Foreword
to the Second Edition

by pervez hoodbhoy

Confronting Empire is aptly titled. At a time when the world order created by the United States after World War II is unraveling, China is rising, and U.S. strength is on the wane, there are calls to make America great again. One can easily forget that this nostalgia is for the decades when the United States was an aggressive, bellicose power. Between 1945 and 1995 it had fought twenty-three major wars as well as countless minor ones. Korea, Guatemala, Congo, Laos, Peru, Vietnam, Cambodia, El Salvador, and Nicaragua are only some of the countries that it had bombed or invaded. The United States had overthrown elected governments, used targeted killing, napalm, chemical defoliants, and cluster munitions, and built a nuclear arsenal able to end the world. Surely this empire needed and needs to be confronted.

I see it now, but confrontation was the last thought I had in mind when in 1969 I got off the plane from Pakistan as a nineteen-year-old heading to MIT to be a first-year student. This was a time when things were stirring in the imperial heartland against yet another war, this one in Vietnam. Even at MIT—a key bastion of technology that powered the postwar American empire—the protests had assumed force. But, as a techie type from an elite Pakistani high school where students are typically thoughtless and career obsessed, I was neither aware of nor cared about larger issues.

The first time I actually saw Eqbal Ahmad was when he spoke at an anti-war rally outside the MIT Student Center sometime in 1970 where he was sharing the platform with Noam Chomsky, Salvador Luria, and Howard Zinn. It started out with me being a curious onlooker, but it was the beginning of a profound transformation. Eqbal’s oratory had left me stunned, releasing a strange energy within me. Then, some weeks later, at my invitation, he returned to speak about the genocide in East Pakistan.

Back in those days only the tiniest minority of West Pakistanis in the United States, including both students and those settled there, had any sympathy with the Bengalis who were now being massacred by the tens of thousands. In fact, the majority of us West Pakistanis wanted a still harsher response to their agitation for a separate state. In these adverse circumstances Eqbal Ahmad, together with Feroz Ahmad and Aijaz Ahmad (no relation to each other), had started a frankly traitorous magazine called Pakistan Progressive that sought to rally Pakistanis in North America against their army’s actions. I became the magazine’s campus promoter and distributor.

Eqbal championed causes of those oppressed and dispossessed. It didn’t matter where: Algeria, Vietnam, Pakistan, and Palestine. In his foreword here, his friend Edward Said speaks to Eqbal’s “heroic defense, his unstinting sense of solidarity with, my people, the Palestinians. For many refugees, camp dwellers, and wretched of the earth who have been forgotten by their fellow Arabs and Muslims, Eqbal was one of their guiding lights.” Ostracized by most of the American academic community for his passionate advocacy of Palestinian rights, Eqbal had remained an itinerant professor at several U.S. universities for much of his life. He recalled that his colleagues at Cornell chose to stand elsewhere rather than sit with him at the same cafeteria table.

With a strong memory for events and people, an uncanny ability to quickly grasp the essence of a political situation, and a large circle of contacts that kept him informed, Eqbal achieved a reputation for being prescient. He had warned Yasir Arafat that firing Katyusha rockets from South Lebanon into Israel would achieve nothing beyond brutal Israeli retaliation. Indeed, it came just as he had predicted. As Beirut was destroyed block after block, Eqbal was burning from within, helpless and frustrated by his inability to prevent the carnage. This emotional state probably had something to do with the fact that he suffered his first heart attack in 1982.

It was natural that I started seeing the world through Eqbal’s eyes. I remember it was late evening in Islamabad—morning time in New York—when I entered the living room of my house on the campus of Quaid-e-Azam University. The first airliner had already crashed into the World Trade Center. Aghast, my wife and I watched the second plane strike, shoots of fire emerge, and the towers collapse in slow motion. No, she said, it wasn’t an animation or a video game. My first thought—the world would now see hell. My second strayed to Eqbal: who would he have said had done it? What was likely to happen next? And, might we have again quarreled on the causes and responsibility?

It had already been two-and-a-half years since Eqbal had passed away, leaving us all with a grief that just would not go away. As I write this seventeen years later, my eyes blur. That’s unusual even though I eventually became part of his family—his niece, Hajra Ahmad, and I had married twenty-five years before his death—and he dearly loved our children. But that still doesn’t explain it because I am just one of so many who knew him—and there were hundreds across the world—who also had this sense of infinite loss.

