INTRODUCTION

EQBAL AHMAD (1930?–1999),¹ A BRILLIANT PROFESSOR AND political analyst on the global left, saw trends developing in international relations that few others recognized. In the syndicated newspaper columns he wrote in the last decades of his life and some four million people read weekly, he offered his views on myriad subjects. He amazed his readers with predictions of future events that later transpired, making him into a guru for some and an uncanny analyst for others. Six examples suffice to illustrate his perspicacity, astuteness, and originality.

1. Years before it happened, he predicted the chaos that would follow if and when the U.S. military invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein. An extract from a December 20, 1998, essay that he wrote for the Karachi newspaper Dawn demonstrates his special skill. In a prescient analysis, he wrote:

Dictators rarely leave behind them an alternative leadership or a viable mechanism for succession. Saddam Hussein is not an exception. Disarray and confusion shall certainly ensue if he is eliminated. Iraq is a greatly divided country, with the rebellious Kurds dominant in the north and Shias in the south. With the one linked to the Kurds in Turkey and the other to Shiite Iran, their ambitions in post-Saddam Iraq can cause upheavals in the entire region. It is not clear that the United States has either the will or the resources to undertake the remaking of Iraq. If it does not, the scramble over Iraq may ignite protracted warfare involving Turkey, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Kurd, Arab, Shia, Sunni, and, in one form or another, the United States.

The fundamentalist brand of Islamism may thrive in such an environment. Islamism will find at least two major sponsors in the struggle for Iraq: Iran borders on southern Iraq, which is home to the most sacred shrines of Shia Islam and is populated largely by Shia Muslims.

Iran’s influence may easily fill the post-Saddam vacuum, a development Saudi Arabia, the sheikhdoms of the Gulf, and the US shall find intolerable. Since none of America’s conservative Arab allies like Arab nationalism…they may counter Iran by promoting Sunni fundamentalism. Sectarian groups thrive in this brand of Islamism. Like Afghanistan today, Iraq may turn into a battleground of war parties backed by several states.²

Eqbal wrote this essay a year before his death and five years before the United States, joined by a handful of other states, attacked and conquered Iraq. An insurgency then ensued, which intensified and continued after Saddam Hussein’s execution in 2006. As Eqbal predicted, Iraq faced civil war that its neighbors became involved in either directly or through internal proxies.

2. In Afghanistan, he saw the detrimental aftereffects of the U.S. organizing an international jihadist crusade there against the Soviet Union in the 1980s and predicted that blowback from those events would come to haunt the West in years to come. Before anyone else, he sensed that Osama bin Laden (1957–2011), the founder of al-Qaeda and initially America’s ally, would become its nemesis after the Russians withdrew from Afghanistan. In perhaps the best of his public lectures at the end of his life, before a packed house at the University of Colorado at Boulder on October 12, 1998, Eqbal analyzed the new U.S. foreign-policy paradigm of antiterrorism and predicted that bin Laden would turn against the United States. He did this well before al-Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center in downtown New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001. “Terrorists change,” he argued.

The terrorist of yesterday is the hero of today, and the hero of yesterday becomes the terrorist of today. In a constantly changing world of images, we have to keep our heads straight to know what terrorism is and what it is not…. Officials don’t define terrorists because definitions involve a commitment to analysis, comprehension, and adherence to some norms of consistency…. The absence of definition does not prevent officials from being globalistic. They may not define terrorism, but they can call it a menace to good order, a menace to the moral values of Western civilization, a menace to humankind. Therefore, they can call for it to be stamped out worldwide…. The official approach to terrorism claims not only global reach, but also a certain omniscient knowledge. They claim to know where terrorists are, and therefore where to hit…. The official approach eschews causation. They don’t look at why people resort to terrorism…. [There is] the need for the moral revulsion we feel against terror to be selective. We are to denounce the terror of those groups which are officially disapproved. But we are to applaud the terror of those groups of whom officials do approve…. The dominant approach also excludes from consideration the terrorism of friendly governments.³

Eqbal met bin Laden in 1986 at the moment that the Saudi was an American ally, recruiting jihadists to fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Bin Laden turned against the United States in 1990, Eqbal pointed out to his audience, when the United States, in its buildup to attack Iraq, sent troops into Saudi Arabia, the home of the Kaaba in Mecca, where non-Muslims are not welcome. Just as bin Laden fought to get the Russians out of Afghanistan, by 1991 he wanted to get the Americans out of Arabia. In another venue, Eqbal described why bin Laden became an enemy of the United States:

[Bin Laden] was socialized by the CIA and trained by the Americans to believe deeply that when a foreigner comes into your land, you become violent. Bin Laden is merely carrying out the mission to which he committed with America earlier. Now he is carrying it out against America because now America, from his point of view, is occupying his land. That’s all. He grew up seeing Saudi Arabia being robbed by Western corporations and Western powers. He watched these Saudi princes, this one-family state, handing over the oil resources of the Arab people to the West. Up until 1991, he had only one satisfaction that his country was not occupied. There were no American or French or British troops in Saudi Arabia. Then even that small pleasure was taken away from him during the Gulf War and its aftermath.⁴

