point proposal, and then base his struggle on it. Fight over it. Mobilize governments around it. Go to the United Nations with it. Go to the United States Congress with it. You may hit a blank wall for a long time, but you will be creating legitimacy for the rights of the Palestinian people for a viable option, and ultimately the Israelis will have to come to the table with you. . . . 

When we came out of the meeting, Edward looked literally paper white. He was angry and disappointed. He shook his head. Another person who was with us, a Palestinian banker from Paris, went back and stayed with Arafat for about twenty minutes while we waited outside. He came out also looking downcast and said, “You know I went back to tell Abu Amar [Arafat’s nom de guerre] that he should listen to Eqbal. If he doesn’t listen now, there’s no hope for us.”

That’s the last time I saw Arafat. Israel’s government finally gave me a laissez-passer in 1994. I went to Gaza first and spoke there to a human rights organization. I sent a message to Arafat saying that I was in Gaza. I didn’t ask for an interview. Every time it was his office that had invited me, maybe at somebody else’s suggestion. He never even contacted me. On the first day, the hotel where the human rights conference was to be held was told not to allow the conference to meet.

Arafat and the people around him are thugs collaborating with Israel. Right now, in their moment of greatest thuggery, the Western media is saying nothing about them. They have suddenly become good guys.

Why do you think, and you’ve had more than thirty years examining the Israeli-Palestinian-Arab question, it’s been so difficult in the United States for there to be an open dialogue?

I thought the best explanation ever given to this phenomenon was in a chapter of The Question of Palestine called “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims.”19 Said argues that the attainment of hegemony of the Zionist discourse—which devalues Palestinian Arab reality—was an aspect of the Orientalist discourse. He demonstrates it in very practical ways. That phenomenon is stronger today, because unlike in 1947 or even 1960, Israel’s legitimacy is interwoven with American institutions of power, including the media, the Department of Defense, and the CLA. Israel and the United States are now tied in multiple layers of integrated relationships. In this situation, it’s very difficult for any voice to be heard. It is difficult to teach properly, because you start getting calls and harassments of all kinds. I have been very lucky, and that’s one of the reasons why I teach in a small college. Hampshire gives me the freedom to do what I want to do outside of the college.

Earlier you said you “paid the price” at Cornell.

I paid very heavy prices over the years, not just at Cornell. I would rather not talk about it. It’s McCarthyism of a kind, conformities enforced for the few voices. . . . At the moment, there are four or five people who are foreign affairs columnists of the New York Times, the newspaper of record. Two of them, A.M. Rosenthal and William Safire, are right-wing Zionist supporters of the Likud Party. The third is Thomas Friedman, a centrist Zionist supporter of the Israeli Labor Party. A fourth, Anthony Lewis, is a liberal and a putative Zionist. Of all the foreign affairs columnists of the New York Times, there is not one that would take an independent position on the issue of the Arab-Israeli conflict, much less . . . one that would comprehend the aspirations, the needs, the feelings of the Arab or Palestinian people. The same pattern is repeated in the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and other major papers.

In this time of multiculturalism, Rosenthal describes Islam as a “hate civilization” and gets away with it. Simultaneously, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky—I’m a smaller figure, but I’ve written for the New York Times for a long time—none of us can write a word on the Middle East in its pages or in the Washington Post. We are not unknown people. We are not bad writers. No, our voices have to be banned. . . . 

I don’t think it’s a question of Jewish control over the media. That’s pure nonsense. It’s a much more complex system of the exercise of power and hegemony. There are some views that are to be blocked.

I mean, Jesus, what would the world say if the Iranian newspaper of record described Judaism as a “hate civilization”? We would condemn that.

FAIZ AHMED FAIZ

One event I want you to describe is a meeting in Beirut with you, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and Edward Said.

I think it was 1980. Zia ul-Haq was the military dictator in Pakistan. He was very strongly supported by great human rights worshippers such as the government of the United States and the publishers of the New York Times. Faiz Ahmed Faiz had found a sanctuary of sorts in war-torn Beirut. He came to my lecture in Beirut. I noticed him sitting in the back. I went up to him and introduced him to Edward. Edward wrote about it a few years later in an article in Harper’s entitled “The Mind of Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile.”20 Faiz wrote a number of very moving poems about his experience in Lebanon. Edward had a sense immediately that here was a great poet and therefore showed a great deal of interest in talking and listening to him. At one point, we were having dinner in a restaurant where curfew had already been imposed but we continued to stay on and fighting had begun. Faiz recited several poems as I translated them verbatim. We all ignored the shooting and went on.

Said writes that you stopped translating and the Urdu filled the night air.

I stopped translating at one point. Faiz continued to recite. But, see, Urdu poetry has an extraordinary sound. About a week ago, I did a bilingual reading in Amherst of Faiz’s poetry with Agha Shahid Ali. A lot of Americans who know nothing of Urdu had tears in their eyes. Faiz brought the Urdu language from where Muhammad Iqbal had left it right smack at the center of history. He, like Pablo Neruda in Spanish and Nazim Hikmet in Turkish, stretches the Urdu language and establishes extraordinary congruence and harmony, between the new, modern forms, including free verse, with the classical rhymed poetry of Urdu and Persian. It’s from that congruence that the popularity and power of Faiz’s poetry occurs. Also, of course, the power of his poetry comes from the fact that he was socially and politically a most engaged poet who spent many years in prison.

ORIENTALISM

It seems that one of Said’s great contributions is his defining how knowledge was constructed, particularly around the Arab Middle East and Islam, to serve the interests of imperial power. That was first developed in Orientalism and still further in Culture and Imperialism.21

I would put it slightly differently. I think the greatest singular achievement of Said, as a literary critic, beginning with Orientalism, has been to put imperialism at the center of Western civilization. . . . What you find in both historical, political literature and literary works in the West in the last 400 years is a great emphasis on the role of enlightenment in the making of civilization and its discourse. You find a great deal of emphasis on rationalism . . . on democracy and democratic values, and on liberalism, as an aspect of enlightenment. There is an almost remarkable tendency to not mention imperialism as shaping the contours of Western civilization.

In Orientalism, Said’s argument is not about Orientalists. It is about the relationship of knowledge to power, of culture to imperialism, and of civilization to expansion. He put therefore the whole issue of Western expansion, domination, and imperialism as central forces in defining the nature of civilization itself. That includes music, literature, poetry, politics, and the writing of history. The remarkable thing is that he did it with such power and erudition that no one has successfully challenged his premises.

