Introduction
1. No one except Eqbal’s older sister, Sharfa Jahani Khanum (b. 1920), claimed to know his exact birth date. She told me that he was ten years her junior, putting his birth on December 30, 1930. His mother delivered him on his family’s estate in Bihar near West Bengal in India, and there, as was the case with most infants on the subcontinent in the colonial period, births were not normally recorded. Eqbal claimed that he did not know his exact date of birth, but he thought that he was fifteen years old at the moment of partition of the Indian subcontinent, which would place his birthday in 1932. His widow, Julie Diamond, thought 1932 was correct, but his grade transcript from Occidental College in California, his driver’s license, and hospital records (Ali Medical Center from March 1991) list his date of birth as December 30, 1930. A biography, with information provided by Eqbal and issued in a press packet by the Harrisburg Defense Committee on January 24, l972, lists his birth date as December 31, 1930. Other documents in the Eqbal Ahmad Papers at Hampshire College’s Johnson Library in Amherst, Massachusetts, give the year of his birth as 1932. When I first met him at Princeton University in 1958, he thought that he was seven years my senior. I was born in 1937. His widow, however, does not believe that he was seven years old when his father died in 1937. She thought he was closer to five. Copies of the hospital bill and his driver’s license are located in Box 12, Eqbal Ahmad Papers (EAP), 1956–1999, Johnson Library, Hampshire College, Amherst, Mass.
2. Eqbal Ahmad, “After the Winter Bombs,”
Dawn (Karachi), December 20, 1998, reprinted in Eqbal Ahmad,
The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, ed. Carollee Bengelsdorf, Margaret Cerullo, and Yogesh Chandrani (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 287–290, quote on 289.
3. This lecture was published as Eqbal Ahmad,
Terrorism: Theirs and Ours, foreword and interview by David Barsamian, Open Media Pamphlet Series (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001), quote on 12–15, reprinted as “Terrorism: Theirs and Ours,” in Ahmad,
Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, 257–266.
6. Ahmad, “Osama bin Laden Is a Sign of Things to Come.”
7. Richard Falk, who was part of the delegation, told me that its members changed their opinion about Eqbal, whom they at first resented for monopolizing the conversations as he deconstructed the plans of the Iranian revolutionaries for their new state. His analysis proved to be correct (conversation with the author, Santa Barbara, Calif., November 2012).
8. I had hoped to get Eqbal a job in New York City at Brooklyn College in 1975, and Eqbal went there for an interview with the dean of the School of Social Science, who very much wanted him on the faculty. The dean later told me that the appointment could not go through because of opposition by pro-Zionist faculty and administrators. The same happened at Rutgers University, where the associate provost told me a similar story.
9. Edward W. Said, “Eqbal Ahmad; He Brought Wisdom and Integrity to the Cause of Oppressed Peoples” [obituary],
Guardian (London), May 14, 1999.
10. Eqbal Ahmad, “History Is a Weapon: Cold War from the Stand Points of Its Victims” (1991),
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/eqbalahmadcoldwar.html (accessed January 22, 2015). Eqbal delivered his talk “The Cold War from the Standpoint of Its Victims” at the conference “Rethinking the Cold War” in honor of William Appelman Williams at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, October 18–20, 1991. Its original title was “Victims of the Long Peace,” and it is reprinted in Ahmad,
Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, 219–227.
11. Ahmad, “Osama bin Laden Is a Sign of Things to Come.”
12. Amitava Kumar, novelist, professor of English at Vassar College, and fellow Bihari, understood Eqbal’s outsider status. He could not imagine Eqbal running a university such as the one he wanted to build in Pakistan because Eqbal “was too much the congenital outsider” (“On Eqbal Ahmad,”
Nation, November 27, 2006,
http://www.amitavakumar.com/?page_id-29 [accessed January 22, 2015]).
13. George Simmel, “The Stranger,” in
Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings, ed. Charles C. Lemert (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993), 139–141; Richard Wright,
The Outsider (New York: Harper, 1953); Colin Wilson,
The Outsider (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956); James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village,”
Harper’s Magazine, October 1953; Albert Camus,
The Outsider, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Knopf, 1970); Edward W. Said,
Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 1999).
14. Judith M. Brown, “The Making of a Critical Outsider,” in Judith M. Brown and Martin Prozesky,
Gandhi and South Africa: Principles and Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 21–33.
15. Tom Hayden, ed.,
Radical Nomad: C. Wright Mills and His Times (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2006).
17. Marty Jezer,
The Power of the People:
Active Nonviolence in the U.S., ed. Robert Cooney and Helen Michalawski (Philadelphia: New Society, 1987), specifically the chapters “World War II and the Pacifist Movement,” 96–97, and “Direct Action for Disarmament,” 138–139. Don Will, who knew Eqbal well and whose father, Herman Will, had organized with Mustie, clarified for me some of these points (interview with the author, Orange, Calif., November 2011). See Herman Will,
A Will for Peace: Peace Action in the United Methodist Church: A History (Washington, D.C.: General Board of Church & Society of the United Methodist Church, 1984).
18. Charles De Benedetti,
An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam War (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 20–26.
19. Don Will to Stuart Schaar, e-mail, November 24, 2010; Will, interview.
20. David Barsamian,
Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire: Interviews with David Barsamian (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2000), 33.
21. Cora Weiss to Stuart Schaar, March 2, 2013, author’s correspondence files.
22. Barsamian,
Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire, 153.
23. Falk was the first well-known antiwar activist to fly to Chicago to meet Eqbal after his indictment, despite the fact that they did not yet know each other well. He was invaluable in helping Eqbal work out an initial defense strategy. See Barsamian,
Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire, 27. Noam Chomsky was the second to arrive.
24. Ted Glick (b. 1939), the layman whose name was added in a second indictment, decided to defend himself. His case was thereupon separated from that of the others, so the group thenceforth was known as the Harrisburg 7. Glick went on to become a leader of the Green Party in New Jersey and unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate on that party’s ticket. He remains an activist, staging many fasts, and has led many demonstrations on environmental issues.