Elsewhere Eqbal wrote that “for him [bin Laden], America has broken its word. The loyal friend has betrayed him. Now they’re going to go get you. They’re going to do a lot more. These are the chickens of the Afghanistan war coming home to roost.”⁵

Eqbal described bin Laden as a tribal person who felt abandoned by the Americans after they had supported him and the jihadist movement in Afghanistan. Once the Russians withdrew, so did the Americans, losing interest in their once loyal allies. Working on the tribal principles of loyalty and revenge, bin Laden turned against the United States when it jettisoned the jihadists. Years before September 11, 2001, Eqbal explained the contradictions in the U.S. antiterrorist policies, educating as he spelled out how the new paradigm had developed and replaced the Cold War as the new integrating principle of U.S. foreign policy:

American operatives went about the Muslim world recruiting for the jihad in Afghanistan. This whole phenomenon of jihad as an international armed struggle did not exist in the Muslim world since the tenth century. It was brought back into being, enlivened, and pan-Islamized by the American effort. The United States saw in the war in Afghanistan an opportunity to mobilize the Muslim world against communism. So the United States recruited mujahideen from all over the Muslim world. I saw planeloads of them arriving from Algeria, the Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and Palestine. These people were brought in, given an ideology, told that the armed struggle is a virtuous thing to do, and the whole notion of jihad as an international, pan-Islamic terrorist movement was born.⁶

3. Participating in a delegation of peace activists to meet Iranian revolutionaries after they forced the shah to flee in early 1979, Eqbal used Persian, which he had perfected at Princeton University, to converse with the new leaders of the country and listen to their plans for the future. He hogged the conversation, and some members of the U.S. delegation were furious with him for doing so. But in the end he was the only one, based on what he heard, to predict that Iran would become a highly authoritarian state, with a centralized religious command backed by machinegun-equipped revolutionary guards and a more pliant governmental structure without significant power.⁷

4. Eqbal devoted a great deal of energy to defending Palestinian rights and included references to their plight in much of his writing and public lectures. His family in India and Pakistan had sensitized him at an early age to the suffering of others. His older brother Zafar, who raised him, became a Buddhist and stopped eating meat at home in reaction to the ethnic cleansing of Jews and Gypsies in Europe starting in 1938. The Palestinians appreciated Eqbal’s solidarity and invited him often to address their audiences. Because of his outspoken defense of the Palestinian cause, no major U.S. university would hire him for a permanent job.⁸ He traveled to the Middle East to meet with Palestinian leaders on many occasions. In a memorandum he wrote for Palestinian leaders Yasser Arafat (1929–2004) and Abu Jihad (also known as Khalil al-Wazir, 1935–1988) in 1980 while visiting Beirut with Edward W. Said (1935–2003), Eqbal “sadly forecast the quick defeat of PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] forces in South Lebanon” by the Israeli armed forces.⁹ Eqbal told the two PLO leaders that their people could never defeat Israel militarily and advocated the organization of massive campaigns of civil disobedience and large-scale nonviolent actions to shake Israel’s legitimacy and fundamentally challenge its occupation of Palestinian territories.

5. Eqbal rejected analysis that placed the Cold War as the central feature of the world after 1945. He was one of the few political analysts to view the Cold War in terms of what it meant to its Third World victims. He derided the dominant viewpoint that it was a struggle between forces of freedom and democracy on the one side and totalitarianism on the other, and he raised questions about the validity of the notion that we should be grateful that the world was spared a third world war as a result of the threat of mutual nuclear annihilation between the two superpowers. Making an original contribution to international relations theory, he argued that a large part of Asia, Africa, and Latin America actually did experience a third world war as a result of the violence brought to bear on it during the Cold War. Eqbal lamented that frequent bloody regional and proxy wars took their toll wherein “an estimated 21 million people died, uncounted millions were wounded, and more than a hundred million were rendered refugees by what have been variously described as the limited, invisible, forgotten, and covert wars of the 1945–1990 period.”¹⁰ For Eqbal, the defining features of the post–World War II period consisted of national liberation struggles, revolutionary warfare, and counterinsurgency as people in the global South outside the United States and the Soviet Union faced constant assaults.

6. More than a decade before the outbreak of the Arab Spring at the end of 2010, Eqbal understood that young people would spearhead a revolt in the Middle East and North Africa that would challenge the old dictatorial order. In an interview he gave to David Barsamian that was published in the November 1998 issue of Progressive magazine, “Osama bin Laden Is a Sign of Things to Come,” he saw the inevitability of a large-scale Arab uprising:

The Arabs are, at the moment, an extremely humiliated, frustrated, beaten, and insulted people. If you look at the situation from the stand point of the Arab as a whole, this is a most beleaguered mass of 200 million people. What is actually uniting them at the moment is a sense of common loss, common humiliation.