So what is it that drew people instinctively toward this man? I have no clear answer. Perhaps it was because you felt he deeply cared about you. It wasn’t faked; he somehow had a capacity to hold so much and give so much. He was an attentive listener who somehow made time for individual stories; few in this fast-paced world have patience for this. If you had a problem, you went to him, and you would come back feeling less burdened.

Eqbal passed away in 1999. Today, almost two decades later, no issue burns more fiercely than that of Islam in the contemporary world. His vision and voice would have been a key part of the global conversation if he had lived. A life-long involvement with Algeria, Palestine, Kashmir, Pakistan, and India led Eqbal to a firm position on many Muslim causes as well as a profound understanding of Islam’s relationship to power and politics. He saw Muslims as wretched and dispossessed, betrayed by their leaders, the hapless victims of a predatory imperial system. With his Muslim roots he felt a deep empathy for the Muslim predicament while, at the same time, maintaining a strictly secular outlook on life. Even as his life ebbed away, I did not see him make any supplications or any attempt to pray. So let me try to present Eqbal’s position on Muslims and Islam in the modern world. I will try to do it as fairly as I can. I must admit, however, that I cannot agree with it in totality.

The future of Muslim societies can only lie, Eqbal believed, in allowing Islamic values of justice, equality, and tolerance to shape power and politics but without the formalistic imposition of structures and strictures of centuries past. For him it was values, knowledge, aesthetics, and style that had defined Islamic civilization and invested it with greatness. But “don’t hanker for the past” was his message. Those who glorify the past and seek to re-create it, almost invariably fail, while those who view it comprehensively and critically are able to draw on the past in meaningful and lasting ways. “The admiration for Emperor Aurangzeb is a symptom of a deep ailment,” he wrote, adding that that in Pakistan, Islam has been a convenient refuge of troubled and weak leaders. Reacting against Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s call in 1998 for an Islamic state governed by sharia principles, he ascribed it to “a protracted crisis of leadership” and an attempt to distract attention away from core issues.

Political-religious movements that purport to create an Islamic state, and which have adopted terror as their weapon, have done enormous damage to Muslims, said Eqbal. They wage holy wars and commit atrocities sanctimoniously, yet nothing is truly sacred to them. They spill blood in bazaars, in homes and in courts, mosques, and churches. They believe themselves to be God’s warriors, above man-made laws and the judgment of mankind. In doing so, they surrender the most potent weapon of the weak—the moral high ground. For Eqbal, Mahatma Gandhi and nonviolence had a lesson for us all.

What explains the rise of extremist political-religious movements? Certainly, “Islamic fundamentalism” is a common enough epithet used by the Western media for the Muslim variety. But, Eqbal insisted, neither Muslims nor Jews nor Hindus are unique in this respect. All variants of contemporary fundamentalism, he said, reduce complex religious systems and civilizations to one or another version of modern fascism. They are concerned with power, not with the soul, and they mobilize people for political purposes rather than with the goal of sharing or alleviating their sufferings and aspirations. All brands of religious fundamentalisms are reflections of a common problem, with shared roots and similar patterns of expression.

These shared roots, said Eqbal, lie in global changes that are occurring much too fast for successful human adaptation. For millennia, humanity had experienced the unsettling process of change. But the global transformation made possible by technology and communication is so systemic that it destroys the autonomy of life lived for millennia, forcing diverse peoples and individuals to live in urban proximity and compete with each other. Caught in this furious tempest of modernity and change, cultures do adapt, but relatively slowly and often painfully. How peacefully and democratically a society makes this journey depends on its historical circumstances. But activists need not be fatalistic and leave social change to the blind forces of technology and economics. What matters equally is “the engagement of its intelligentsia, the outlook of its leaders and governments, and the ideological choices they make.”

Death has interrupted our conversation, one that I would have much wanted to pursue further. I cannot claim to have definite answers to the questions we debated nor know the way ahead. Can Muslims be weaned away from the notion that they are superior to everyone else and, by virtue of possessing the perfect book, have also inherited the master plan for a utopia on earth as well as the rewards in the afterlife? Post–bin Laden, but in the age of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi and Boko Haram, what is the alternative to high-tech weapons, clear-cut military doctrines, and the relentless deployment of military force?

Eqbal’s answers would have drawn on his commitment to being a staunch humanist and activist fighting for the voiceless and the oppressed. He cared deeply and was willing to believe people could endure and be more brave and creative than they knew. He saw the big picture and still knew the value of individual stories. His incisive and lucid way of thinking and his voice are clear and sharp in these skillful interviews with David Barsamian.

 

August 2016