Have you seen any change in the academy in terms of people who are focused on Islamic civilization, the South, the third world?

There is a change in the academy in the same way as in linguistics. There are two times: before Chomsky and after Chomsky. In literary criticism and historical writing there are two times: before Orientalism and after Orientalism. There’s no question about that. Has it changed the study of Islam in the West? Yes. It has changed both for the better and for the worse.

For example, partly in reaction to Said, but primarily from its own needs and prejudices, there is at the moment an organized attempt to demonize Islam and Muslims. This includes an Orientalist as established and respected as Bernard Lewis, and a polemicist as disrespected as Howard Bloom, who wrote The Lucifer Principle. The book’s argument is that Islam is a satanic, barbarian civilization.22

It’s rather interesting to see what the Serbs did with it. They based their whole genocide on this derivative rhetoric that demonizes Islam and Muslims. That is why the Serb fascists have been saying to journalists with a sense of disbelief, “We don’t understand why you folks don’t understand that we were doing your job. We were ethnically cleansing Europe. We were doing the job for you. After all, you have all understood . . . that this is a demon religion, a demon civilization.”

At the same time, there is a body of scholarly work on Islam, and on Muslims and the Middle East, that shows a kind of understanding that we did not have fifty years ago. . . . But I would say that Orientalism’s biggest single impact has been . . . outside of the Islamic purview, because Islamic civilization still remains a target for political reasons. So there the impact has been, ironically, the least. On the history of blacks, Africa, race relations in the United States, and on literary criticism and the historical writings of colonial Western expansion, it has had a big impact.

What about in the third world? Has it been an influence?

Not significantly, I am sorry to say. There is a certain canonization of Said and Orientalism, but beyond that, very few critical works of history have appeared from the third world that show genuine learning from the Orientalist construct. The best developments probably have been in Indian historiography at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi and with the subaltern group that started with Ranajit Guha.23 In Arabic there have been a couple of new things that have come out, including Muhammad Abed al-Jabry’s work, that have been interesting, but there’s not too much.24

THE DEMONIZATION OF ISLAM

Where do you trace chronologically when Islam, Muslims, Arabs become targeted as a threat or an enemy of the West?

This is not a completely new phenomenon. . . . In the tenth century, for the first time you saw a certain notion of demonizing Islam. At that point, it wasn’t so misplaced from the European point of view, because Islam was an expansionist civilization, and therefore considered . . . a threat and a menace. The Crusades witnessed the first instance of demonization along religious lines, that is, demonization of Islam itself rather than of Arabs or Turks. . . . Next you notice it in the period when British and later French colonialists encountered Muslim resistance.

There was the case of the Mahdi, who besieged and killed General Charles George Gordon in 1885 in Khartoum. That particular moment saw a great deal of emphasis on Islamic fanaticism. Colonial battles were never remembered unless a Custer was killed or a Gordon besieged. Millions of people may die, but the memories are of Custer and Gordon.

This is the third time . . . in the last 1,400 years that there is this organized attempt to demonize Islam. This time it’s more organized and sustained, because the means have changed. Today there is mass communication.

Does this process of demonization come from a shared consensus that is not articulated? Or are people meeting at Harvard and saying, “OK, we have to get together and demonize Arabs and Muslims?”

I don’t think there is a conspiracy. . . . Great imperial powers, especially democratic ones, cannot justify themselves on the basis of power or greed alone. No one will buy it. . . . Modern imperialism needed a legitimizing instrument to socialize people into its ethos. To do that it needed two things: a ghost and a mission. The British carried the white man’s burden. That was the mission. The French carried la mission civilisatrice, the civilizing mission. The Americans had manifest destiny and then the mission of standing watch on the walls of world freedom, in John F. Kennedy’s ringing phrase. Each of them had the black, the yellow, and finally the red peril to fight against. There was a ghost and there was a mission. People bought it.

After the Cold War, Western power was deprived both of the mission and the ghost. So the mission has appeared as human rights. It’s a very strange mission for a country which for nearly a hundred years has been supporting dictatorships in Latin America and throughout the world. Chomsky and Herman wrote about this in The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism.25

In search of menace, they have turned to Islam. It’s the easiest, because it has a history.

It’s also the most vulnerable.

It’s vulnerable. It’s weak. . . . Islamic countries are home to the oil resources of the West. The West has encountered resistance in Algeria, Egypt, among the Palestinians, and with the Iranian revolution—enough to arouse anxiety that Western interests . . . are threatened. And there is a history of demonization. All these things fall into place. And there are enough vested interests to take advantage of it.

Media coverage of Islamic fundamentalism seems to be very selective. There are certain types that are not discussed at all. For example, the Saudi version, which may he among the most extreme. Americans hear a lot about Hezbollah and Hamas and groups in Egypt, like the Akhwan.

This is a very interesting matter you are raising. . . . Saudi Arabia’s Islamic government has been by far the most fundamentalist in the history of Islam. Even today, for example, women drive in Iran. They can’t drive in Saudi Arabia. Today, for example, men and women are working in offices together in Iran. Women wear chador, but they work in offices. In Saudi Arabia, they cannot do it. So on the basis of the nature and extent of fundamentalist principles or right-wing ideology, Saudi Arabia is much worse in practice than Iran. But it has been the ally of the United States since 1932, so nobody has questioned it.

But much more than that is involved. Throughout the Cold War, starting in 1945 when it inherited its role as a world power, the United States has seen militant Islam as a counterweight to communist parties in the Muslim world. During this entire period, the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt was not an enemy of the United States. . . . The U.S. government actually promoted and supported the Islamic regime that is now in power in Sudan. General Muhammad Gaafar al-Nimeiry was allied to the Islamic movement of Sudan and was a friend.

America’s two major leverages on its allies in Western Europe and Asia—the nuclear umbrella and economic superiority—had drastically diminished by the early 1970s. The U.S. was looking for new leverages over its allies. They picked the Middle East because this was where the energy resources for the industrial economies of Japan and Europe came from. An established, unchallenged American influence in this region . . . could control prices and show Europe and Japan, “We can give you cheap oil. We can make your oil expensive. We hold your economic lifeline.”

