Eqbal Ahmad: Critical Outsider in a Turbulent Age

In response to the juxtaposition of terrorism and Islam in the media and dramatic news events of our day as well as to the focus on the extremes in the popular Western imagination, which knows little about how most Muslims act and what they believe and how many of them abhor Muslim ultra-radicals, Eqbal argued on many occasions that the best antidote to Islamic extremism lay in freely organized elections emanating from a vibrant civil society. He also pointed out that Islamic radicals such as the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan could not win majorities in fair elections because most Muslims rejected the strictures placed on them by such an alternative. Islam allowed for great diversity and celebrated differences, he argued.

At Princeton University, Eqbal examined alternative models of change and had doubts about those models that renowned scholars, such as Bernard Lewis, touted as successful. For example, he questioned the achievements of Mustapha Kemal (Atatürk, 1881–1938) in Turkey, a controversial position because scholarly consensus in the late 1950s and early 1960s touted Atatürk’s model for change as a great success.¹ Eqbal viewed this Turkish leader as just another dictator who imposed a foreign ideology on the Turks, disestablished Islam, and robbed his people of their rich cultural heritage. He also fretted over those Muslim leaders who abhorred Islam, disparaged the Islamic tradition, and disestablished it under the guise of secular reforms. Likewise, he saw no room for mullahs in politics.

As a graduate student, Eqbal argued endlessly about models of change: Was Atatürk an appropriate example to follow? How could the Islamic tradition be harnessed to facilitate change? Eqbal believed that any major social and political transformation involving Muslim society had to include an important Islamic component, for the soul of the people lay within it. He also saw Islam as the link that tied communities together.

He believed strongly in a progressive Islam, a little understood concept in the West and equally misunderstood in the Muslim world. Most left-leaning Muslims with whom he dealt had cut themselves off from their culture and had no idea that a progressive tradition existed at all within Islam. As secularists, most of them distrusted anything having to do with religion. Having studied Islamic history, Eqbal could stand on his own in debates on the subject.

At the end of his life, when he attempted to establish Khaldunia, a private liberal arts college in Islamabad, he faced criticism not only from the right but also from his allies on the left. Some Islamists argued that he was attempting to open “a school of Greek revival” in the country, a code phrase that evoked foreign philosophical influences within early Islam that Muslim scholars had rejected during the high Middle Ages. Leftists and liberals were upset because they thought he was catering to Islamic sensibilities, positioning himself, as one critic put it, “between theocracy and secularism.”² They wanted a totally secular curriculum, whereas Eqbal argued that Islamic studies had to be taught in order to provide students with roots. He did not want them to grow up estranged from their own culture.

Eqbal and I discussed the notion of progressive Islam endlessly, and later in life we coauthored essays that incorporated the ideas of progressive Muslims from North Africa and Muslim India, such as the Tunisian Tahar Haddad and the Indian Ubayd Allah al-Sindhi (d. 1944).³ Eqbal’s vision of forward-looking Islam came from those sources and others, including Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun, the brilliant polymath fourteenth-century North African statesman and scholar after whom he named his projected university.

In support of his views, Eqbal argued in an essay on Islamic history that already by the mid–tenth century, when the Buyids began ruling over parts of the Abbasid Empire, there existed a separation between religious and worldly power.⁴ This position ran counter to the views of most modern-day Islamic radicals, who wanted states ruled by Islamic law (sharia) and rationalized this choice by arguing that worldly power and religion had always remained combined in the Muslim world.

Eqbal likewise opposed the dictatorial model developed by Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia. He pointed out that Bourguiba, like Atatürk before him, had forced change and robbed the Tunisian people of their souls, and so Eqbal expected a backlash, which ultimately came. This approach marked his work during the rest of his life, for he always sought the means to foster change using the best of a people’s traditions, opposing always the imposition of foreign ideologies and methodologies in transforming society. Following in the footsteps of scholars in Princeton and Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century, he stressed the need to harness social change to inherited traditions, preferably progressive ones where they existed, and he abhorred those leaders who imported ready-made notions and ideologies of change from abroad.⁵