25. Harrisburg [Pennsylvania] Defense Committee Collected Records, 1970–1973, Collection CDG-A, Peace Collection, Swathmore College, Swathmore, Pa.,
http.//www.swarthmore.edu/Library/peace/ (accessed July 13, 2013). I also collected a personal archive of materials from the pretrial and trial proceedings, which I have used to write this book and will eventually deposit in the Swathmore College Peace Collection.
26. For more on Boudin, see Leonard Boudin, “Reminiscences of Leonard Boudin,” 1983 interview, Individual Interview List Oral History Project, RLIN NXCP86-A42, Document OHI0016726-12169, Oral History Research Office, Columbia University, New York. Boudin’s daughter, Kathy Boudin (b. 1943), joined the Weather Underground and was convicted in a felony murder case for participating in an armed robbery that led to the murder of two police officers and a security guard. She served twenty-two years in prison. When she got out of jail, she earned her Ph.D. and later taught as an adjunct lecturer in the School of Social Work at Columbia University.
27. Jay Schulman to Stuart Schaar, personal communication, New York City, June 25, 1972. The survey was carried out by Eqbal’s friend, Professor Jay Schulman (1927–1987), sociologist at City College of New York, who pioneered the techniques of jury selection at this trial.
28. The charges against Berrigan and McAlister were later dropped on appeal. The prosecutor in the case, William S. Lynch, claimed that fourteen letters came into Lewiston Prison for Phil and ten went out to Liz.
29. Besides short stories, Julie Diamond wrote the book
Kindergarten: A Teacher, Her Students, and a Year of Learning, foreword by Jules Feiffer (New York: New Press, 2011).
30. The quote from Perrin comes from a handout composed by the Defense Committee and distributed to reporters; copy in author’s Harrisburg files.
31. Eqbal Ahmad, statement, Chicago Federal Court Building, January 14, 1971, copy in author’s Harrisburg files.
32. Garry Wills, “A Revolution in the Church,”
Playboy, November 1971.
33. For instance, Thomas Jeannot reports that the American historian Howard Zinn, from Boston University, drove the fugitive Dan Berrigan from New Jersey to Boston, beginning Dan’s four-month evasion of the FBI (“Berrigan Underground,” in
Faith, Resistance, and the Future: Daniel Berrigan’s Challenge to Catholic Social Thought, ed. James L. Marsh and Anna J. Brown [New York: Fordham University Press, 2012], 174).
34. Lee Lockwood, “How the ‘Kidnap Conspiracy’ Was Hatched,”
Life, May 21, 1971. Lockwood (1932–2010) here acknowledged for the first time publicly that “Ahmad…is widely reported to have been a main organizer of Dan Berrigan’s underground movements.”
35. Douglas received more than $9,000 in 1970 for his services as an informant plus the use of a government credit card for three months. Beginning in December 1971, he also received a per diem of $36 as a government witness (Homer Bigart, “Berrigan Trial Witness Says He Weighed Informer Career,”
New York Times, March 9, 1972, and “Prosecutor Lauds Berrigan Informer,”
New York Times, March 17, 1972).
36. More information on the Davidons can be found in the Ann Morrissett Davidon and William C. Davidon Papers, 1949–, Collection DG144, Swathmore College Peace Collection,
http.//www.swathmore.edu/Library/peace/ (accessed July 13, 2013). Journalist Betty Medsger, who covered the Harrisburg trial, later published
The Burglary:
The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI (New York: Knopf, 2014), which indicated that Bill Davidon was the mastermind behind the break-in of FBI offices in Media, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, forty-three years ago, in which peace activists stole FBI records. These records revealed the existence of “Cointelpro” set up by the FBI in 1956 to investigate and disrupt dissident political groups in the United States. Davidon and the other Media raiders were never caught.
37. For details of Dan’s arrest, see Jim Forest, “Harrisburg Conspiracy: The Berrigans and the Catholic Left,”
Win (Ripon, N.Y.), March 15, 1973, 13.
38. Quoted from my hand-written notes of a meeting with the defendants in New York City before the Harrisburg trial began, n.d., to be deposited in the Harrisburg Defense Committee Collected Records, 1970–1973, Swathmore College.
39. Eqbal’s arguments against draft board raids and in favor of large mass actions are given in Justin Jackson, “Kissinger’s Kidnapper: Eqbal Ahmad, the US New Left, and the Transnational Romance of Revolutionary War,”
Journal for the Study of Radicalism 4, no. 1 (2010): 101.
40. Cited in “Eqbal Ahmad: Odd Man Out,”
Washington Post, February 13, 1972, which is quoted in Jackson, “Kissinger’s Kidnapper,” 103.
41. Quoted in Lockwood, “How the ‘Kidnap Conspiracy’ Was Hatched.”
42. A copy of the letter is included in Forest, “Harrisburg Conspiracy,” 16.
43. Homer Bigart, “Informer Says Berrigan Told of Entering Tunnels,”
New York Times, February 29, 1972, and “Two Quote Priest on Tunnel System,”
New York Times, March 21, 1972.
44. Homer Bigart, “Tunnels’ Destruction Is Topic of Purported Berrigan Letter,”
New York Times, March 2, 1972; Forest, “Harrisburg Conspiracy,” 10.
45. Jack Anderson, “The Berrigan Fiasco,”
New York Post, June 21, 1972.
46. The May 21, 1971, issue of
Life had a nine-page photo essay on the defendants: Lockwood, “How the ‘Kidnap Conspiracy’ Was Hatched.” Lee Lockwood, a photo journalist who had made a film about Dan Berrigan while Dan was underground,
The Holy Outlaw, wrote an informative article. Several of the defendants and some of their close friends spoke to Lockwood confidentially.
47. David E. Rosenbaum, “Senate Panel Concludes Inquiry into Amnesty for Draft Evaders,”
New York Times, March 3, 1972.
48. The best books on these two movements are Joshua Bloom and Waldo F. Martin Jr.,
Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); and Daniel Erick-Wanzer,
The Young Lords: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2010).