This people has only two choices now, as its young people see it: It’s either to become active, fight, die, and recover its lost dignity, lost sovereignties, lost lands, or to become slaves.¹¹

This statement offers an explanation of why so many Arabs resorted to terrorism, but it also helps us fathom why so many people in the Arab world took to the streets to bring down their dictatorial regimes in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

This is only a sampling of Eqbal’s insights, which gained him a reputation as an uncanny political analyst who saw trends emerging before any of his peers. Moreover, his mind was quirky, and you could never predict how he would react to issues, making interactions with him exciting events.

Eqbal’s Wide Contacts

The combination of originality, intelligence, and fearlessness in confronting power drew to Eqbal some of the major intellectuals on the left and prominent figures in a variety of fields in the United States, western Europe, Africa, Latin America, and South Asia. He socialized with writers from around the world and learned from them. He was one of Edward Said’s closest friends in New York City. He was also friends with Noam Chomsky (b. 1928), David Dellinger (1915–2004), Leonard Boudin (1912–1989), Howard Zinn (1922–2010), Richard Falk (b. 1930), Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (1929–2001), Janet Abu-Lughod (1928–2013), and many others. He corresponded with leaders of the international Left, and on the Indian–Pakistani subcontinent he knew and befriended the most gifted intellectuals, while political figures and military leaders courted him for advice.

He also simultaneously served as a coeditor of the British journal Race & Class, joined the editorial boards of the Paris monthly L’Economiste du Tiers Monde (1972–1983) and the mass-circulation French fortnightly Afrique-Asie (1968–1983) published in Paris, and helped establish Pakistan Forum (1969–1977) but broke with its editors over ideological and personal issues. In 1979, he was a guest columnist for the New York Times. He later contributed to the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and the Parisian periodical Le Monde Diplomatique. At the end of his life, he wrote weekly columns for the Pakistani daily newspaper Dawn and was a contributor to the London-based newspaper al-Hayat and Cairo’s al-Ahram Weekly.

Critical Outsider and Witness

As a Pakistani spending most of his adulthood after 1957 in the United States, Eqbal lived on the frontiers of several worlds, which allowed him to see issues from new vantage points.¹² Coming to the United States as a nationalist with left leanings, meaning that he had favored partition of India and the creation of Pakistan and had studied Marx and Lenin without becoming a Leninist, he gradually shed his nationalist identity and became a public intellectual with a global vision. Because he reached maturity outside the frameworks of Pakistan’s social and political constraints, his place on the margins of different worlds freed him from the traps that surround those who work and live locally. He therefore approached the world with different assumptions than others. There lay his originality.

Much has been written about outsiders, exiles, strangers, and foreigners and their creativity or roles as gadflies. The sociologist George Simmel (1858–1918); the philosopher and writer Colin Wilson (1931–2013), a twenty-four-year-old British angry young man; the writers Richard Wright (1908–1960), James Baldwin (1924–1987), and Albert Camus (1913–1960); and the literary critic Edward W. Said (1935–2003), to name just a few, made the “otherness” inherent in alienation and exile a prototype for new insights, substantive change, and existential angst.¹³ More than a decade ago Judith M. Brown (b. 1944) wrote about Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) in terms of his outsider status following his return to India from South Africa, where he had learned mass organizing and developed his oppositional strategies to colonial power.¹⁴

C. Wright Mills (1916–1962), the innovative and influential sociologist on the left, has been labeled a “radical nomad” because he moved tirelessly from one issue to another without settling down, which thereby helped him see reality in ways different from his scholarly peers.¹⁵ Mills, like Eqbal, bore witness by speaking out against injustice, calling attention to wrongs, and revealing hard truth to power.¹⁶ Eqbal went further than Mills in that he and a few others before him—such as the peace activist, labor organizer, and one of the initiators of the nonviolent civil rights movement A. J. Mustie (1885–1967) and members of both the Fellowship of Reconciliation, founded in 1916, and the War Resister’s League, established in 1923—helped secularize the Christian concept of witness and shaped it into a powerful tool for social change.¹⁷ Mustie, the tireless organizer, had tried a wide variety of ideologies, including Trotskyism, a fair sampling of Christian sects, pacificism, and so on, but even though early in his life he joined the clergy, he bore witness not to evangelize or to get people to become Christians but rather to obstruct the war machine and build an antiwar movement.¹⁸ David T. Dellinger, the editor of Liberation magazine and, like Mustie, an indefatigable peace activist, likewise radicalized the nonviolent resistance movement and willingly went to jail to prove his antiwar convictions.

Although the nonevangelical direct-action civil disobedience movement began in the United States way before the 1960s, Eqbal brought a fresh view of Gandhi’s strategy and tactics to the U.S. antiwar movement, mixed with a critique informed by the teachings of the 1913 Bengali Noble laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), which I discuss in some detail later in this introduction. Eqbal promoted peaceful nonviolent actions (such as provoking mass arrests, staging sit-ins, disrupting the everyday order of things) to protest escalating wars and manifestations of gross injustice.