This was the time of the Nixon Doctrine, namely, the use of regional powers to police the region for the United States. In the Middle East, they chose Iran and Israel. In the Pentagon, throughout most of the 1970s, they were called “our two eyes in the Middle East.” In 1978, after having or perhaps because of having taken some $20 billion of military hardware from the United States, the shah of Iran fell under the weight of his own militarization. The 1979 Islamic revolution threatened American interests deeply . . . materializing in an uglier form during the hostage crisis.

Within a year, quite ironically, something totally the opposite happens. The Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan. In Pakistan, an Islamic fundamentalist dictator promoted, with the help of the CLA, an Islamic fundamentalist resistance against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Now what you had was Islamic fundamentalists of a really hardcore variety, the mujahideen in Afghanistan, taking on the “evil empire.” They received billions in arms between 1981 and 1988 from the United States alone. Add additional support from Saudi Arabia, under American encouragement. . . . American operatives went about the Muslim world recruiting for the jihad in Afghanistan, because the U.S. saw it as an opportunity to mobilize the Muslim world against communism. That opportunity was exploited by recruiting mujahideen in Algeria, Sudan, Egypt, Yemen, and Palestine. From everywhere they came. They received training from the CIA. They received arms from the CLA. I have argued in some of my writings that the notion of jihad as “just struggle” had not existed in the Muslim world since the tenth century until the United States revived it during its jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Since then, almost every Islamic militant, including those in Israel, Algeria, and Egypt . . . has been trained in Afghanistan. The CLA people call it “Islamic blowback.”

These are aspects that the American media is not willing to touch on. The New York Times’ four foreign affairs columnists are neither qualified nor would they want to be qualified to comment on these realities.

What side effects have U.S. support of the mujahideen had on Pakistani society?

One is the extraordinary proliferation of drugs and guns. Something like $10 billion in arms was pumped into Pakistan and Afghanistan. Half of it at least rebounded and became part of international trade. Much of it ended up in Pakistan. So, you have a situation in Pakistan where almost every third man is armed . . . with automatic weapons, Kalishnikovs and grenade launchers. What used to be small crimes have now become big crimes, because petty thieves are armed with weapons that can lead to killings if they feel threatened. In 1979, at the advent of the Afghanistan revolution, there were an estimated 110,000 drug addicts in Pakistan, mostly addicted to opium, some to hashish. Today, we have 5 million addicts. Opium has become a big trade through Pakistan. It comes from Afghanistan and Iran. We have an estimated $4 billion trade in Afghan drugs. In a country whose total foreign exports were $6 billion before all this, you introduce $4 billion in trade in drugs. We have created in Pakistan an entire class of rich drug dealers who are paying off this politician here, that bureaucrat there, that port authority there. The political system of the whole country has become enmeshed with the drug mafia. It is not quite as bad as Colombia yet. But it’s very close to it.

The third effect is probably the most serious. Pakistan is a very heterogenous society. There are six ethnic groups living together with a combination of antagonism and collaboration. The antagonism consists of something like, “You speak Baluch. I speak Urdu. Our children play together. They have quarreled with each other. My child has beaten your child. . . . We get into an argument over whose child was worse.” Previously, it was an argument. Today, bullets can fly. So what used to be, because of ethnic differences in our society, completely minor, local, street arguments, are now made with guns. . . . After a while these little things accumulate and create ethnic warfare.

Are there any progressive political formations in Pakistan?

At this point, no, except in the nonpolitical and informal sector. The primary expressions of progressive formations in Pakistan today are in the media. Since 1987, we have had freedom of the press. It’s very lively. In fact, I think I could say without doubt that the Pakistani press today is probably the liveliest in the third world. It’s livelier than in India, Egypt, or Indonesia. . . . My articles come out every week. Women are publishing.

The progressive presence is visible in the women’s movement. Zia ul-Haq’s military regime, which was supported by the United States, was very harsh on women. It passed a number of anti-women ordinances, including the hudood ordinances, which reduced women’s witness in court cases to half of a man’s witness. Qisas ordinances ruled that if a woman was murdered by a man, the murder could be compensated for, by paying money. Blood money justifies the murder of a woman.

The first major resistance came from the Women’s Action Forum. . . . Ten thousand women came out in the street and the regime took some fright. The police struck them and beat them up. That’s when people generally turned against the military. It looked like it must have been a very weak regime to be beating up women. Women have remained very active. Feminism is the most progressive force in Pakistan today.

Various nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working on the environment, on protection of land, and against large dams supported by the World Bank are having a political impact. But as a political force, progressivism, for the time being, is dormant.

To what extent did Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto contribute to that? She’s seen as modern, English-speaking, educated, and progressive. That’s the conventional media image.

She was the first Muslim woman prime minister in world history. Educated at Harvard, Radcliffe, and Oxford—where she was elected the president of the Oxford Union, she’s articulate. She’s an attractive and courageous woman. She fought the military dictatorship after her father was executed by Zia ul-Haq. She went to prison and lived in house arrest. She lived in exile. So she underwent the gamut of political resistance, oppression and suffering.

The people of Pakistan rewarded her by electing her prime minister in 1988. As prime minister she proved to be inexperienced, unsuccessful, confused, directionless, and in some respects misguided. The big bureaucrats, army officers, and vested interests moved against her, and her government fell in 1990. People felt that the vested interests were unjust to her. After all, she was very young. . . . She needed to learn, and they didn’t give her enough time.

In 1993, the country elected her again. She made those same mistakes and more. She and her husband, Asif Zardari, turned out to be almost unbelievably corrupt, with bribery, payoffs, bank loans to her supporters, patronage untrammeled. Worse, the corruption was not accompanied by production.

The post-Civil War U.S. government was very corrupt. Former Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Andrew Johnson could have been indicted, but they were productive. They were capitalist thieves.

What we have learned in Pakistan is that traditional feudal thieves are much worse than capitalist ones. They don’t even produce. They create no wealth at all, not even for themselves. They just steal. That’s what Ms. Bhutto did.

THE TALIBAN

Moving to Afghanistan and the evolving situation there. The Taliban movement, you suggest in an article, has connections with not just Pakistan but also with the United States.