49. Dan Berger,
Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (Oakland, Calif.: AK Press, 2005).
50. A copy of the letter can be found in Forest, “Harrisburg Conspiracy,” 18.
51. Garry Wills, “Love on Trial: The Berrigan Case Reconsidered,”
Harper’s, July 1972.
52. Forest, “Harrisburg Conspiracy,” 19. Jim Forest had converted to Catholicism and in 1964, after being dismissed from the U.S. Navy as a conscientious objector, was one of the founders of the Catholic Peace Fellowship. He worked for a time as the managing editor of Dorothy Day’s
Catholic Worker, later writing her biography. In 1969, he served as the Vietnam Program Coordinator of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and received a prison sentence for raiding a Milwaukee draft board and removing and burning files. In 1971, he worked on the Harrisburg Defense Committee. In 1989, he converted to Orthodox Christianity and from his base in the Netherlands soon became secretary of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship. Besides working in journalism, he has written several adult and children’s books.
53. Homer Bigart, “Berrigan Defense Calls No Witnesses and Rests Its Case,”
New York Times, March 25, 1972.
54. Quoted from notes I took at the strategy session with the defendants, n.d., New York City.
55. The Harrisburg Defense Committee published both Phil’s intended opening statement as well as a copy of the statement he would have presented in his defense if he had been allowed to speak publicly at the trial.
56. The Chicago Seven, originally the Chicago Eight, included antiwar activists Abbie Hoffman (1936–1989), Jerry Rubin (1938–1994), David Dellinger, and Tom Hayden (b. 1939), all of whom were charged with conspiracy, inciting riots, and other crimes relating to the protests that took place in 1968 at the Democratic National Convention. Black Panther activist Bobby Seale (b. 1936) was originally one of those charged, but his case was severed from the others.
57. I have in my possession the account records, while in New York City, of all the Harrisburg Defense Committee’s disbursements to the lawyer working on the case.
58. For a compendium of Dan’s work, see Daniel Berrigan,
Writings, Modern Spiritual Masters (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2009).
59. For Elizabeth McAlister’s life after the trial, including several stints in prison amounting to some four years for antimilitaristic activities, see “Peace Train: Nearly Forty Years After Its Founding a Radical Catholic Commune Finds New Allies,”
Baltimore Magazine, March 2012,
http://www.baltimoremagazine.net/peole/2012/03/peacetrain (accessed July 13, 2013). Phil and Liz Berrigan founded a commune in Baltimore at Jonah House in 1973. After twenty years, they moved into St. Peter’s Cemetery in West Baltimore as caretakers of the grounds for the archdiochese. Phil Berrigan was buried in that cemetery. When the Occupy movement came to Baltimore in 2011/2012, the young organizers of the new movement sought out the members of Jonah House and linked up with these older pacifists.
60. For an update on Frida Berrigan’s life, see “Marriages/Celebrations: Frida Berrigan and Patrick Sheehan-Gaucher,”
New York Times, July 15, 2011.
61. A copy of Eqbal’s evaluation of Frida Berrigan’s student work is included in EAP, Box 4, evaluations.
1. This was the way Eqbal’s friend Raza Kazim explained Bihar’s cultural legacy to me in Pakistan in the spring of 2004.
2. Eqbal Ahmad, comments prepared for his retirement celebration, Hampshire College, 1997, zip files on disks made as backup of Eqbal’s computer hard drive, March 25, 1998, under “my files” and “veiled,” Box 12, Eqbal Ahmad Papers (EAP), Johnson Library, Hampshire College, Amherst, Mass.
3. Arlie Russell Hochschild to Stuart Schaar, January 2011, author’s correspondence files.
4. Ahmad, comments prepared for his retirement celebration, 3.
5. Amrik Singh Nimbran,
Poverty, Land, and Violence: An Analytical Study of Naxalism in Bihar (Patna, India: Layman’s Publication, 1992), 3, 11.
6. Ahmad, comments prepared for retirement celebration. According to Eqbal’s nephew Kamran Ali in Pakistan in 2004, other Maliks before Eqbal had married outside the clan but were stigmatized for doing so.
7. Eqbal Ahmad, conversation with the author, 1964.
8. Ahmad, comments prepared for his retirement celebration.
9. David Barsamian,
Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire: Interviews with David Barsamian (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2000), 3.
10. Ahmad, comments prepared for his retirement celebration.
12. Regarding his mother’s pilgrimage, see “To Whom It May Concern,” Correspondence 1970, Box 1, EAP.
13. For the Punjab land-resettlement program, see Tarlochan Singh,
Land Resettlement Manual, part I,
http://www.Punjabrevenue.nc.in/manuel.htm (accessed February 24, 2014), and for the program in all of India and Pakistan, see Joseph B. Schechtman, “Evacuee Property in India and Pakistan,” in
50 Years of Indo-Pakistani Relations, vol. 1, ed. Verinder Groever and Ranjara Arora (New Delhi: Deep and Deep, 1955), 55.
14. John Berger memorializes the story in “Two Recumbent Male Figures Wrestling on a Sidewalk,” in
Photocopies: Encounters (New York: Vintage, 1998), 94–101.
15. Khwaja Habiballah, conversation with the author, Lahore, April 8, 2004.
16. The interview was never published. Copy in author’s files and used with Dohra Ahmad’s permission.
17. This story is based on “Correspondence. Sailor, Randolph,” Box 1, EAP. The Yale Divinity School Library contains Randolph Sailor’s papers.
18. Khwaja Habiballah, conversation.
19. Arshad Durrani, conversation with the author, Lahore, April 8, 2004.
20. Syad Abid Hussein to Eqbal Ahmad, December 9, 1983, Correspondence 1980–1983, Box 1, EAP.
21. Barsamian,
Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire, 120–121.
22. Eqbal’s comments on Lenin’s disdain of democracy are in ibid., 123–124.
25. Iqbal Riza, conversation with the author, New York City, September 15, 2005. Iqbal Riza was Eqbal’s close friend and a Pakistani diplomat who quit the foreign service. He worked from 1997 to 2005 at the United Nations as Secretary-General Kofi Anan’s cabinet chief.