Eqbal had a great appreciation for Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948), the founder of Pakistan. Despite his aristocratic airs and deep secularism, Jinnah understood the rich traditions that Islam offered on which to build a modern state. Eqbal pointed out “that the Ulema in their overwhelming majority opposed him [Jinnah] and he made scant effort to placate them…. [He] also remained uncompromisingly opposed to theocracy.” Religion, Jinnah argued, “was dear to us. All the worldly goods are nothing when we talk of religion. But there are other things which are very vital—our social…and economic life, and without political power how can you defend your faith and your economic life[?]” Jinnah was likewise progressive regarding women: “it is a crime against humanity, the founder of Pakistan argued, that our women are confined with the four walls of their home like prisoners. Women are our companions and you should take them out to work shoulder to shoulder in all spheres of life.”⁶

Eqbal opposed political leaders’ manipulation of Islam for their own political ends and criticized Pakistani leaders Zia ul-Haq and Nawaz Sharif (b. 1949) for doing so. He went further and claimed that “Islam has been, in Pakistan and also in other Muslim countries, a refuge for weak and scoundrel regimes in modern times. Whenever they feel threatened and isolated—and are losing their grip, losing popularity, and losing the consensus of the people—they bring out Islam from the closet and use it as a political weapon.”⁷

Eqbal also criticized the modern madrassas (madaris, Islamic religious schools), which bear little resemblance to the great mosque universities in the wider Muslim world in medieval times. Subjects such as mathematics, chemistry, botany, astronomy, and philosophy were taught then, but not today, which makes it impossible for them to produce great philosophers, mathematicians, and legists like the ones in the past. In a fierce condemnation, Eqbal concluded: “Their curriculum reduces Islam to a penal code, a ritual of ablutions and prayers[,] and a litany of crimes and those harsh here-and-now punishments. Thousands of energetic and motivated youth who graduate from these institutions are men abandoned in the middle of the ford, cut off from their real past, totally unprepared to meet the challenges of the future and fevered by the dreams of a theocratic state in which they shall be assigned their merited roles.” He estimated that between ten thousand and fifteen thousand of these young men had by that time fought with the Taliban, one-quarter of the forty thousand to fifty thousand armed militants living in Pakistan, mostly products of the modern-day madrassa.⁸

As pointed out in the introduction, Eqbal foresaw something like the Arab Spring developing among Muslims, for he located a powerful insurrectionary strain within Islamic political culture, rooted in doctrine and historical examples. He observed that among Sufis (mystics), the most renowned were the ones who challenged those in power. In fact, one could not become a great Islamic saint without having done so, he argued. While the traditional ulema rationalized power, insurrectionists invoked the Qurʾan and prophetic tradition to struggle (jihad) against oppressors. Islam spread as part of a social revolt, and, Eqbal argued, in fact Islam “is a religion of the oppressed.” It still appealed to the poor and disinherited throughout the world, becoming the fastest-growing religion in Africa and the East Indies and having great appeal among African Americans and prisoners in the United States.⁹

Likewise, Eqbal had an original view of the movement mistakenly called “fundamentalism” in Islam. He saw the Islamists as a “modern phenomenon, a response to the crisis of modernity and identity” as societies moved from the agrarian/pastoral mode of production to the industrial. Such a massive transformation affected all aspects of life and forced people to adapt to new ways of existence, challenging the old givens, values, mores, as well as class and gender relations. It produced a rupture in the social order, putting old values into question, with the world seeming as if turned on its head. Capitalism and industrialism have produced total revolutions, threatening old ways of life and values: “Complexity and pluralism threaten most…contemporary Islamists because they seek an Islamic order, stripped of its humanism, aesthetics, intellectual quests, and spiritual devotion. Their agenda is simple, therefore very reassuring to the men and women who are stranded between the deep waters of tradition and modernity.”¹⁰

Eqbal was one of the first analysts to see the connections between Muslim and other forms of “fundamentalism,” such as the Christian evangelical movement in the United States, Hindu extremism, and Israeli right-wing settlers:

Eqbal lamented that to a varying degree all of these movements “frown on joy and pleasurable pastimes. They have few positive links to culture and knowledge and regard these as dangerous sources of corruption. Hence the control of educational institutions and regulation of society’s cultural life become the primary objectives of these movements.”¹² For the same reasons, he abhorred the Taliban in Afghanistan, who denuded Islam of the joys of life that he knew as a child growing up in a Muslim household in the Indian countryside. He wrote one of his most poignant columns about their madness in denying Muslims joys such as music, games, women’s work, and schooling outside of the home.¹³ In the column “The Taliban’s Unlikely Story,” which he published in the Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram Weekly on October 17, 1996, he called the Taliban “unreconstructed misogynists.” “Girls of all ages are banned from school. Women are forbidden to work outside their homes, and ordered to cover themselves from head to foot. Kabul’s schools have lost 80 per cent of their teachers, all government offices have 50 per cent less female employees and hospitals have but few male nurses. An inch of exposed female body causes her to be beaten in public by gun-toting Taliban.” Eqbal knew a more gentle Islam, which provided enjoyment and culture for all who participated in the Islamicate.

When on February 14, 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–1989) issued his fatwa against novelist Salman Rushdie (b. 1947) and established a bounty for his death, forcing the writer into hiding for several years, Eqbal and Edward Said mobilized some intellectuals to sign a letter to the New York Review of Books condemning the action.¹⁴ Rushdie had become famous after writing Midnight’s Children when it won the 1981 Booker Prize, the most prestigious award given to British novelists. The title of his controversial novel Satanic Verses (1988) refers to verses that the prophet Muhammad supposedly added to the Qurʾan, accepting as divine three goddesses who were worshipped in Mecca. According to legend, the Prophet later relented and removed those verses, saying that the devil had tempted him.

Eqbal’s nephew Iftikhar was Rushdie’s friend and before Rushdie published the controversial book had invited him to a party in Manhattan when the well-known author visited the city for a PEN meeting of famous international novelists. Eqbal was also present at the party. Rushdie had just heard the Peruvian writer/politician Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936), who in 2010 won the Nobel Prize in Literature, speak to the assembled authors, and he entertained us for a half an hour doing an imitation of Llosa’s talk. His accent was perfect and had all of us enthralled with his talent as a mimic, giving us a clue to his gifts in capturing the voices of his characters as he heard them.

Eqbal, Edward, and their friends deplored the death threat against Rushdie and labeled the action “antithetical to the Islamic tradition of learning and tolerance.”¹⁵ At the same time, Eqbal thought that Rushdie was wrong to hand himself over to the British police for protection, therefore fortifying the state’s role in antiterrorism. Given his own experience hiding Dan Berrigan from the FBI in the early 1970s, he thought that the marked man would have been better off having friends organize a network of civilians to shelter him while he was hunted by the ayatollah’s followers and other radical Islamists. Rushdie clearly didn’t want to take any chances and felt that his life was on the line after the ayatollah issued his fatwa. At any rate, the author hid under official protection and felt free to travel and make public appearances only after the threat was partially, but not fully, rescinded.

As mentioned in the introduction, Eqbal became concerned about the manipulation of Islam by Western powers as well as radical Islamists for their own ends. For example, he blamed the United States for resurrecting the medieval concept of jihad as holy war and arming and funding Islamic radicals recruited from all over the Muslim world to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan after 1979. He pointed out that there are two forms of jihad: the first is “striving for the faith” and can take the form of redoubling individual efforts to be a good Muslim, trying to convince fellow Muslims to follow Qurʾanic commandments, and the like. The “lesser jihad” included holy war. For Eqbal, “[c]ontemporary ‘fundamentalism’ reduce[s] complex religious systems and civilizations to one or another version of modern fascism. They are concerned with power not with the soul, with the mobilization of people for political purposes rather than with ‘sharing’ or alleviating their sufferings and aspirations. Theirs is a very limited and time-bound political agenda.”¹⁶

For Eqbal, Islam was wondrous, more than a religion, for it represented a way of life, progressive and varied, ever changing, and adaptable to a variety of cultures and peoples. It was not the religion’s fault that its adherents distorted it and made it into something that it was not. The Islamicate had produced great civilizations, brilliant minds, spectacular art and poetry, priceless carpets, miniature paintings, and mosaics, all of which Eqbal knew and celebrated and had grown up with and collected throughout his life. He was a Muslim and felt totally at home in its traditions.