YOU COULD NEVER PREDICT HOW EQBAL WOULD REACT TO A given crisis, which meant that speaking to him about current events was always an adventure. Sometimes he would shock people whom he barely knew by defending positions diametrically opposed to what he surmised was their received knowledge. He did so not to provoke but to force those listening to rethink their positions and see events in a new light. This approach, combined with significant rhetorical skills, meant that once you heard him, you never forgot him. And he did it all with such charm that even though his arguments may have appeared outrageous to some, they listened and paid attention. Others on his wavelength appreciated the clarity with which he presented his arguments, for he had the habit of packaging his talks in numerical order, three or four points, which followed from one to another. His humor, the force of his logic, and his clarity sometimes helped win over his opponents.
Eqbal met Edward Said for the first time in 1968. The U.S. war in Vietnam and the protests against it defined in those days America’s intellectual and political environment on the political left. Eqbal, as a leader of the antiwar movement, had become a prominent figure. He surmised that Edward already knew about him even before they met and that the critic would favor an outspoken dissenter who lived in the United States without becoming a citizen. Their friendship grew continuously and never broke. Eqbal wrote on December 7, 1992, about the circumstances of their meeting in a letter to Tim May and Frank Hanly, BBC producers working on a program about Edward’s life:
[O]ur meeting and, later,…our friendship…had to do perhaps with the fact that we were both exiles…. We shared the exiles’ experience…as it induces a certain relationship of alienation and intimacy with one’s chosen environment, and of constant often secret negotiations between one’s colonial past and contemporary metropolitan life. I and Edward never talked about this. I should, nevertheless, note that he mentions in Culture & Imperialism the experience of exile with feeling and insight….
I first came to know of Edward from an article—“Portrait of an Arab”—which I read in
The Arab World, a magazine which used to be published by the Arab League…. It was an unusual piece to be printed in an official Arab organ. At the time when Israel was routinely referred to [in the Arab media] as…the Zionist entity, Edward wrote of the Palestinian Arab as a shadow of the Jew—tormented, persecuted, and devalued. More important, it was a seminal essay. [Its] themes…later [re]appeared full bloom in
Orientalism—of representational forms and narratives as defining the moral epistemology of imperialism, instruments in the creation of imperial ethos, legitimacy, and identity. I was deeply moved and impressed by the essay and asked Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, a mutual friend, to introduce me to Said. He did a few months later.
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Eqbal recalled to the TV producers that only a few dissenters spoke out in the United States after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. “Those around us, including the ‘peace people,’ considered Zionism and Israel to be blameless and [the] heroic survivor of wanton Arab aggression. The media was closed to us…there was no mainstream magazine open to our viewpoint on the Middle East.” Among those who “advocated the restitution of Palestinian rights Edward stood out for his open and critical posture not only towards the Arab governments, but also towards the PLO…. It was rare at the time to find pro-Palestinian critics of the PLO’s strategy and politics.”
Eqbal then recounted to May and Hanly the negative reactions to a talk he had given after the 1967 war at the second convention of the Organization of Arab Students. In it, he criticized the tactics used by the Arab states and argued that they could never defeat Israel militarily. Eqbal thought that his talk was “fool hardy [sic]” and “given at the wrong time to the wrong audience.” When Eqbal and Edward first met, Edward asked him about this speech. He seemed quite curious, and he surprisingly agreed with Eqbal’s conclusions. Eqbal therefore appreciated Edward’s “consistently critical solidarity” with the PLO and its leaders.
Imperialism took many forms, and Eqbal reflected on that issue in his letter to May and Hanly. He explained his and Edward’s affinities—especially their similar views on imperialism—and summarized the reasons why they had become close friends:
[The year] 1967 had a lasting effect on Edward intellectually and politically. During the weeks that the Arab-Israeli conflict occupied center stage in the American discourse, an astounding system of beliefs, images, myths, and anxieties about Arabs and Islam unfolded before us. Layer after layer of libel were heaped daily by certified experts, columnists, and politicians. The simple minded [sic] Arab could dismiss it as the work of an influential lobby. But to a discerning intellect, it was obvious that on display was a historically rooted and complex culture of imperialism.
