Introduction
BY DAVID BARSAMIAN
It is difficult to think of Eqbal Ahmad in the past tense. As I look at his words, I hear his lilting accent and mellifluous voice ringing in my ears. Eqbal was very fond of Urdu poetry and used it as a tool of analysis. One of its main motifs is paradox. So, I write with a mixture of joy and sadness. Joy that we have this book and sadness that Eqbal is not with us.
I remember the gleam in Eqbal’s eye and his enthusiastic response when I first proposed doing a series of interviews for a book. The idea had great appeal to him. He had written the introduction to The Pen and The Sword, my book with Edward Said.1 And he was familiar with my work with Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.2 More than that, we met in a curious way, albeit he was older, on the same “kinare” or riverbank. I always felt a connection with Eqbal. I had spent some time in South Asia and spoke his language, Urdu, and shared his appreciation of and admiration for Indo-Islamic culture. Although I had not been displaced myself, my parents had been—and the upheaval and turmoil they went through marked me deeply.
I knew of Eqbal and his activism long before we actually met. Our first interview in 1983 in New York was memorable and instructive. We sat at his kitchen table and talked about the third world, imperialism, and dependency. I thought, “I’ve got a great interview” and couldn’t wait to hear the results. As soon as I came home, I turned the tape recorder on only to discover that the tape was blank! Alas, I had failed to press the record button. As they say in South Asia, “What to do, baba?” With trepidation and embarrassment, I called Eqbal and told him of my gaffe. He said, “No problem. Come over and we’ll do it again.” And, indeed, a day or two later we re-did the interview. Generosity and graciousness marked the man. Over the years, whenever I told the story, his friends would nod and say, “That’s Eqbal.”
Our interview time passed quickly and almost effortlessly, even though they lasted as long as six hours. He had an easy conversational style that was at once compelling and inviting. Our discussions were punctuated by spicy food and glasses of wine. During a break from one marathon session in August 1998, we took a walk around Mt. Holyoke. He was in a pensive and reflective mood. It was then he told me that his health was not so good. Ten months later, he was dead.
The topics covered in these interviews are as current as when we first discussed them: economic decay and breathtaking misrule in Pakistan (a country again under military control since General Pervez Musharraf ousted Nawaz Sharif in October 1999), Hindu fundamentalism, nuclear weapons in South Asia, Kashmir, Afghanistan, the Balkans, Sri Lanka, sectarianism, pathologies of power, the implosion of third-world countries, and the overarching issue of U.S. imperialism. While others backed off from using the term, Eqbal never hesitated. His good friend Pervez Hoodbhoy commented after hearing Eqbal lecture for the first time that he had never heard “such a devastating combination of knowledge, eloquence, and passion used with unerring precision to shatter the myths and lies that surrounded America’s imperial adventure.”
There is a lot of claptrap these days about public intellectuals. Eqbal Ahmad was a rare combination of scholar and activist. He not only shared his knowledge with progressive movements for social change but he participated in them. He cared about people and he cared about justice.
The second interview ends with a Muhammad Iqbal couplet which expresses a sentiment that echoes in these pages. Eqbal Ahmad was “someone capable of seeing inside.”
Boulder, Colorado
May 2000
NOTES
1 Eqbal Ahmad, “Introduction,” in Edward W. Said, The Pen and the Sword: Conversations with David Barsamian (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994).
2 See Howard Zinn, The Future of History: Conversations with David Barsamian (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999), and Noam Chomsky, The Common Good: Noam Chomsky Interviewed by David Barsamian (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press/Odonian Press Real Stories Series, 1998).