26. Eqbal Ahmad to David Hochschild, August 25, 1993, 5¼-inch diskette, Box 2, EAP.
27. Donald R. Hamilton, dean, Graduate School, Princeton University, to Eqbal Ahmad, April 1, 1960, file “certificates, fellowships,” Box 2, EAP. I bought a new Volkswagen convertible in Gibraltar in 1962 for $1,000, which would cost about $17,000 today. Therefore, $2,450 in 1960/1961 represented a very generous fellowship equivalent to around $40,000 today.
28. James I. Armstrong, assistant dean, Graduate School, Princeton University, to Eqbal Ahmad, November 9, 1960; and “Advanced Fellows Feted by University,”
Princeton Herald, November 11, 1960, file “certificates, fellowships,” Box 2, EAP. Princeton gave out about ten Proctor Fellowships each year to the Graduate School’s best students.
29. JL [Jean Lacouture], “La Mort de Roger Le Tourneau: L’homme tranquille de l’islamologie française,”
Le Monde (Paris), April 10, 1971.
30. Eqbal Ahmad to Stuart Schaar, December 19, 1961, author’s correspondence files.
31. The chronology for this period was provided by letters that Eqbal and I exchanged and that we happily dated. I kept these letters and will eventually deposit them with the rest of the papers I have relating to Eqbal in the Stuart Schaar Special Collection at the Brooklyn College Library.
32. I have in my files copies of letters that Tlili wrote to Eqbal in January and February 1967, when the trade union leader, fearful of being assassinated by the Tunisian secret police, lived in Geneva. The January 17, 1967, letter begins with the salutation “Very dear brother Eqbal.” The letters, including that one, are scanned in an electronic folder of 152 pages in pdf format, file mg5 (mg5_02_ ctliliahmed.pdf), copy in Box 2, EAP, and can also be downloaded from
http://hdl.handle.net/10009/642 (accessed July 25, 2013).
33. Tâhir al-Hadâd [Tahar Haddad],
Al-ʾummâl al-tûnisiyûn wa dhuhûr al-harakah al-niqâbiya (The Tunisian workers and the birth of the trade union movement) (Tunis: Arab Printers, 1927), translated as
Les travailleurs tunisiens et l’emergence du mouvement syndical, trans. Abderrazak Halioui (Tunis: Maison Arabe du Livre, 1985).
34. Tâhir al-Hadâd [Tahar Haddad],
Imraʾ atunâ fial-shariʿah wa a mujtamaʾ(Our women in Islamic law and society) (Tunis: Artistic Printers, 1930; reprint, Tunis: Maison Tunisienne de l’Edition, 1978), partially translated into French by M. Mutafarrij in
Revue des Etudes Islamiques 3 (1935): 201–230; completely but less adequately translated as
Notre femme, la législation islamique et la société (Tunis: Maison Tunisienne d’Edition, 1978).
35. Eqbal Ahmad and Stuart Schaar, “M’hamed Ali et les fondements du Mouvement syndical tunisien,” in
Les Africains, vol. 11, ed. Charles-André Julien (Paris: Editions Jeune Afrique, 1978), 13–46, translated as “M’hamed Ali and the Tunisian Labor Movement,”
Race & Class 19, no. 3 (1978): 253–276, and “M’Hammad Ali: Tunisian Labor Organizer,” in
Struggle and Survival in the Middle East, 2nd ed., ed. Edmund Burke III and David Yaghoubian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 264–277. See also Eqbal Ahmad and Stuart Schaar, “Tahar Haddad: A Tunisian Intellectual [1920s],”
Maghreb Review 21, nos. 3–4 (1996): 240–255.
36. Abdelhai Choikha to Eqbal Ahmad, n.d. (early 1970s), Correspondence 1957–1999, Box 2, EAP. See also Ahmed Mestiri,
Temoignage pour l’histoire (Tunis: Sud Editions, 2011), 260–261.
37. See, for example, Eqbal Ahmad and Stuart Schaar, “Human Rights in Morocco and Tunisia: A Critique of State Department Findings,”
MERIP Reports, no. 67 (1978): 15–17, reprinted in
Congressional Record H2514–15, H2518–19 (April 5, 1978).
38. Clement Henry Moore (after 1995 Clement Moore Henry),
Tunisia Since Independence: The Dynamics of a One-Party Government (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965; reprint, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982).
39. Eqbal Ahmad to Stuart Schaar, August 29, 1963, author’s correspondence files.
40. Charles B. Hagen, chairman, Department of Political Science, University of Illinois, to Eqbal Ahmad, April 29, 1964, Correspondence 1951–1999, file “certificates and fellowships,” Box 2, EAP.
41. Eqbal Ahmad to Stuart Schaar, September 22, 1965, author’s correspondence files.
42. Feldstein was president of the New Hampshire Charitable Association from 1986 to 2010.
43. Margaret Burnham, conversation with the author about Eqbal in Mississippi, New York City, November 2012.
44. Eqbal Ahmad to Professor T. Cuyler Young, April 29, 1969, Correspondence, Box 1, EAP.
45. Eqbal Ahmad to Dorothy Nelkin, May 22, 1969, Correspondence, Box 1, EAP.
46. Eqbal Ahmad to Dohra Ahmad, Islamabad, October 25, 1992, disk, files “my files,” “letters,” “Dohra,” Box 12, EAP.
47. Eqbal Ahmad, “Radical but Wrong,” in
Régis Debray and the Latin American Revolution, ed. Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968), 70–83. Eqbal reconciled with Debray by the early 1970s after Debray published
Revolution in the Revolution, trans. Bobbye Ortiz, new ed. (1967; New York: Grove Press, 2000), which Eqbal liked, and he invited the Frenchman to participate in programs organized by the Harrisburg Defense Committee around his trial in 1972. See Eqbal Ahmad to Régis Debray, March 12, 1972, author’s correspondence files.