Edward proceeded to excavate and expose its roots. His skills and methods as a critic were great assets, but what invested power and originality to his work in the next two decades was a seminal insight regarding the relationship of knowledge to imperial power.
Orientalism was a milestone in this regard. What makes his current work extremely interesting is that he also elaborates on another set of relationships—between imperialism and the novel, poetry, and music, and the relationship between culture and resistance.
Edward wrote
Orientalism to demonstrate the depths of imperial ideology within Western culture. He applied the lessons he learned from Michel Foucault, who demonstrated the importance of substructures of knowledge, which at first sight were not apparent but had to be excavated and extracted from cultural forms and constructs, the whole constituting patterns that assumed the power of institutions. Edward also mined Antonio Gramsci, the secret head of the Italian Communist Party whom Mussolini imprisoned, because Gramsci recognized the power of hegemonic knowledge and advocated creating alternate institutions in order to foment and spread new knowledge, the better to replace old dominant structures of thought and practice.
2 As Eqbal told May and Hanly, he recognized that “a common anti-imperialist outlook went into the making of [his and Edward’s] friendship more…than the shared experience of exile.”
Both men had cosmopolitan views, and by the time they met, they had seen a considerable part of the world. Their status as refugees had made them into critical outsiders. Both of them could see the societies in which they lived from without, and they had developed sufficient yardsticks with which to gauge with some detachment and discernment what they experienced and saw. Eqbal recognized this when he observed to May and Hanly that although Edward was a “Tory in life style [sic], and to some extent in taste,” he also was a “critical democrat, which explains, at least partially, the absence of third worldism, and the antipathy he feels to authoritarian minorities which rule the Arab world, their addiction to arms, narrow vision, and indifference towards the future”:
The colonial encounter left a permanent mark on us as it did on the colonized lands. Fortunately, its impact has been more even on individuals like me and Edward than on our societies as a whole. To different degrees both of us have shared a consciously dual relationship to the West and to our native environment. We are, to paraphrase Nehru, at home in both civilizations, at ease in neither. Anti-imperialism has been a defining sentiment with us, but it has never degenerated into anti-westernism. In differing ways we both love and appreciate much about western civilization at the same time as we are appalled by the imperious patterns of sectarian prejudices, informed ignorance, callousness, and hypocrisy….
As his latest book shows, Edward is a universalist despite or because of the anguish which sectarian ambitions inflicted upon him and his people. This may be yet another factor which explains the durability of our friendship.
And they certainly grew to depend on one another. They adored and admired each other and fed off of each other’s intelligence and wit. The fact that Edward’s and Eqbal’s own family and friends lived in New York was one of the main reasons why Eqbal returned to the city with regularity. Edward rarely let anyone read his completed manuscripts but published them mostly as they were written, so confident was he about the validity of his views. He made some exceptions to his policy of immediate publication without review in the 1990s, when he began showing his finished work to Eqbal and a few other close friends before sending manuscripts off for publication. Edward dedicated his book Culture and Imperialism to Eqbal, and that act was a tribute to the ongoing creative dialogue they had over the decades.
It was a delight to see them together, for they joked around, and each brought out the best in the other. Their letters and email exchanges over the years would make a remarkable book. Their correspondence, for fun, overflowed with imitations of the flowery language of medieval Muslim royalty, whose missives would begin with adoring words, comparing the other to a rose in bloom or the sun rising to majestic heights, but then announce abruptly that the wielder of such compliments had just conquered “his dear brother’s” prize city. Forgive the indiscretion, the bearer of bad tidings would then beg, but he knew that the receiver of the news would understand why the aggressive prince had to act the way he did. Eqbal and Edward, in jest, incorporated these sorts of protocols into their letters and emails with hilarious effect. One salutation at the end of a letter Eqbal wrote to Edward on September 25, 1997, gives an idea of what went on in their voluminous correspondence: “With much humble affection and prayers that I stay a particle of dust under you[r] vigorous feet,” Eqbal rhapsodized, “I remain: Forever your homage paying
chamcha [‘spoon,’ implying that he was a mere utensil in relation to his superior].”