Afghanistan has suffered criminal neglect at the hands of the United States and its media. In 1979 and 1980, when the Afghan people started resisting Soviet intervention, the whole of America and Europe mobilized on their side. For the media, it was such a big story that CBS paid money to stage a battle that it could broadcast as an exclusive. Afghanistan was in the news every day. It disappeared from the news the day the Soviets withdrew. Then, Afghanistan was abandoned by the media, by the American government, by American academics, and as a result by the American people. These people who fought the West’s battle with the West’s money and with the West’s arms, and in the process distorted themselves, distorted Pakistan, and contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union, found themselves totally abandoned after the Cold War. The Taliban’s rise takes place in that vacuum.

The Afghan mujahideen fell to fighting with each other. They were all both warriors and drug smugglers. They were known to the CIA as drug smugglers. . . . There are ten factions shooting at each other, and something new develops. The Soviet Union falls apart. Its constituent republics become independent. Among those are the six Soviet republics of Central Asia: Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kirghizstan, and Azerbaijan. These six Central Asian republics, whose majority population is Muslim, are very close to or bordering on Afghanistan, and also happen to be oil- and gas-rich states. So far their gas and oil has passed through the Soviet Union . . . but now a new game starts: How is this oil and gas going to go out to the world? At this point, American corporations move in.

The American corporations want, obviously, to get hold of the oil and gas. After the Cold War, who controls which resource at whose expense and at what price? Corporations like Texaco, Amoco, and Unocal start going into Central Asia to get hold of these oil and gas fields. But how are they going to get the oil and gas out? . . . Through Turkey and via Afghanistan to Pakistan are two possibilities. Iran is the third, but they don’t want to put any pipelines in Iran because Iran is an adversary of America. Therefore, Pakistan and Afghanistan become the places through which they are likely to take pipelines. And then they can cut the Russians out.

President Clinton made personal telephone calls to the presidents of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Azerbaijan, urging them to sign pipeline contracts that together amount to billions. These pipelines would go through Turkey and via Afghanistan to Pakistan and take oil to the tankers that would meet them at the ports. The pipeline would go through Afghanistan. Both Pakistan and the United States . . . pick the most murderous, by far the most crazy of Islamic fundamentalist groups, the Taliban, to ensure the safety of the pipelines.

The Taliban are anti-women. Some of the highest U.S. officials have been visiting and talking to them. The general impression in our region is that the United States has been supporting them.

How do you know that high Clinton administration officials have been meeting with the Taliban?

From very insignificant lines in the New York Times and Washington Post. I have no private information. These are published facts. But they are written in such a way that, unless you are watching very closely, you don’t pick it up.

Why would the U.S. support what you describe as the most crazy, most anti-women, most fundamentalist formation in Afghanistan to advance their geopolitical interests? Were not other groups available?

These were deemed the most reliable, perhaps for good reason. In Afghanistan, there are four major ethnic groups. There are the Uzbeks who live in the northern region, near Uzbekistan. There are the Hazaras. They are Persian-speaking, among whom Iran would exercise influence. Therefore, they are not totally reliable. The Tajiks are also Persian-speaking. They have been under Russian influence, but since they are Persian-speaking, Iranian influence on them is potentially strong.

The Taliban come from the Pakhtoon ethnic grouping. They are the majority people. They have a large presence in Pakistan, where we have something like 15 million Pakhtoons. Pakistan has been an old ally of the United States. Its loyalties have been tested. It’s much better to have the pipelines under the control of people upon whom the government of Pakistan can exercise some influence, upon whom Iran will have no influence.

The Pakhtoons are Sunnis. The Tajiks are partially Shiias, partially Sunnis. The Hazaras are entirely Shiia. The Uzbeks are Sunnis, but their loyalties are divided. They have never been tested. So there are a lot of ethnic considerations, ethnic politics, and historical ties involved.

The U.S. concern is not who is fundamentalist and who is progressive, who treats women nicely and who treats them badly. That’s not the issue. The issue is who is more likely to ensure the safety of the oil resources that the United States or its corporations could control?

One of the leaders of the Afghan resistance against the Soviet occupation was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. His name has been consistently linked with gun running and drug smuggling. Do you have any information on him?

I met him several times. I don’t think he is worse than anyone else. He’s a bit more of a killer. He is also more progressive, more modern, much more sensible towards women, for example, than the Taliban.

The Taliban is as retrograde a group as you can find. Their power base is Qandahar, a southern province of Afghanistan. Last year, I spent two weeks there. One day, I heard drums and noises outside the house where I was staying. I rushed out to see what was going on. In this ruined bazaar, destroyed by bombs and fighting from the war, there was a young boy. He couldn’t have been more than twelve. His head was shaved. There’s a rope around his neck. He is being pulled by that rope in the bazaar. There is a man behind him with a drum. The man slowly beats the drum, dum, dum, dum. The boy is being dragged through the street. I asked, “What has he done?” People said he was caught red-handed. I thought, This is a twelve-year-old kid. What could he have been doing? They said, “He was caught red-handed playing ball.” I said, “What kind of ball?” “A tennis ball.” “What’s wrong with that?” “It’s forbidden.”

I went off to interview one of the Taliban leaders. He said, “We have forbidden playing ball by boys.” I asked why. He said, “Because when boys are playing ball it constitutes undue temptation to men.” The same logic that makes them lock up women behind veils and behind walls makes them prevent boys from playing games. It’s that kind of madness.

Another time I found the watchman where I was staying literally weeping and very agitated. I asked, “What happened to you?” He said, “They took my radio.” I said, “What the hell were you doing? Why did they take your radio?” He said, “I was listening to a singer.” Music is banned under the Taliban. People who will ban music and play are, I would say, fifty light years behind the Iranian Islamic regime.

Robin Raphael, the assistant secretary of state for South Asia, an appointee and college friend of Bill Clinton, flew out on a helicopter from Islamabad to meet with the Taliban leaders in Qandahar. So let them not tell me anything about human rights issues in China, of all places. The U.S. government officials lie when they talk about human rights. They’re a bunch of hypocrites and liars. You can’t take it seriously.

RECONSTRUCTING HEGEMONY

In the 1970s, there was a surge of uprisings and revolutionary activity in Nicaragua, Iran, Angola, Mozambique, and elsewhere. How did the imperial system respond to those upheavals, and how was it able to reconstruct its ideology and its hegemony?

The Vietnam War seems to me to be the most landmark event in modern history since World War II, because it redefined the choices and the strategic design of the United States and its allies.