48. Six years after Eqbal passed away, there was a controversy between Noam Chomsky and the British newspaper the
Guardian over an interview regarding Bosnia that he had given to a hostile reporter, Emma Brockes, on October 31, 2005. The
Guardian pulled the story from its website on November 17, 2005.
49. Quoted in Michael McAuliffe, “U.S. Policy Blamed for ‘Genocide,’”
Sunday Republican (Amherst, Mass.), December 4, 1994.
51. Eqbal Ahmad, “At Cold War’s End,”
Boston Review, June–August 1993, and “Welcome War in Bosnia,”
Dawn (Karachi), 1994 (specific date unknown), both reprinted in Eqbal Ahmad,
The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, ed. Carollee Bengelsdorf, Margaret Cerillo, and Yogesh Chandrani (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 249–252, 271–273.
53. Eqbal Ahmad, “NATO Has Failed,”
Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo), April 8–14, 1999, and “NATO: The Controversy over Kosovo,”
Dawn (Karachi), April 11, 1999. See also
Al-Ahram Weekly, April 15–21, 1999, and, on Kosovo and Russia,
Dawn, April 25, 1999.
54. Raza Kazim, conversation with the author, Lahore, March 2004.
55. See, for example, Eqbal Ahmad, “On Arab Bankruptcy,”
New York Times, August 10, 1982, reprinted in Ahmad,
Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, 357–359.
56. Eqbal Ahmad and Richard J. Barnet, “A Reporter at Large: Bloody Games,”
New Yorker, April 11, 1988, 44–86, reprinted as “Bloody Games,” in Eqbal Ahmad,
Between Past & Future: Selected Essays on South Asia, ed. Dohra Ahmad, Iftikhar Ahmad, and Zia Mian (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 153–194, and
Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, 453–492.
57. See the introduction, example 2.
58. Barsamian,
Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire, 48.
59. Eqbal Ahmad to Dohra Ahmad.
60. Professor Carollee Bengelsdorf, ten-year evaluation of Eqbal Ahmad, November 14, 1989, Correspondence 1957–1999, “Hampshire College reappointment,” Box 2, EAP.
61. Disk, 1972, Box 12, EAP.
62. Adele Simmons, former president of Hampshire College, to Stuart Schaar, January 12, 2011, author’s correspondence files.
2. Reflections on Eqbal’s Life
1. Eqbal Ahmad to Tim May and Frank Hanly, December 7, 1992, p. 1, file “Said, Edward,” Correspondence, Box 1, Eqbal Ahmad Papers (EAP), Johnson Library, Hampshire College, Amherst, Mass. Quotations in the next four paragraphs are from this letter.
2. Stuart Schaar, “Orientalism at the Service of Imperialism,” in
Orientalism: A Reader, ed. A. L. Macfie (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 181–193.
3. Eqbal Ahmad to Edward Said, September 25, 1997, Box 12, EAP.
4. Said’s reading of this letter Edward Said and Radha Kumar, “Remembering Eqbal Ahmad,” reminiscences given at the celebration of his life, Hampshire College, Amherst, Mass., September 18, 1999, recorded by David Barsamian for Alternative Radio, Program SAIE-KUMR001. The talk can be purchased from the site
http://www.alternativeradio.orgkproducts/saie-kumr001 (accessed January 22, 2015).
5. Edward W. Said to the Search Committee, Middle East Studies, Hampshire College, April 6, 1983, Correspondence 1957–1999, Box 2, EAP.
6. Eqbal Ahmad, “Commencement Address,” Hampshire College, May 17, 1997, 3, in zip files on disks made as backup of Eqbal’s computer hard drive, March 25, 1998, files “Eudora,” “Attack,” “hamp.wp,” Box 12, EAP.
7. Zia Mian, conversation with the author, New York City, March 17, 2004.
8. The chronology and details of the land grant for the university as well as Prime Minister Bhutto’s opposition to the project are detailed in Eqbal Ahmad to Dr. Saidar Mahmoud, Secretary of the Ministry of Education, Pakistan, January 6, 1998, file “Khal” (for “Khaldunia”), Box 12, EAP.
9. Najeeb Omar, conversation with the author, Karachi, April 12, 2004.
10. A week and a half before Eqbal died, he wrote a devastating article, “Bonnie and Clyde in Karachi,”
Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo), April 29–May 5, 1999, in response to the conviction of Benazir Bhutto and her husband, Asif Zardari, for having taken $4.3 million in kickbacks from a Swiss Company. Zardari, around whom corruption scandals continually surfaced, spent time in prison and then went into self-exile to Dubai. He returned to Pakistan in December 2007, taking over the Pakistan People’s Party after his wife’s assassination. He then was elected president of Pakistan and served from 2009 to 2013.
11. Pamela Collett, “A New University for Pakistan: Institution’s Organizers Seek to Break from a Long Tradition of Colonial Education,”
Chronicle of Higher Education, April 27, 1994.
12. Eqbal Ahmad to Dohra Ahmad, Amherst, Mass., August 17, 1993, disk, file “DOHR,” Box 12, EAP.
13. Eqbal Ahmad, letter to the editor,
Times Literary Supplement, April 2, 1993.
14. Rumors abound that Eqbal was part of the Algerian delegation to the Evian Peace Conference in 1962, which ended the eight-year Algerian War. The historian Mohamed Harbi, to whom I introduced Eqbal in the 1990s in New York City and who was at Evian, told me in Paris in 2005 that Eqbal was not there.
3. Polemics
1. Abderrahmane Moussaoui,
De la violence en Algérie: Les lois du chaos (Arles, France: Actes Sud and MMSH, 2006). Harbi told me in Paris a few years ago that he had turned some seventeen hundred documents detailing past violence in Algerian society over to the Algerian national archives for the use of future historians.
2. There are rumors afloat that Eqbal worked with Fanon in Tunis. There is no definitive evidence one way or the other as to whether they met. Dated letters that we exchanged show that Eqbal arrived in Tunis in early 1962, but Fanon, who lived there, died of leukemia on December 6, 1961, in a Bethesda, Maryland, hospital. Eqbal did befriend Fanon’s widow, Josie, and gave a reception for her in his New York apartment after Fanon died. He was going to organize a tour for her around the United States to spread Fanon’s message, but she tragically committed suicide in 1989 in Algiers before any plans could materialize.