3 The humor had no bounds, and they reveled in thinking up such adornments to their correspondence, which gave them enormous pleasure.
The humor extended to gentle criticism Eqbal gave Edward on a subject as ponderous as the Kosovo crisis. In response to an article Edward had written on the subject for the Karachi newspaper Dawn, Eqbal sent his friend the following letter, which Edward read at the celebration of Eqbal’s life at Hampshire College on September 18, 1999, four months after he died:
Son of Palestine, Moon over Jerusalem, Light of the Semites, Refuge of the World, Shadow of the Lord on Earth…a humble particle of dust offers salutations from down under your expensively dressed and glorious feet…and welcomes you back to the land of bombs and missiles, cold milk, and caned honey. With deep interest and in humble submission, I read your stirring thoughts in
Dawn…on the plight of Kosovo and the nefarious imperial intervention therein to advance its own purposes. Since in your wisdom and forbearance you have forsaken your abject bat man, this august essay is the one august sign I have of your return to the not-so-glorious belly of the beast. I enclose an abject effort on the subject, which unfortunately was written and dispatched before I could enlighten my dusty self and decorate my humble effort with a quotation from your brilliant observations.
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Edward thought the world of Eqbal, and it was fortuitous that they had found each other and become good friends. Edward expressed his admiration for Eqbal in a letter of recommendation he wrote for his friend when the latter applied for a job at Hampshire College in 1983, beginning it by calling him “a truly remarkable man”:
Knowing him has been an education. He is…the finest, most astute and brilliant analyst of contemporary politics from a non-European and non-Western point of view that I have ever encountered. Deeply learned and humane, he is a man of great, genuine learning…he commands history, politics, society, culture and everyday life, and as a consequence his analyses are regularly enlivened by the insight and generosity that eludes most other people in his field…. He is also…a man of reason and dispassionate fairness, never more than when his own sympathies are engaged…no one has the command and learning that he has…. I cannot think of anyone more distinguished as man and as scholar than Dr. Ahmad.
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Eqbal was probably the most loyal friend anyone could ever have. Friends could do no wrong, or if they did something he disapproved of, he would have it out with them privately but never in public. He defended friends beyond the call of duty, sometimes refusing to see shortcomings or the value of external criticism. That attribute solidified his friendships and created close bonds between him and many people. But such blind loyalty also had its drawbacks. He broke with several people with whom he had collaborated for decades when they criticized his closest friends publicly in print. Others broke with him. For example, he went on offensives on behalf of Edward time and again as Edward’s detractors mounted concerted campaigns to discredit the critic. Eqbal had no tolerance for anyone who joined the frenzy of attacks against Edward, one of his closest friends.
Eqbal’s Attributes and Interactions with Friends and Students
There were many things about Eqbal that his writings do not reveal. He had the extraordinary ability to cut through chaff and get to the heart of matters in his own distinctive way. His ironic and mischievous sense of humor mitigated the seriousness with which he confronted life’s problems.
He was also a remarkable teacher who practiced his trade full time, not just in the classroom. Conversations with him offered new analysis. He tailored his many newspaper and magazine columns to teach about the complexities of society and politics without ever talking down to readers. He rarely wrote for the powerful but rather aimed his analysis at those who might enhance civil society and ameliorate the conditions that he described. He taught in order to motivate people to try to improve the world. In the classroom, he wanted to stamp on his students a sense of morality and also to empower them.
He summarized best what he stood for in a commencement speech he delivered at Hampshire College on May 17, 1997, just as he was about to retire from teaching. After entertaining the students and their parents with a witty oration, he concluded his talk by telling them what he thought the term third world really meant, while echoing the epithet on Karl Marx’s tombstone, “Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point, however is to change it”:
Power is more or less unequally distributed in nearly all spheres of life—internationally, nationally, and even in the family, and this inequality—be it racial or sexual, of classes, or of nations—stands [as] a major obstacle to human liberation. To ameliorate it is an enlightened, educated project. Viewed thus, the third world is a metaphor for unequal exchange. The “expectation” then is that the educated person would discern its patterns, within and without, and work at obviating it. The function of knowledge, after all, should be to comprehend reality in order to change it.