Between 1945 and 1965, America enjoyed strategic superiority over any power or group of powers, because of its possession and delivery capabilities of nuclear weapons. But by 1968, the Soviet Union had deployed its own intercontinental ballistic missiles and also nuclear submarines. The American nuclear doctrine of massive retaliation had shifted to mutual assured destruction. We had reached a state of madness . . . that greatly reduced the United States’ strategic leverage. . . . Europe and Japan had recovered economically. Far from playing the roles of junior partners on the world scene, they were becoming economic competitors. The United States had reduced economic leverage over its allies. . . . 

Between 1945 and 1965, the United States demonstrated its power by its will and capacity to intervene in third-world countries in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. . . . So, Jacobo Arbenz doesn’t behave in Guatemala? Overthrow Arbenz. The United States and its British allies don’t like Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran? Get rid of Mossadegh. Patrice Lumumba in the Congo emerges as a threatening figure? Let’s cut him down to size.

In all these cases, intervention worked, and at very small cost to the United States. Henry Kissinger, in 1958, described these as “limited wars.” Zbiegniew Brzezinski used to call them “invisible wars”; Huntington called them “forgotten wars,” meaning essentially that they were limited in their consequences for the intervening power. They were invisible to the American people. They were forgotten by the American media.

Vietnam changed that. The war that was supposed to be limited in its consequences cost 57,000 lives, 230,000 wounded, nearly $220 billion in expenditure, and thousands of U.S. aircraft. With the anti-war movement and the churches and trade unions screaming, the American establishment understood that it had lost the will, if not the capacity, to intervene militarily in areas abroad.

An additional pillar of American power had been the overriding consensus behind a foreign policy. They lost all of these to varying degrees by 1968.

The U.S. establishment faced the problem of either changing the very course of its policy or finding devices to restore its declining power. The choice it made was that of restoration, not of reconstruction or reform. Restoration means that you adopt a strategy that would bring these four pillars back to their former strengths. As a result, there was this massive and significant shift in strategic weaponry. The United States moved in search of first-strike capability, and second, to lower the threshold on the use of nuclear weapons. These were two prongs of regaining strategic leverage.

The B-1 bombers, the MX missiles, and ultimately Star Wars were all programs aimed at restoring U.S. strategic superiority. In the same way, the introduction of mini-nukes, medium-range cruise missiles, and tactical nukes at the battlefield level were designed to lower the threshold: to say to the Soviet Union, “Look, we can use nuclear weapons in battlefield situations. Don’t mess around with us when we intervene somewhere else.” But doing this had a sort of a strange and mixed effect. On the one hand, it upped the ante on the arms race. On the other, it frightened a lot of people both in the United States and in Europe, and you had the beginnings of an anti-nuclear movement. Anyway, to gain leverage over allies, American attention shifted from the Atlantic and the Pacific to the Middle East. They assumed that this was an area upon whose oil resources Europe and Japan rely. If the United States could call shots in determining at what price and how much oil will flow, then it would have a powerful leverage over its allies.

In order to develop interventionist capabilities, the Nixon Doctrine was formulated. Its aim was to create regional powers in each significant region of the world, arm them the best you can, and be prepared to support them if necessary. That’s why you saw the modernization of the Navy, the formation of the rapid deployment forces, and the creation of the regional allies. Between 1970 and 1978, Iran bought $20 billion in arms, and Israel received $33 billion in grants and aid.

New rhetoric was being continuously found—human rights, a new structure for peace, détente—to justify foreign policy.

Now, briefly, to the economic aspect of it. The structure of capitalism began to change precisely in that period. It went largely, but not entirely, unnoticed by most liberal scholars of international relations. Big multinationals were seeking to leave areas of high labor costs for areas of very low labor costs. They started looking for what multinationals called in those days “export platform countries.” There developed a coincidence of export platforms and the regional influential. In Latin America, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile were the regional constellations of American power. They also happened to be, at that time, the countries that were chosen to serve as export platforms for the multinationals. In Asia, Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia, and to a smaller extent the Philippines were all regional influentials of the Nixon Doctrine. They also happened to be the export platforms of the big multinationals. In the Middle East, Iran and Israel were serving that purpose. Africa was a bit chancy. Nigeria, Zaire, and South Africa were the three that were looked at.

The point I am making is, between the strategic design and the political economy of imperialism there was a coincidence. The second point I am making is that the structure of world capitalism, what is today called globalization, started to develop and change in the 1970s. That process has now matured a little bit more, especially in East Asia. There has been some maturation of it in Latin America. There has been no maturation of it in the Middle East. All that you see in the Middle East is that American power has increased, especially after the Gulf War. The rapid deployment force has now become a permanent presence in the Middle East. The U.S. Navy is now permanently stationed in the Persian Gulf. So while American strategic concentration has become larger in the Middle East, and its military and political power appear consolidated in the region, its economic roots remain weak, because they remain one-sided. The Middle East is essentially a provider of raw material and not an export platform.

A second phenomenon is that discontent remains. The question of Palestine, for example, has been manipulated, but not solved. It may blow up any time. Iraq has been beaten up and suppressed. Five hundred thousand Iraqi children have died for lack of nutrition and medicine. These are not conditions in which you have stabilized power. Iran has been quarantined. How long do you quarantine a country of 60 million people? So American power, while it has greatly expanded in the Middle East, remains extremely vulnerable to local resistances, revolts, and the sheer instability of the situation.

In addition to what you have described, there has also been the imposition on the developing world of what is called neoliberal economic reform, administered primarily through the World Bank and the IMF. These so-called reforms involve shredding the safety net, ending public welfare programs and privatization. Is this part of the restoration of imperial hegemony?

Yes, but the progression of it has been somewhat different. The rhetoric of human rights was greatly prevalent throughout the Carter administration. But the reality was that the regional allies of the United States were mostly tyrannies. Iran and Saudi Arabia in the Middle East. In Southeast Asia, Indonesia and South Korea. They still remain tyrannies. The Philippines of the Marcos period. In Brazil, the military generals. In Argentina, the killing generals. In Chile, Pinochet. These were all fascist regimes committed to the developmental model of export platforms.

Then something happened in 1978 and 1979—most unexpectedly to American policymakers and also to Middle East experts. The Iranian revolution broke out. The analysis that American policymakers made of the Iranian revolution was very interesting. It was that what broke the back of the shah was that he bought too many weapons too soon and his regime was too dictatorial, too authoritarian, and did not allow any mechanism for blowing off steam. It is after the revolution in Iran, beginning in 1980, that you see American policy committed to making very gradual—and they discovered that this is not possible everywhere—progression from developmental fascism to a modicum of political liberalization.