3. Faiz Ahmad Faiz, “Dawn of Freedom,” trans. Agha Shahid Ali, in David Barsamian,
Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire: Interviews with David Barsamian (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2000), viii–ix.
4. Barsamian,
Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire, 127.
5. See the excellent study of Gellner by John A. Hall,
Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography (London: Verso, 2012).
6. Letters flew back and forth between Gellner and Said starting with Gellner’s review of Edward Said’s book
Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993; New York: Vintage, 1994): Ernest Gellner, “The Mightier Pen? Edward Said and the Double Standards of Inside-Out Colonialism,” in “The Bogy of Orientalism,” special issue,
Times Literary Supplement, February 19, 1993. The issue had an Orientalist painting by Ludwig Deutsh on the front cover. The letters can be seen in the February 26; March 5, 19; April 2, 9, 16; and June 4 and 11, 1993, issues. John M. Mackenzie, emeritus professor of imperial history at Lancaster University in Great Britain, called this memorable debate “a near defamatory correspondence” (“Edward Said and the Historians,”
Nineteenth Century Contexts 18, no. 1 [1994]: 9–28).
7. Ernest Gellner,
Words and Things: A Critical Account of Linguistic Philosophy and a Study in Ideology (London: Gallancz, 1959).
10. Hall,
Ernest Gellner, 272.
11. Two of Robert Montagne’s most important publications were
Les Berbères et le Makhzen dans le sud du Maroc (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1930), and
Naissance du prolétariat marocain (Paris: Peyonnet, 1952).
12. In 2002, Michael Cook received a $1.5 million Distinguished Achievement Award from the Mellon Foundation.
13. Patricia Crone and Michael A. Cook,
Hagarism, the Making of the Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). In this book, Crone and Cook argued that Islam had deep roots in Judaism. They saw early Islam as a tribal rebellion of Arabs and Jews against Byzantine and Persian domination, a controversial viewpoint informed by Armenian, Syriac, Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic texts. Ironically, the book’s central theses were rejected later, even by the authors themselves. Another early book by Crone,
Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), caused further stir because she took on the dean of early Islamic studies, Montgomery Watt (1909–2006), a Marxist Scottish Episcopal minister who taught at Edinburgh University from 1964 to 1979. Watt examined the material roots of early Islam in his classic works
Muhammad at Mecca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953) and
Muhammad at Medina (1953; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956). He argued that Mecca was an important commercial hub in the trade between Arabia and the heartland of the Middle East and that a rudimentary form of capitalism was developing there at the time of the prophet Muhammad that challenged the value system of the town’s tribal peoples. Muhammad’s prophecy was the answer to the population’s problems in their attempts to adjust to the new situation created by these material shifts. Crone challenged Watt’s thesis, pointing out in a long section of her book that frankincense, the basis of Meccan prosperity, was no longer traded with the Fertile Crescent during the prophet’s lifetime, as Watt had asserted, but rather that Arabian traders enriched themselves with the trade in camel skins. So, Crone argued, it turns out that Muhammad probably engaged in the camel-skin trade, and he would have been very successful at it—leaving the reader to wonder why a local capitalism could not develop around that commerce. The significance of Crone’s work was her anti-Marxist bias hidden behind a curtain of erudition.
14. Chris Hann, “Obituary: Professor Ernest Gellner,”
Independent (London), November 8, 1995.
15. For Lewis’s and Said’s contrasting views, see Bernard Lewis, “The Clash of Civilizations,” 363–366, and Edward W. Said, “The Clash of Ignorance,” 367–372, in
The Middle East and Islamic World Reader, 3rd ed., ed. Marvin E. Gettleman and Stuart Schaar (New York: Grove Press, 2012).
16. Eqbal Ahmad to Ernest Gellner, March 9, 1993, and a copy of his
Times Literary Supplement letter, zip files on disks made as backup of Eqbal’s computer hard drive on March 25, 1998, Box 12, Eqbal Ahmad Papers (EAP), Johnson Library, Hampshire College, Amherst, Mass.
17. The original French title of Franz Fanon’s book is
Sociologie d’une révolution: L’an V de la Révolution algérienne (Paris: Maspero, 1959). It was translated into English as
A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1959).
18. Eqbal Ahmad, letter to the editor,
Times Literary Supplement, March 9, 1993.
19. Eqbal Ahmad, “Trade Unionism in the Maghreb,” in
State and Society in Independent North Africa, ed. Leon Carl Brown (Washington, D.C.: Middle East Institute, 1964), 146–191.
20. Ahmad, letter to the editor.
21. Samir al-Khalil [Kanan Makiya],
The Republic of Fear: The Inside Story of Saddam’s Iraq (New York: Pantheon, 1990). For details of U.S. aid to Iraq during that war, see Stuart Schaar, “Irangate: The Middle East Connections,” in
The United States and the Middle East: A Search for New Perspectives, ed. Hooshang Amirahmadi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 177–210.
22. Kanan Makiya,
Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World (New York: Norton, 1993).
23. Geraldine Brooks, “Bookshelf: Stories of Suffering in Saddam’s Iraq,”
Wall Street Journal, April 7, 1993; Michael Massing, “Book Review:
Cruelty and Silence,”
New Yorker, April 26, 1993.
24. Edward Said, interview by Nabeel Abraham,
Lies of Our Times (
LOOT), May 1993, 13.
25. Eqbal Ahmad, “Cruelties Compounded” [review of
Cruelty and Silence, by Kanan Makiya],
Nation, August 9, 1993.
26. Eqbal Ahmad to Elsa Dixler and Victor Navasky, August 5, 1993, disk, Box 1, EAP.
27. Eqbal speaks of his problems with the
Nation over “Cruelties Compounded” in Eqbal Ahmad to Dohra Ahmad, August 17, 1993, disk, file “DOHRA,” Box 12, EAP.