As Don Will (1949–2014), the Pakistani’s late friend, explained, “Eqbal reversed the narrative of the Holocaust, by advocating marches and ship sailings of Palestinians to walk and sail back home and calling for them to organize a green, peaceful march from Jordan and .Lebanon into Palestine.”¹⁹ Eqbal argued that the Palestinians should claim that

they 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…as a society the way Americans divided [over Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent movement]. I would keep it divided until it makes peace.²⁰

As Cora Weiss (b. 1934), one of the founding members of Women’s Strike for Peace as well as the president of the Hague Appeal for Peace and Eqbal’s friend, wrote to me, “Eqbal’s legacy is significant. His lectures and articles will be read by generations to come. Facing an impasse, we still ask, what would Eqbal have done?”²¹

Growing Up Surrounded by High-Muslim Culture

Eqbal’s upbringing in homes filled with high-Muslim culture gave him special social skills and charm rarely found in North America. His family’s progressive politics brought him out of the feudal age into modern times. His aristocratic bearing was reflected in his etched features, shock of black hair, piercing eyes, and special charisma and magnetism. But instead of exuding aristocratic aloofness, he was taught by his oldest brother’s down-to-earth decency to be accessible and to greet friends and strangers alike with great warmth. His elite status as a descendant of a clan that allegedly participated in the conquest of northern India was reflected in the Persian miniatures that lined the walls of his homes, the fine carpets that he selected with great care to cover his floors, and the gourmet food that he prepared and served with just the right mix of spices. Like the princes of old, he established a salon in New York City where intellectuals, journalists, novelists, poets, and political figures from around the world paid court. In this way, he kept up with events with a depth that few newspapers and books could provide. Besides being well informed and blessed with great analytical and synthetic skills, he would spellbind those hearing him talk about these events, whether around a dinner table, in a classroom, or in a rally of thousands of people.

These qualities only enhanced his position as an outsider because he was able to package his ideas in accessible form, which lessened the shock of their originality. He disarmed many of his critics through his sheer brilliance and charm. His quirkiness worked in his favor, for people who heard or read him came to expect the unexpected from him.

A Progressive Family

His mother and father, progressive landowners in Bihar, India, joined the Congress Party. In 1937, Mohandas Gandhi came to their home region after communal riots there threatened to turn into civil war. The bigger-than-life leader organized a children’s march composed of Muslim and Hindu youth to demonstrate that the communities could live together in peace. Eqbal’s mother convinced Gandhi to take her young son, then around seven years old, on the march, which brought Eqbal into close proximity with the Mahatma for several months. Eqbal told me years later that he hated Gandhi’s asceticism and was not at all happy on the march because he himself had grown up surrounded by the trappings of wealth and culture, ate elaborately prepared meals, and ran free within his family’s compound. My friend could not stand the invariably boiled vegetables served without spices or sauces, seasoned only with lemon, that Gandhi and the kids ate daily. Yet he confided to one of his closest Pakistani friends that even as a child he knew that he was in the presence of a great man, and later in his life that man’s ideas helped shape his adherence to the ideals of nonviolence and civil disobedience as tools of the weak against the powerful. Rabindranath Tagore, the polymath antinationalist whom Eqbal as a child saw on his death bed in New Delhi in the 1940s, his gigantic white beard spread over his pillow, also had great influence in shaping Eqbal’s choices as he matured and began to understand the limitations of narrow nationalism.

Eqbal had a deep moral sense that revolted against injustice wherever he saw it. He took up unpopular causes, such as defending Palestinian rights and saving Bosnians from ethnic cleansing, that others would not touch. If he felt that something was right, he championed the cause, wherever the chips fell. The search for justice rather than for personal rewards drew him to unpopular causes, even if it meant that he would suffer personally as a consequence of doing so.

His family in India and Pakistan where he was born and grew up shaped his moral sense. His father, a lawyer, was killed in 1937, while Eqbal cuddled next to him on the family’s veranda, by peasants working for neighboring landlords who desired to punish him for defending exploited peasants in Bihar. His oldest brother became his surrogate father, and he too had a great moral force that also rubbed off on the young man. As the tax inspector of the newly created Pakistan, he was incorruptible and scrupulously honest in his dealings with tax dodges. Eqbal’s mother, like Tagore, influenced his rejection of narrow nationalism in favor of an all-inclusive cosmopolitanism. As a young man, Eqbal was also inspired by his teachers at Foreman Christian College in Lahore. By his own admission, Princeton University’s graduate school and the Fires-tone Library’s remarkably rich collections fashioned him into the cosmopolitan intellectual that he became. “Princeton was intellectually…formative because it threw at me ideas and concepts that I had to confront and react to. I think intellectually my oppositional outlook…developed in Princeton. This [the late 1950s and early 1960s] was a time of conformity in America, and that conformity was very frightening.”²²