The Philippines, for example. An attempt with Egypt for infitah, combining a modicum of political opening with a lot of economic opening. Attempts to help that process in South Korea have not really succeeded. They tried, but the military is so strong there that it has not quite worked. They tried to make gradual change from fascism to some form of liberalized democracy in Indonesia. It hasn’t worked. And therefore U.S. policymakers talking about human rights in China look the other way when it comes to Indonesia, which is one of the worst violators on the world scene today. There are several countries that are human rights violators of extreme proportions: Indonesia, South Korea, Israel, and Turkey, and they all remain deeply tied to the United States.

In the Middle East, U.S. policy was to develop strategic assets. Nixon’s defense secretary, Melvin Laird, called Israel the “local cop on the beat,” taking care of the region.26 If that were the case, why did the United States go to such ends and make such efforts to keep Israel out of the Gulf War?

Israel has been described continuously in this country as a strategic asset. I haven’t seen it as serving as a strategic asset. The rhetoric has taken over any sense of reality. . . . 

The Israeli military is more war-capable than either the French or the British or even the Chinese, if you’re not talking about a long, protracted land war. China, of course, has a large territory and it’s a different kind of country altogether. The existence of Israeli power is unquestionably there. What purpose does it serve? During the Gulf War, the greatest challenge for American policy was how to keep Israel out of this war, rather than how to bring it in. The greatest fear American military planners had was that Saddam Hussein might force Israel’s entry into the Gulf War. The great fear was, “Oh, my God, I hope the Israelis don’t get involved.” What kind of strategic asset is that? It makes no sense.

What Israel does do is to keep the area in some respects quite unstable. Just today, I heard that Israeli planes are bombing Lebanon again. On appearances at the moment, the mainstay of American power in the Middle East is not the strength of Israel. It’s the weakness of the Arab regimes. In the Middle East today you have armed minorities that are ruling the majorities. The Saudis, the Egyptians, the Jordanians are all armed minorities that are ruling over their people. These are insecure regimes. They are more scared of their own people than of foreign powers. Therefore, they are going to collaborate with the United States and wherever necessary with Israel at any cost. So at the moment American power in the Middle East is based on Arab weakness. How long can that last?

What do you think about the future of Israel?

In the short run, seemingly bright and powerful. In the long run, very dark.

Why do you say that?

The Israeli government, to my total surprise—or not so much surprise, I think we could have expected it—has been missing its chance for the last ten years to make peace with its Arab neighbors. For forty-five years, Israeli officials talked about wanting to be recognized. That was the only basis for peace. Now every Arab government, plus the PLO, openly recognizes Israel’s right to exist. They have removed the Arab boycott. Egypt, the largest Arab country, has reached full peace with Israel. The PLO has reached full peace with Israel. King Hussein of Jordan has reached full peace with Israel. But the Israelis are continuing to take Palestinian lands and build settlements.

Their policies are to convince the Arabs that no matter what they are willing to give, Israelis want peace on their terms—more territory and more humiliation of Arabs. More expansion. It can’t last that way. Israel is a small country, 5.5 million people. The Arabs are many. They are at the moment weak, disorganized, demoralized, and a bunch of country-sellers are ruling those places. That’s not a permanent condition. Someday the Arabs will have to organize themselves. Once they have done that, you will see a different history beginning again, and it won’t be a pretty one. In fact, I’m scared of it.

NATO is now seeking to incorporate the former states of the Soviet-influenced Eastern Europe. What are your thoughts on that?

It seems that the president of the United States is committed to the expansion of NATO to include such countries as the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and possibly even Romania. The new secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, is a very strong proponent of NATO’s expansion. I think it’s correct to assume that U.S. diplomacy is going to push for NATO’s expansion hard and fast. What will it do? I think it’s very dangerous. It’s a dangerous move that could ignite or at least lay down the foundations of another Cold War in a big way. Here is why.

If there is any one thing that moves Russian foreign policy, it is the fear of invasion. Russia has been invaded from Western Europe three times since Napoleon invaded. The last time, when Hitler did it, they lost more than 30 million people. These invasions have all come through the buffer states like Poland and Czechoslovakia. If NATO is expanded there, no matter what rhetoric is used to justify it, no matter how much you mollify Russian fears with words, the fears will be there. Right now, the Russians can’t do too much about it. They are weak. They are in disarray. And their power is totally dispersed. . . . But just as I was saying about the Arabs earlier, one day they are going to reorganize themselves. Their weakness cannot be assumed to be permanent.

Every policy that begins on the assumption of keeping someone weak forever is doomed to fail. That was the problem of the Treaty of Versailles. Its primary presumption was—“Give Germany a treaty that will keep it weak forever.” Far from it—it gave them deep resentments of a kind that got totally distorted and also had power to give us another war. That’s what we are doing with Russia.

Why are they doing it? The expansion of NATO is a mechanism for ensuring continued American power and leverage in Europe. If the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary come in, they will be three new members—I’m just taking these three for now—who would support American positions in NATO. And the United States needs more weight to offset France, for example, which is pushing for an independent Europe.

Second, the end of the Cold War has started the search for a new balance of power in Europe. The situation seems to me, both in Europe and globally, very similar to that which followed the defeat of Napoleon at the battlefield of Waterloo and the collapse of Napoleonic France. France and Britain had been competitors for imperial possessions. They fought over possession of India and parts of Southeast Asia. They started competing over portions of Africa. Finally, Napoleon rose to challenge British hegemony on a world scale with the invasion of Egypt. The bipolar world that existed between Britain and France broke down with the collapse of Napoleonic France. What followed was the unchallenged hegemony of Great Britain. From 1815 to 1914, Britain was the paramount power. And the biggest challenge for Britain was to maintain the balance of power between and among the other, smaller powers.

The challenge of balance was of course the greatest in Europe itself. Its overall texture was roughly what it is today. The fear on the part of Britain and France of a powerful Germany emerging to challenge British and French power has been reignited with the reunification of Germany. This time, Germany has reunited with a massive amount of economic muscle. British and French diplomacy are looking to Russia, a reorganized Russia, to balance Germany, and Germany to balance Russia. That is why they would like to deprive Russia of its Eastern European security belt while allowing Russia more influence in the Balkans. One of the reasons Serbia was tolerated in its aggression for as long as it was, and has been rewarded for its aggression with 50 percent of Bosnia, is to ensure that Russian influence in this direction, to Germany’s flank, expands, while Russia is cut down on the Czech-Polish front. Without going into great detail, this type of strategic manipulation has been the long-term harbinger of big wars. It was this sort of strategic manipulation that ultimately gave us World War I and finally World War II.