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Teaching with passion and conviction, he changed the lives of many who studied with him. He grouped around him a large number of loyal students who venerated him as he aged and as he exuded an air of determined wisdom. He cultivated such adulation, sometimes to his detriment. Some young people in his entourage have complained that as he aged, he accepted less and less criticism from them, making it difficult for those who disagreed with him to voice their opinions. A few became estranged, and others had to go through elaborate dialogues with him to reestablish relationships. But, to his credit, he never let his students become complaisant and continuously challenged them when they least expected it.
Outsider Status and Rapport with Those in Power
Problems also sometimes arose from Eqbal’s being an outsider. For example, his distance from Pakistan on occasion bred misunderstandings and, worse yet, at times fantasies. Some accused him of chasing pipe dreams and applying yardsticks to Pakistan that were sometimes irrelevant to realities on the ground. For example, beginning one month after Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto (1953–2007) came to power, in his newspaper columns Eqbal attacked her policies and the corruption of her husband, Asif Ali Zardari (b. 1955). He continued these attacks at the same time that he expected the couple to endorse and underwrite plans he had to establish a new university in Pakistan. In fact, he heard that the prime minister, in a fit of megalomania, had told people a far-fetched story that Eqbal was responsible for the death of President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (1928–1979) by attacking him openly and bitterly in the press before General Zia al-Haq (1924–1988) overthrew his regime.
Zia Mian (b. 1961), who shared a house in Islamabad with Eqbal in the mid-1990s, remembered a “bad encounter” Eqbal had with Prime Minister Bhutto in 1995 at an event concerning the creation of Bangladesh, organized at the Pakistan national library in the capital and attended by about four hundred people. After Eqbal criticized Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in his turn at the podium, Bhutto’s daughter took the stage and defended her father’s policies without referring to what Eqbal had previously said. After the session, when Eqbal extended his hand to shake hers, she ignored him and afterward avoided him.
7 In a letter to Dr. Saidar Mahmoud, the secretary of the Ministry of Education, on January 6, 1998, Eqbal wrote that between August 1994 and October 1996 the university he hoped to found faced “undue delays by officials who felt that the Prime Minister [Bhutto] was not keen on the project.” In fact, Bhutto’s husband, while she was alive, confiscated the 200 acres in Islamabad that the cabinet of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif (b. 1949) had promised to Eqbal in January 1993 for the construction of the projected university; Zardari supposedly intended to use that land for a country club and golf course. After a great deal of organizing, in July 1994 Eqbal was promised a reduced land grant of 70 acres that was much less desirable than the first.
8 Another 130 acres were reserved for future acquisition by the university but not assigned to it at the time. Eqbal’s nephew Najeeb Omar, an architect who worked closely with Eqbal on the project, had inspected the smaller parcel located “in a remote area near Lake Rawal in the vicinity of Islamabad. Unlike the first allotment, it had no road frontage and the cost of building new roads and infrastructure to make the place accessible to students and teachers would have been too prohibitive to use.” Eqbal could have taken the 70 acres, but he had no charter to set up a university on it. Without one, he did not want to assume title to the land.
9 By placing himself in the impossible situation of needing a corrupt regime to supply him with state land for his new venture, he made the realization of his dream that more difficult to achieve.
10 He had also hoped to raise substantial funds for the new university from U.S. foundations. Adele Simmons, the president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation at the time, concluded that the most her foundation could do for him was to give him some seed money, but no more. She did not think that any U.S. foundation would help him underwrite the establishment and running of a foreign university. He had found some rich Pakistani backers for the scheme, but they would not or could not put up enough money to launch and sustain a full-fledged university. Before Eqbal died, he and his Pakistani friends had raised more than $3 million of the $30 million needed to open the new school.