29. Aijaz Ahmad, “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality,”
Race & Class 36, no. 3 (1995): 1–20. According to Eqbal’s nephew Kamran Asdar Ali, Aijaz had called Eqbal a CIA agent without having proof. As a committed Communist, Aijaz must have resented Eqbal’s independence on the left. The two broke over Aijaz’s attack on Edward W. Said in the pages of
Race & Class.
30. The letters between Eqbal Ahmad, Ambalavaner Sivanandan, and Hazel Waters about this affair are in Correspondence 1995–1996, Box 1, EAP.
4. Islam and Islamic History
1. Bernard Lewis,
The Emergence of Modern Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961).
2. His opponents’ arguments are summarized in Eqbal Ahmad to Stuart Schaar, June 3, 1992, author’s correspondence files.
3. For example, Eqbal Ahmad and Stuart Schaar, “Tahar Haddad: A Tunisian Activist Intellectual,”
Maghreb Review 21, nos. 3–4 (1996): 240–255.
4. Eqbal Ahmad, “Islam and Politics,” in
The Islamic Impact, ed. Yvonne Haddad, Byron Haines, and Ellison Findly (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1984), 7–26, reprinted in Eqbal Ahmad,
The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, ed. Carollee Bengelsdorf, Margaret Cerillo, and Yogesh Chandrani (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 160–178, and excerpted in Eqbal Ahmad,
Between Past & Future: Selected Essays on South Asia, ed. Dohra Ahmad, Iftikhar Ahmad, and Zia Mian (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 260–280.
5. These ideas began to be discussed in academic circles in the early 1960s and were incorporated in Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne H. Rudolph,
The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development of India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). In fieldwork in Java and Bali and in books published in the early 1960s, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz at the University of Chicago dealt with similar themes.
6. Jinnah’s views are summarized in Eqbal Ahmad, “The Betrayed Promise,”
Dawn (Karachi), June 18, 1993, reprinted in Ahmad,
Between Past & Future, 27–30, quotes on 27–28. For more of Eqbal’s views on Jinnah, see “Pakistan’s Endangered History” and “Jinnah, in a Class of His Own,” in Ahmad,
Between Past & Future, 19–22, 23–26.
7. David Barsamian,
Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire: Interviews with David Barsamian (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2000), 140. In the same vein, see Eqbal Ahmad, “Islam as Refuge from Failure,”
Dawn (Karachi), September 6, 1998, and
Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo), September 10–16, 1998.
8. Eqbal Ahmad, “An Islamic Predicament,”
Dawn (Karachi), February 22, 1998, reprinted in Ahmad,
Between Past & Future, 256–259, quote and estimation on 257, 258.
9. Ahmad, “Islam and Politics,” 270–271.
10. Eqbal Ahmad, “A
Jihad Against Time,”
Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo), February 4–10, 1999.
11. Eqbal Ahmad, “Roots of the Religious Right,”
Dawn (Karachi), January 24, 1999, reprinted in Ahmad,
Between Past & Future, 281–285, and
Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, 179–190, quote on 190. See also Eqbal Ahmad, “The Grim Reaper Is Everywhere,”
Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo), March 11–17, 1999, and “Profile of the Religious Right,”
Dawn, March 17, 1999.
12. Eqbal Ahmad to Israel Shahak, n.d., under recipient’s name, Box 1, EAP.
13. Eqbal Ahmad, “In a Land Without Music,”
Dawn (Karachi), July 13, 1995, reprinted in Ahmad,
Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, 500–503.
14. Edward W. Said, Aga Shahid Ali, Ibrahim Abu Lughod, Akeel Bilgrami, and Eqbal Ahmad, “‘The Satanic Verses’” [letter to the editor],
New York Review of Books, March 16, 1989,
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1989/mar/16/the-satanic-verses/ (accessed January 22, 2015).
16. Ahmad, “Roots of the Religious Right,” 186–187.
5. Imperialism, Nationalism, Revolutionary Warfare, Insurgency, and the Need for Democracy
1. Eqbal Ahmad, “The Iranian Revolution: A Landmark for the Future,” in “On the Iranian Revolution,” ed. Eqbal Ahmad, special issue,
Race & Class 21, no. 1 (1979): 3–11, reprinted as
The Iranian Revolution (Lahore: Vanguard, 1980).
2. Raza Kazim, conversation with the author, Pakistan, April 7, 2004.
3. Eqbal Ahmad, “Iran and the West: A Century of Subjugation,”
Christianity & Crisis, March 3, 1980, 37–44, reprinted in
Tell the American People: Perspectives on the Iranian Revolution, ed. David H. Albert (Philadelphia: Movement for a New Society, 1980), 28–43.
4. Frank Wisner Jr. was studying for a bachelor’s of arts degree at the time Eqbal was at Princeton. He was the son of Frank G. Wisner (1909–1965), the CIA director of operations for Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union, during the Cold War. The older Wisner committed suicide in 1965. Frank Jr. went on to become U.S. ambassador to India, the Philippines, and Egypt before ending his government service as undersecretary of defense for policy (1993–1994). Since retiring from the government, he has engaged in business and has served on several boards of large corporations such as Enron and AIG. In June 2013, he joined the board of Ergo, a global intelligence and advisory corporation.
5. Eqbal Ahmad, “Revolutionary Warfare: How to Tell When the Rebels Have Won,”
Nation, August 30, 1965, 95–100, reprinted in Eqbal Ahmad,
The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, ed. Carollee Bengelsdorf, Margaret Cerullo, and Yogesh Chandrani (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 13–23.
6. H. O. Nazareth, prod.,
Stories My Country Told Me: The Meaning of Nationhood (Bremerton, Wash.: Penumbra Productions for the BBC Arena, 1996).
7. Mahatma Gandhi,
The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates Between Gandhi and Tagore, 1915–1941, comp. and ed. with an introduction by Sabyasach
ī Bhattacharya (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1997).
8. David Barsamian,
Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire: Interviews with David Barsamian (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2000), 4.