Eqbal’s Notoriety

Eqbal became notorious beginning in January 1971 when President Richard Nixon’s Justice Department indicted him and several U.S. Catholic priests, laymen, and nuns for plotting to kidnap National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger (b. 1923). They were also accused of conspiring to blow up heating ducts in tunnels underneath government buildings in Washington, D.C., and to raid U.S. army draft boards in several cities in order to ruin selective-service records. Over a period of fourteen months, Eqbal’s and his indicted “co-conspirators’” names and photos appeared on television and on the front pages of major newspapers and magazines in the United States and overseas. To defend them, Eqbal, on the advice of Richard Falk, an international lawyer and then professor at Princeton University,²³ recruited one of the best lawyers in the United States, Leonard Boudin. Leonard, a renowned lawyer on the political left, had previously represented the great African American singer and actor Paul Robeson (1898–1976), and he would later defend Daniel Ellsberg (b. 1931), who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Former attorney general Ramsey Clark (b. 1927) led the legal team, seconded by the politician Paul O’Dwyer (1907–1998), who later became the president of the New York City Council. While out on bail, the defendants, initially known as the Harrisburg 8 and then as the Harrisburg 7 (see figure 7), after the conservative capital of Pennsylvania where their trial took place,²⁴ turned their case into an anti–Vietnam War indictment of the Nixon administration.

In a survey of the jury after the trial ended, the Harrisburg Defense Committee, which had been organized to raise funds and spread the defendants’ antiwar sentiments,²⁵ discovered that the overwhelming majority of the dozen jurors were won over by the extraordinary clarity and expertise of Leonard Boudin, who, of all members of the legal team, had impressed them the most.²⁶ Leonard, with high drama, mesmerized the jurors, gained their sympathy, and demonized the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents assigned to follow Eqbal when describing how two of those agents had sat smugly in their car and watched without intervening while Eqbal was mugged nearby.

The Defense Committee survey also discovered that one of the female jurors “would never have sent her favorite priest to jail.” She had fallen in love with one of the clerical defendants during the trial, she responded, when asked why she felt that way.²⁷ The case ended on April 5, 1972, after ten of the jurors voted for acquittal on the main charges, with Father Phillip Berrigan (1923–2002) and Sister Elizabeth McAlister (b. 1940) found guilty of smuggling letters illegally into and out of Lewiston Prison, where the priest was already detained.²⁸

Although Eqbal had previously lived in New York City, where his wife since 1969, writer and teacher Julie Diamond (b. 1944) had grown up,²⁹ at the time of the arrest and trial they resided in Chicago. He worked there as a research fellow for the liberal Adlai Stevenson Institute (1968–1972). On January 12, 1971, FBI agents arrested Eqbal in his office. Constance Perrin, an institute fellow, gave the following account to the press:

Two men entered a row of three offices…. The two didn’t identify themselves. They just asked, “Where is Mr. Ahmad’s office?” I didn’t ask them who they were. We’re very trusting here. They came out of the office with him. He called to me, said, ‘Would you call these people and tell them what has happened?’ [Ahmad then gave the names of two people.] I asked the men where they were taking him. They said, “We’ll be at the Federal Building.” Eqbal said, “I don’t know what the charges are.” One of the men said, “The charge is conspiracy to commit kidnapping.” When the men took him away, they had him in handcuffs.³⁰

Eqbal spent the night in jail, had a hearing the next day, and was released after his close friends Prexy Nesbitt (b. 1944), later famous for being a principal leader of the Divest from South Africa campaign and other liberation struggles relating to the U.S. civil rights movement and southern Africa, and the Palestinian Northwestern University professor Ibrahim Abu-Lughod helped raise $6,000 toward a $60,000 bail, assuring his provisional liberty. Once free, Eqbal went on the offensive and spoke out before a barrage of reporters against the ongoing Vietnam War (see figure 6), calling the charges “ridiculous” and hoping that a court case would not distract from his and others’ efforts in opposing the war “and bring[ing] the truth to the public.”³¹

As soon as I heard of the indictment and his arrest, I called his and Julie’s many New York friends to my Manhattan apartment. We formed a defense committee, which joined forces with some lay Catholics and other antiwar activists as well as radical priests and nuns in blue jeans who grouped around the famous Berrigan brothers. These clerics had become renowned for breaking into draft boards and pouring blood on selective-service records. Reverend Phil Berrigan, a Josephite whose order served the African American community, was the first North American Catholic priest to go to jail as a political prisoner.³² He spent eleven years altogether in prison for actions he initiated in opposition to war. After he had served in the military during World War II, resistance to war and militarism had become an integral part of his life. Incarcerated since early May 1970, he remained imprisoned this time for three years. His older brother, Daniel (b. 1921), a prize-winning poet, Jesuit priest, and Eqbal’s friend from Cornell University who had previously worked as the assistant director of the campus’s United Religious Work organization, was on the run for four hectic months in order to avoid arrest. He was then one of the FBI’s “ten most wanted fugitives,” evading more than two hundred FBI agents who sought to incarcerate him for his participation in a draft board raid. Eqbal had worked behind the scenes with some well-known antiwar activists to hide Dan in middle-class homes,³³ moving the priest continuously to prevent the FBI from catching him.³⁴ As part of a wide network extending from the East Coast to the Midwest, Eqbal recruited me to hide Dan in a Manhattan apartment that I had borrowed. Eqbal and his associates had Dan appear at antiwar rallies, where FBI officers waited for the fugitive to show up so that they could take him into custody. On all occasions, just as the agents rose to accost Dan, the antiwar activists whisked the priest away and made him disappear. The director of the FBI, the all-powerful J. Edgar Hoover (1895–1972), had to be furious that a group of radical civilians continuously outwitted his seasoned officers. Putting an end to Dan Berrigan’s freedom and cracking the organization that supported his life on the run must have become an obsession for the FBI director.