What scholars of Europe call the “long peace,” from 1815 to 1914, ended with two world wars. But keep in mind that during this period of long peace an estimated 120 million people were killed in the process of colonial expansion and ensuring the safety of the capitalist market.

Talk about the legacy of colonialism and imperialism today in Africa. We see the fragility of countries such as Rwanda, Burundi, Zaire, and others. These states are imploding.

This is something relatively new, isn’t it? We have witnessed in the past six years this extraordinary phenomenon of states simply blowing up through internal implosion. Not revolution. It’s not even proper civil war. Somalia was the first, followed by Rwanda. Now we are seeing it happen in Zaire [Congo]. Really interesting questions arise.

The first question is the viability of certain post-colonial states. These states came into being first as administrative boundaries, drawn by colonial powers for the purposes of administration. In the process of decolonization, these became state boundaries recognized under international law. When one transforms administrative boundaries into state boundaries without considering other factors, you will have elements of instability built into it. They don’t follow natural lines of any kind, either cultural, geographical, or physical features. So there is an artificiality about a great number of post-colonial states.

There is a second phenomenon that we have to grasp. These decolonizations coincided with the Cold War. The first countries to be decolonized were India and Pakistan in 1947, two years after the start of the Cold War. The last countries to be decolonized were Angola and Mozambique around 1974, at the height of the Cold War. This meant that both superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, viewed these decolonized entities as pawns on the chessboard. They were keen to have these. The method of having influence on them was to offer two things: military aid and economic aid. Build their military and bureaucratic structure through the Agency for International Development and the Military Assistance Program and their Soviet equivalents, with the result that these states were maintained by artificial injections of armaments and money. In return, they served a number of purposes, both strategic and economic. They gave economic access. In the process these countries developed great dependency on the metropolitan benefactors. Economic and military aid served as glues to statehood.

The Cold War is over. The structure of aid and militarization disappears. A number of those states which were less important strategically to the United States in the post-Cold War period, and which did not have the patronage of the Soviet Union anymore, started to fall apart.

Somalia is a perfect example. Siad Barre, the dictator of Somalia, was first allied to the Soviet Union. The Soviets put in artificial military and economic muscle into that state. Then aid started to decline with the economic crisis in the Soviet Union. Siad Barre shifted to the United States, which was at the time looking for strategic insertions in the Persian Gulf area. So they took on Siad Barre. More aid flowed in. He stayed on. When the Cold War ended, he was abandoned. The crisis of the state began. It fell apart. The glue was removed.

In 1989, you traveled to the Soviet Union for the first time. Why didn’t you go before then?

I had been critical of Soviet communism. I thought it was a rather bad form, a wrong way to run a socialist society. The articles I had written on the subject and the speeches I had given had made me persona non grata with the Soviet apparatchiks. It was not until 1989, when I was a beneficiary of glasnost and Moscow University invited me to give a few talks.

That visit made quite an impression on you.

I had, for example, not imagined how unorganic the growth of the Soviet Union had been. A country that produced the most modern research and development in space, jet, laser, and medical technology, did not have a small calculator on the market. There was no organic relationship between one segment of Soviet society and another. I think that the extreme unorganic growth of that state contributed greatly to its collapse. Because with all that military spending, if you have no spin-off into the civilian sector, you’re really throwing everything away. Even in America, where there is so much spin-off between military research and development and civilian technology and the civilian market, the country has suffered. There, there was none. It collapsed.

Were you surprised?

I was surprised by the extent of segmentation. I was not surprised that it existed, but really surprised by the extent of it and the demoralizing effect it had on people. The young people at that time, in 1989, really didn’t have any belief in the future. It’s that loss of faith in the future that must have contributed to the collapse of the state.

The central figure presiding over the demise of the Soviet Union is Mikhail Gorbachev. What is your assessment of him?

It is hard to know if he understood what he was doing. He was a visionary, an intelligent man, but why would he not understand that the process he was introducing was too fast for the system to sustain?

I talked to Alexander N. Yakovlev, who was number two in the political bureau and the person who was seen as the architect of perestroika and glasnost, a very intelligent man. He studied at Columbia at the time I was at Princeton. He understood that things could fall apart and that they were going in that direction.

As far as the West is concerned, they would have liked China to do the same thing. The Chinese are engaged in very controlled social change. I hope they are able to control it, because the consequences of China falling apart would be very lasting in Asia. It could have a very destabilizing effect. And China is certainly headed towards rocky times. Its rate of growth is so fast that any system would find it hard to contain. In the coastal areas, the Chinese economic annual growth is about 25 percent. Overall in the country it’s about 13 percent. It’s the highest rate of growth history has recorded. It’s booming. You can’t take that kind of boom without some strains.

What kind of impact has the collapse of the Soviet Union had on Pakistan?

It has destroyed the dependent communist parties, both Maoist and pro-Moscow, with the result that the comprador left has almost totally evaporated from places like Pakistan, Egypt, and Algeria. I think it’s beneficial, because compradorism, dependency of any kind, is not good. Now, the bourgeoisie that controls the state has become more dependent on Washington, the World Bank, and the IMF. The loss of sovereignty is much greater. But at least there is the possibility of the emergence of independent challengers, an independent left.

Segments of the left in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere were very heavily invested politically and emotionally in the Soviet Union. Do you think that was a mistake?

It was a disaster. Not just a mistake. For one thing, it is disastrous in any case for any group or individual to be linked by ties of dependency to anybody, much less a state that was so defective. It renders you uncritical. Soviet communism was one of the most defective formations humanity has seen.

THE FUTURE OF THE U.S. LEFT

What do you see as the future of the left in the United States?

I’m not sure what the future of the left is, but the future of radicalism in America can take non-leftist forms. Jeffersonian liberalism, for example, may have more of a radical future here than the “left” as we have understood it. Some form of anarchism may be more deeply rooted in the American tradition, in which there is a genuine suspicion of government, a genuine objection to the centralization of power. Anarchism may have more of a future than the traditional, orthodox, Marxist left. But I do think that the situation here is not going to remain what it is today. For one thing, the demographic composition of this country is very different from what it was thirty years ago. A very large percentage, probably a quarter, of the total population is now nonwhite, many of them coming from outside the country. This is the first generation of quietists. That’s going to change when the second generation grows up to make new demands, to feel fully American, and feel marginalized as they are making new demands.