11 He found it difficult to raise these funds and confided in a letter to his daughter on August 17, 1993, “Nothing sickens like fund raising; I must find someone else to do it.”
12Most educational institutions set up with private funds in the Third World concentrate on business education, not on the humanities with a large Islamic component and the pure and social sciences, as Eqbal had hoped to do. Rich parents in many countries are willing to invest in business education for their children, expecting them to be able to get well-paying jobs in international corporations upon graduation. Few of the same parents would invest in high tuition for degrees in low-paying fields such as philosophy, sociology, history, and political science. As a result, most students in the Third World study the humanities and social sciences in state universities rather than in private ones. With all good intentions, Eqbal was bucking trends that went against his inclinations. Moreover, a government’s opponent cannot expect that same government to underwrite a venture for him. Because of such contradictions, Khaldunia, Eqbal’s university, therefore faced insurmountable hurdles. Near the end of his life, he admitted to close friends that the project had failed.
Unlike others in a similar position, Eqbal did not have major financial inducements to prod Pakistan’s business elites to support his university project in a grandiose manner. Gandhi in his loincloth, by contrast, had shored up his position as leader of a nonviolent, anti-imperialist struggle by getting the support of significant Indian businesspeople, who underwrote his campaigns. By advocating the boycott of British products and substituting local handmade goods, such as homespun cloth, Gandhi guaranteed that rich industrialists would back his movement. In fact, Gandhi became the darling of the very rich Indian industrialists within the Congress Party, who found his anti-British campaigns useful for their businesses’ expansion at British expense. Eqbal needed such backers to launch his university scheme. Few Pakistani entrepreneurs, however, saw long-term benefits in Eqbal’s Khaldunia like those that Gandhi provided to Indian businesses for the expansion of their own enterprises.
Eqbal’s Algerian Interests
Eqbal visited newly independent Algeria on July 10, 1962, and witnessed the first flush of euphoria of the victorious population. He and his party celebrated independence with the Algerians whom they met, and the experience affected Eqbal profoundly. Any voyage into Algeria at that point in time had to transform anyone coming in contact with the exuberant population. He took away an important lesson that stayed with him throughout his life. Even though the Algerian National Liberation Front had ultimately lost the war militarily to the French, they had won the hearts and minds of the Algerian population and therefore gained their independence.
Eqbal followed postindependence Algerian events closely from his Tunisian base and quickly saw the dangers of a military takeover there, a civil war, which would eliminate those who fought and won the revolution inside Algeria. The National Liberation Front army of Colonel Houari Boumediene (1932–1978), whose troops had been stationed throughout the war in Morocco and Tunisia, marched in and took over the country in a coup immediately after independence. The Algerian population, exhausted from the eight-year war, did not oppose the military then. The army leader allied himself with Ahmed Ben Bella (1916–2012), the first president after independence.
When I visited Eqbal in Tunis just before New Year’s Day in 1963, we spoke at length of the Algerian tragedy. He already had premonitions of doom, which became stronger when both of us returned to Algeria to attend the first congress of the Algerian trade union. We watched incredulously as the new Algerian president, Ben Bella, had the delegates whom the workers had selected democratically as their representatives arrested and replaced by bussed-in peasants, who were instructed to vote for the government’s program. Eqbal fumed and ranted and at the podium had the audacity to confront Ben Bella, whom he had never before met. Taking a great risk of being arrested, he screamed at Ben Bella that he had betrayed the revolution. Many years later, in another context, he called Ben Bella a “mindless opportunist.”
13 At that point in 1963, he concluded that Algeria’s destiny would be bleak.
14 While residing in Tunis, he had developed close friendships with Algerian revolutionaries living in exile there. The most important of them was the Kabylie Berber Belkacem Krim (born in 1922 and assassinated in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1970), who was also one of the original founders of the revolution. Eqbal saw Krim and other Algerian leaders quite frequently and learned a great deal from them about how they organized the uprising and the complications of keeping the revolt alive. As an astute political analyst, Eqbal used that information—from the source—to begin to develop his theories of revolutionary warfare.