The occasion for Hoover to act presented itself when a paid FBI informant, Boyd Douglas Jr., a prisoner allowed to attend Bucknell University while serving time in Lewiston Prison, where Phil Berrigan was locked up, acted as a courier for the priest.³⁵ During those furloughs, Douglas carried letters to Phil from his secret love, Sister Elizabeth McAlister (b. 1940). Liz, as friends called her, had spent the night of August 17, 1970, at Eqbal’s in-laws’ country house in Weston, Connecticut. There she joined for dinner Eqbal and Sister Jogues Egan (1919–1998), a college administrator, and Ann Davidon (1925–2004) and Bill Davidon (1927–2013)—both antiwar activists, she a playwright and he a professor of physics at Philadelphia’s Haverford College.³⁶ This was six days after Dan had been arrested by FBI agents on Block Island, Rhode Island.³⁷ Despite Eqbal’s objections that Dan not go there because he thought that the property on which Dan would be staying would be under FBI surveillance, the Jesuit priest, exhausted from being continuously on the run, wanted to escape to a wilderness sanctuary belonging to his close friends to breathe some fresh air and wander outdoors.

Unbeknownst to Eqbal, Liz had disclosed Dan’s presence on Block Island in a letter she had written to Phil, which she gave to Boyd Douglas for delivery in the prison. J. Edgar Hoover saw the letter and immediately dispatched a Coast Guard cutter filled with FBI agents to the island to arrest the fugitive. After Eqbal learned about Phil and Liz’s foolishness in writing all these details—including a conversation at his in-laws’ house, Phil’s reactions to the idea of a citizen’s arrest of Henry Kissinger, his distrust of Eqbal, and now Dan’s whereabouts (all to be discussed later)—he was furious over what they had done. He told his fellow defendants that the only thing that should be sent to anyone in jail were fresh oranges—no letters, nothing that could be traced and used against them. But the damage was already done.

By then Eqbal had reached the conclusion that draft board raids had become “ritualistic” and counterproductive and should be stopped. He argued with his codefendants that “they needed a moratorium on small group-based actions in which activists burst into selective service offices, destroy records, and have no lasting effect.” Dan Berrigan agreed with him, telling the defendants that “both he and his brother Phil would not do such actions any more since they did not want to put their best people behind bars.”³⁸ Eqbal proposed that they should organize large-scale acts of civil disobedience, such as May Day actions in Washington, D.C., in which hundreds, even thousands, might be arrested.³⁹ By early 1972, he publicly stated that draft board raids “had lost their political efficacy and became means for ‘personal salvation,’ manifestations of ‘American individualism and obsession with heroism.’”⁴⁰ Eqbal was interested in building a mass movement of protest against the war in Vietnam and less interested in creating or sustaining small resistance communities that could not change quickly the way Americans viewed the war.

Each time more Catholic priests and nuns were caught raiding draft boards and turned to the Defense Committee for funds to bail them out, Eqbal became angry that scarce money needed for their trial had to be diverted for what he now considered to be ego-fulfilling reasons. But many priests and nuns who had joined the Catholic resistance community remained single-minded and thought that such raids were still necessary. The need to keep unity intact forced the defendants to refrain from overtly criticizing draft board raids.