Secondly, the patterns of inequality are growing. Thirty years ago, I had not imagined that this country would look this unequal or unjust to the lower strata of society. Something like the top 20 percent of Americans earn 45 percent or so of the income. About 4 percent or so control or own 85 to 90 percent of stocks and bonds. These disparities are going to weigh very strongly on people’s outlook and lead to anger, especially as they do not see the promise of change.

But is it not in the class interests of the owners and managers of the political economy to provide a modicum of wealth and income for the masses in order to ensure political stability?

That’s what the New Deal was about. It was not a socialist form. Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of the finest capitalists around. What he understood was that a modicum of safety, of security, of distributive justice and the stimulation of hope in people is necessary for stability. It is this lesson that the current generation of American rulers is violating. They are going to bring upon this country some sort of an upheaval.

Things are not entirely stagnant and static. You had an experience, for example, in Memphis.

Change occurs, and when it does it happens very fast. When I arrived for the first time as a student, the United States was living in the spell of racism. There were lynchings in the South. When I went to travel with a Japanese and a Brazilian friend to Memphis, for about four hours, from about 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., we couldn’t find a hotel that would admit us because we were colored. One was yellow, one was brown, and one was black. We finally found a space in the ghetto. Exactly two years later, we were integrating the lunch counters and hotels. Just ten years later, I would return to Memphis and stay at the Sheraton Hotel. I want to tell you when I got there, I got out of the taxi, and the bellboy who picked up my luggage was white. I was so happy to see that that I tipped him ten dollars, which I could ill afford, when he brought me to my room. After he left, I sat and cried. The change was marvelous. And it took some struggle to bring about that change. We still have a long way to go, but change has occurred.

When the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was passed in 1964 and the Johnson administration escalated the war in Vietnam by starting the bombing of the north, we at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign decided to have a teach-in. This was actually the first teach-in in this country. We arranged for about 150 people in a small hall. We were afraid we would have ten. The place was mobbed. We had to move into another hall. The anti-war movement had taken off. We had no idea it would happen. Social movements are the most unpredictable of historical phenomena. No one, no scholars have yet found a formula for predicting revolutions or upheavals.

How would you define your own politics?

Socialist and democratic. Those have been my two lasting commitments. By democratic, I mean genuine commitment to equality, freedom of association, critical thought, and the accountability of rulers to citizens. By socialism, I mean control of the wealth by people rather than by the state or by corporations.

You’ve traveled an extraordinarily long distance in terms of miles as well as intellectually. You grew up in a village in Bihar, India. You migrated to Pakistan. You studied at Princeton. You then worked in revolutionary Algeria. You returned to the United States. You were an activist in the anti-war movement. You had an academic career here. Now you’re tying to establish an alternative educational institution in Pakistan. What are your thoughts and reflections on this rather long and varied trip?

What were my choices? Essentially I had two. All my friends from childhood or college days have had to make the same choices. I look at them and in a sense I’m not sorry that I’m not in their position. My choice was to become a regular academic or a corporate executive, to have a very comfortable, boring, selfish, quiet, comfortable existence, as opposed to what I have lived as being very rich spiritually and intellectually and rather poor materially. But look, I have friends from Calcutta to Casablanca, from Algiers to San Francisco. I have the simple satisfaction of knowing that we have tried—we did the best we could and didn’t always succeed—but we tried to change where change seemed necessary. I took rather seriously Karl Marx’s old dictum that the function of knowledge is to comprehend in order to change.

What do you tell your students?

I don’t tell them anything. I think that my life and my teachings all point to two morals: think critically and take risks.

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NOTES

1 Jag Parvesh Chander, ed., Tagore and Gandhi Argue (Lahore, India: Indian Printing Works, 1945). See also B.K. Ahluwalia, Tagore and Gandhi: The Tagore-Gandhi Controversy (New Delhi: Pankaj Publications, 1981).

2 Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World, trans. Surendranath Tagore (New York: Penguin, 1985). Satyajit Ray, The Home and the World, National Film Development Corporation of India, 1984.

3 Larry Collins and Dominique LaPierre, Freedom at Midnight (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975). Gandhi, Richard Attenborough dir., Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1982.

4 Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

5 Stories My Country Told Me: With Eqbal Ahmad on the Grand Trunk Road, H.O. Nazareth dir., BBC Arena/Penumbra, 1996.

6 See “Race for a National Anthem,” The Hindu, December 28, 1998.

7 See Arun P. Elhance, “From War to Water Pacts In Turbulent South Asia,” Christian Science Monitor, January 15, 1997, p. 19.

8 See Thomas Babington Macaulay, Selected Writings, ed. John Clive and Thomas Pinney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).

9 Pamela Collett, “A New University for Pakistan,” Chronicle of Higher Education 40: 34 (April 27, 1994): A35–A36.

10 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1968).

11 Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier, (London: Writers and Readers, 1980).

12 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1968).

13 Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1969).

14 Noam Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” New York Review of Books, February 1967. Reprinted in Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins: Historical and Political Essays (New York: Pantheon, 1969), pp. 323–66.

15 Eqbal Ahmad, “Revolutionary Warfare: How to Tell When the Rebels Have Won,” The Nation, August 30, 1965, pp. 95–100.

16 Edward W. Said, “The Arab Portrayed,” The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967: An Arab Perspective, ed. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 1–9.

17 Eqbal Ahmad, “Introduction,” in Edward W. Said, The Pen and the Sword: Conversations with David Barsamian (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994).

18 Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine, second ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1992). First edition published in 1979 by Times Books in New York.

19 Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine, pp. 56–114.

20 Edward W. Said, “The Mind of Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile,” Harper’s, September 1984, pp. 49–55.

21 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).

22 Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995).

23 See Ranajit Guha ed., A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

24 See Muhammad Abed al-Jabry, Arab-Islamic Philosophy: A Contemporary Critique (Houston: University of Texas Press, 1999).

25 Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume I (Boston: South End Press, 1979).

26 See Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians, revised ed. (Cambridge: South End Press Classics, 1999), p. 535.