The So-Called Conspiracy

Liz McAlister and Jogues Egan had driven to Connecticut from New York City on August 17, 1970, to discuss the consequences of Dan’s capture. Eqbal proposed that they make a citizen’s arrest of Henry Kissinger and interrogate him, perhaps filming the whole event, and then release him. As Jogues, the white-haired administrator, later confided, she heard the idea with “shock and disbelief and treated the entire conversation…as an exercise in fantasy, which she never took seriously.”⁴¹ Ann Davidon rejected the scheme out of hand on the grounds that “kidnapping” could easily lead to violence, which she opposed as a pacifist. Yet Liz wrote a letter to Phil Berrigan in which she recounted with grave seriousness the conversation two days earlier, and it was delivered to the prisoner on August 19 by way of Douglas.⁴² This FBI informant forwarded a copy of the letter to his handlers in the agency. J. Edgar Hoover had earlier received a copy of another letter from Phil Berrigan to Liz relating that Phil and another priest had previously visited a seven-mile-long system of steam tunnels that supplied heat to seventy-five government buildings in the nation’s capital to contemplate the feasibility of upping the ante in the antiwar struggle by blowing up the steam tunnels to disrupt the work of the nation’s bureaucrats. During the Harrisburg trial, Douglas testified that Phil Berrigan had told him that he and another person had posed as underground electricians and entered the tunnels to determine whether such an action was possible.⁴³ Again, according to Douglas, Father Joseph Wenderoth (b. 1936), one of the alleged co-conspirators, had told him that they had chosen George Washington’s birthday, February 22, 1971, as the target date for the explosions.⁴⁴ Hoover tied the two disparate events together and immediately saw the possibility of cracking open and putting an end to the radical Catholic opposition to the Indo-China War. By juxtaposing the threatened kidnapping and the so-called conspiracy to dynamite the steam tunnels, Hoover recommended putting the leaders of the Catholic Left on trial along with a Muslim foreigner, the Pakistani antiwar activist Eqbal Ahmad. In this way, the FBI director could tie them up in lengthy litigation. In November 1970, before the defendants were indicted, Hoover told a U.S. Senate subcommittee that the FBI had uncovered an “anarchist” plot to blow up heating tunnels in Washington and to kidnap President Nixon’s national-security adviser. Even if the state lost its case, the significant expense of seeking justice and providing a legal defense would divert the attention of the Catholic Left and most likely put them out of business.⁴⁵

The opposite happened. The Berrigans’ followers continued to raid draft boards with greater frequency. Likewise, each of the defendants, especially Eqbal and Liz, became “movement heavies,” taking to the road ceaselessly to give speeches castigating the war and thus capturing national media attention. Their notoriety gave them added luster and made them into heroes for many Americans.⁴⁶ They also brought in considerable amounts of money for their defense.

Revolutionaries and draft resisters abounded in America of the 1960s and early 1970s. Recall that in those heady days between fifty thousand and seventy thousand young men of draft age had refused to serve in the armed forces since 1964 and lived as exiles in Canada.⁴⁷ The Black Panthers and Latino Young Lords asserted their right to bear arms against their white dominators.⁴⁸ At the same time, radical whites organized as the Weather Underground advocated using and actually engaged in violence to try to bring down the American state.⁴⁹ In that environment, a besieged Nixon administration might convince a confused U.S. public that a small group of nuns and priests tied into a conspiracy with a Muslim expatriate was dangerous if left free. The charges against them initially were punishable by life in prison, but a second indictment reduced the penalty for conspiracy to five years. The defendants took the trial seriously.

The Question of Trust

However, a problem developed over trust between Eqbal and the imprisoned Phil Berrigan. In an August 22, 1970, letter from Phil to Liz, conveyed by Douglas and passed on to the informant’s FBI handler, the imprisoned priest expressed his doubts about Eqbal, reflecting views of risk, class differences, the nature of activism, and educational disparities: “Just between you and me,” he wrote to Liz,

I have not been overmuch impressed with Eq. He’s a dear friend; very helpful in the last months [allusion to Eqbal’s organizing Dan Berrigan’s underground life], lovely guy, and good ideologue, but still to produce…(I have this terrible suspicion regarding academics). With few exceptions, the bastards will let others go to the gallows without a serious murmur. They did it in Germany, and they’re doing it here. And, Eq is from that strain…. But there are more reservations. I’d be delighted to be wrong. Which is to say, no project can be more solid than its human foundation, and, with all respect, I don’t trust Eq, though he’s a nice guy.⁵⁰

The priests and nuns who grouped around the Berrigans had formed communities of resistance to war and militarism. If you were within that community, you were expected to break the law, get arrested, and, if necessary, go to jail. Eqbal was too cerebral for Phil Berrigan. He had not accompanied the priests and nuns on draft board raids and did not risk getting arrested that way. As already pointed out, Eqbal even came to oppose such actions. The raids had become the test for trust for this segment of the Catholic Left. Because Eqbal had not participated in them and did not take the risk of imprisonment for what Phil considered significant illegal actions, he could not be fully trusted. As a by-product of that mistrust, Liz did not tell Eqbal that she was corresponding with Phil, speaking of sensitive matters, and using another prisoner, who turned out to be an FBI informer, as a courier. Moreover, as the journalist Garry Wills, who followed the trial in Harrisburg, wrote, “When they [Phil and Eqbal] did meet, it was with a tense formality that never, really, relaxed—Ahmad knew what Berrigan had called him in the letters.”⁵¹

Jim Forest (b. 1941), who had gone to prison for a draft board raid in Milwaukee and who worked on the Defense Committee in New York, wrote a comprehensive account of events leading up to the trial and came to Eqbal’s defense: “While the hard jabs at academics seem more than justified [in Phil’s letter], one of the few academics who clearly doesn’t warrant them is Eq, if for no other reason than his risky association with Dan’s underground. It was no symbolic gesture.”⁵²

J. Edgar Hoover, having read Phil’s most recent letter, including his distrust of Eqbal, surmised that placing Eqbal within the conspiracy would heighten divisions among the defendants and make their defense more difficult. Understanding that, Eqbal had to ignore Phil Berrigan’s mistrust once the indictments came down and to bend over backward in his discussions with his codefendants to reach consensus, not allowing personal prejudices to stand in the way of a coherent defense. There was too much at stake to do otherwise. His training in the law as a political scientist proved decisive for the defense as they mapped out their strategy for facing government prosecutors.

Phil wanted to defend himself and not use lawyers at all. In this way, he would have been able to present his antiwar sentiments to a large public. The judge presiding over the case refused to allow him to do so. Four of the seven defendants voted not to present any defense. Phil, Liz, and Eqbal, the three “superstars” with extensive experience in speaking before large audiences, voted to present a public defense. The other four defendants, who lacked the same oratorical skills, decided they would not offer a defense and would instead take a chance that the jury would side with them.⁵³ Reverend Joe Wenderoth, one of the defendants who voted with the majority, summed it up best at a strategy session in New York City. After admitting that “some of the defendants disagree with the policy of draft board actions and that the government did a good job of bringing together seven different people, creating problems that at times became devastating, we are trying to be as open as we can and feel that we have a responsibility to the other defendants. Most of us are not superstars and do not want to be, since we are struggling to be ourselves.”⁵⁴

After the government prosecutors presented their evidence, the defendants announced that they would have nothing further to say and rested their case. Phil Berrigan disagreed with that decision because he wanted his day in court, but he had to go along with the majority.⁵⁵ The strategy worked, however: the jury voted ten to two not to convict them on the major charges.

In other tense moments during the preparation for the trial, Phil and Dan wanted on the legal team the famous lawyer on the left William Kunstler (1919–1995), who had defended the Chicago Seven.⁵⁶ Eqbal thought that activists on trial hired Kunstler if they were guilty, not innocent. Kunstler, a tireless defender of accused leftists, ran political trials and had not mastered conspiracy law the way that Boudin had. In discussions among the defendants about strategy, Eqbal purposefully suggested that Kunstler represent him, not Phil Berrigan. That suggestion sufficed for Kunstler to voluntarily withdraw from the case rather than have to deal on a daily basis with Eqbal, who would demand careful legal work in his defense.

The Catholic Worker owned Emmaus House on East 116th Street in Spanish Harlem, where Jim Forest lived. It became the Defense Committee’s initial headquarters until the committee rented an office at 156 Fifth Avenue. While the committee was in New York City prior to the trial, it received some $300,000 in donations. As the trial date approached, the committee moved to Harrisburg. Through mass mailings, it had helped bring in needed money for the defense, garnering $1,000 contributions from figures such as Joseph Heller (1923–1999), the author of the famous novel Catch-22, and Caesar Chavez (1927–1993), the director of Farm Workers of America.⁵⁷ Marie M. Runyon (b. 1915), who is still alive and active in her late nineties, organized a fund-raising benefit on May 10, 1971, for the Defense Committee in the Central Park West apartment of Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990), the eminent composer and conductor. That event helped raise thousands more.

As already mentioned, Eqbal had become good friends with the poet-priest Dan Berrigan at Cornell University, where they both worked in the late 1960s. They had been drawn to each other because of their love of rhyming words and hatred of the war raging in Southeast Asia.⁵⁸ Eqbal had a rare poetic memory and could recite verses of great Urdu poets by heart for hours on end, simultaneously translating their magnificent images into English for anyone who cared to listen. Through Dan, Eqbal met and became friends with the Catholic nun Elizabeth McAlister.⁵⁹ Phil and Liz later suspended their vows of chastity, married, and raised three children. One of them, their daughter Frida (b. 1974), took a course on international politics with Eqbal at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, in the 1990s.⁶⁰ Life had come full circle as Eqbal began getting as students the children of his friends from Harrisburg days.

An evaluation that Eqbal wrote about Frida’s work, which I found in his Hampshire College archive, demonstrated the impact of her being a Berrigan and his ability to praise and at the same time criticize a friend’s child in order to push her to excel:

Frida Berrigan attended class most regularly and participated in discussions most thoughtfully. The subject engaged her and she worked hard and with genuine interest. Her first paper, on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was excellent in that it was informed and reflective. She kept a log on Bosnia and wrote her final paper on it. This is an extremely well-written paper and Frida’s own voice is both very clear and very moving. However, she does not move much beyond her personal belief in non-violence and the challenge that Bosnian genocide presents to it to explore either forces which underlie the outbreak of such evils or the ways in which the international system responds and should respond to them.

Frida is an extremely good writer. She is also a thoughtful and socially responsible person. What she needs is more grounding in methodology, research, and readings both in social sciences and literature. I hope that in the remaining three years her advisors and teachers will encourage her to focus on developing the discipline of critical scholarship.⁶¹

By dint of his indictment in 1971 and trial in Harrisburg one year later, Eqbal went from being just an academic who held a Pakistani passport—although he was beginning to gain some renown in U.S. anti–Vietnam War circles as a result of his writings on revolution and counterinsurgency and his oratorical skills in mass teach-ins—to becoming an instant celebrity. How did he reach that point? What in his background prepared him for his new notoriety?