9. Zulfikar Ahmad, conversation with the author, Islamabad, March 2004.
10. Barsamian,
Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire, 139.
11. Eqbal Ahmad to Stuart Schaar, December 4, 1978, author’s correspondence files.
12. Eqbal Ahmad, “From Potato Sack to Potato Mash: The Contemporary Crisis of the Third World,”
Arab Studies Quarterly 2, no. 3 (1980): 223–234, quote on 223, 236, reprinted in
Monthly Review 32, no. 10 (1981): 8–21; Eqbal Ahmad,
Between Past & Future: Selected Essays on South Asia, ed. Dohra Ahmad, Iftikhar Ahmad, and Zia Mian (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3–15, quote on 3, 15; and
Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, 116–127. The second article in this series is “Postcolonial Systems of Power,”
Arab Studies Quarterly 2, no. 4 (1980): 350–363, reprinted in Ahmad,
Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, 128–141. The third article is “The Neo-fascist State: The Pathology of Power in the Third World,”
Arab Studies Quarterly 3, no. 2 (981): 170–180, reprinted in
First Harvest: The Institute for Policy Studies, 1963–1983, ed. John S. Friedman (New York: Grove Press, 1983), 68–78, and Ahmad,
Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, 142–153.
13. Eqbal Ahmad, “Beyond Blown Bridges,”
Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo), January 14–20, 1999.
14. Eqbal Ahmad, “Intellectuals’ Role in Society,”
Dawn (Karachi), December 10, 1995, reprinted in Ahmad,
Between Past & Future, 316–319, quote on 318–319.
15. Barsamian,
Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire, 65.
16. Eqbal Ahmad, “The Betrayed Promise,”
Dawn (Karachi), June 18, 1993, reprinted in Ahmad,
Between Past & Future, 27–30, and
Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, 419–422, quote on 420.
17. Eqbal Ahmad, “Notes on South Asia in Crisis,”
Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 4, no. 1 (1972): 23–29, reprinted in Ahmad,
Between Past & Future, 38–48, quote on 46–47.
18. Eqbal Ahmad, “Pakistan in Crisis: An Interview with Eqbal Ahmad by Nubar Hovsepian,”
Race & Class 22, no. 2 (1980): 135, reprinted in Ahmad,
Between Past & Future, 68–88, quote on 75.
19. Eqbal Ahmad, “Islam and Politics,” in
The Islamic Impact, ed. Yvonne Haddad, Byron Haines, and Ellison Findly (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1984), 7–76, reprinted in Ahmad,
Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, 160–178, and excerpted in Ahmad,
Between Past & Future, 260–280, quote on 263.
20. For more on this concept of a social democracy, see Omid Safi, ed.,
Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism (Oxford: One World, 2003).
6. The Middle East and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict
1. “Eqbal Ahmad, India, Pakistan, Bosnia, etc.: Interviewed by David Barsamian,” August 4, 1993,
http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Library/9803/eqbal_ahmad/Barsamwint.hmtl, (accessed October 4, 2004, but no longer available).
2. David Barsamian,
Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire: Interviews with David Barsamian (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2000), 32.
3. Eqbal Ahmad, “Pioneering in the Nuclear Age: An Essay on Israel and Palestinians,”
Race & Class 25, no. 4 (1984): 1–7, reprinted in Eqbal Ahmad,
The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, ed. Carollee Bengelsdorf, Margaret Cerillo, and Yogesh Chandrani (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 298–317, quote on 302.
4. The society website’s listing of conferences for 1994 does not include the one that Eqbal participated in on September 13, 1994: “Jerusalem: Between the Past and the Future” (see
http://www.passia.org/ [accessed August 6, 2013]). Although Eqbal was the main speaker on the panel, he so shocked his audience with his proposals that the organization removed all traces of what he said from its website.
5. Eqbal Ahmad, remarks at the conference “Jerusalem,” 2, 3, 4.
6. Eqbal Ahmad, “An Essay in Reconciliation” [review of
The Question of Palestine, by Edward W. Said],
Nation, March 22, 1980. Eqbal repeated this statement in Eqbal Ahmad, introduction to David Barsamian,
The Pen and the Sword: Conversations with Edward Said (Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, 1994), 1–16.
7. Eqbal Ahmad and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, eds., “The Invasion of Lebanon,” special double issue,
Race & Class 24, no. 4 (1983). See also Ahmad, “Pioneering in the Nuclear Age.”
8. Edward W. Said, “Foreword: Cherish the Man’s Courage,” in Barsamian,
Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire, xxix.
11. Eqbal Ahmad to Tim May and Frank Hanly, December 7, 1992, p. 1, file “Said, Edward,” Box 1, Eqbal Ahmad Papers (EAP), Johnson Library, Hampshire College, Amherst, Mass.
12. Eqbal Ahmad to Israel Shahak, October 22, 1969, file “Shahak, Israel,” Box 1, EAP.
13. Barsamian,
Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire, 98.
14. Ahmad, “Pioneering in the Nuclear Age,” 305.
15. See the article Eqbal wrote, published in different journals with different titles but otherwise is the same article, that deals with this subject: “Born Again Apartheid,”
Dawn (Karachi), October 25, 1998, and “After the Peace of the Weak,”
Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo), November 5–11, 1998.
16. Eqbal Ahmad, “The Hundred Hour War,”
Dawn (Karachi), March 17, 1991, reprinted in Ahmad,
Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, 278–281, quote on 278.
17. Ahmad and Abu-Lughod, eds., “Invasion of Lebanon.”
18. Eqbal Ahmad, “Encounter with an Islamist,”
Dawn (Karachi), July 26, 1998, reprinted as “Encounter with a Fighter,”
Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo), July 30–August 5, 1998.
19. Eqbal Ahmad, “Lebanon’s Economic Mystery,”
Dawn (Karachi), July 19, 1998, and
Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo), July 23–29, 1998.
20. Eqbal Ahmad, “King Hussein’s Dual Legacy,”
Dawn (Karachi), February 14, 1999, reprinted in Ahmad,
Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, 381–385, quote on 385.
7. India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh
1. Eqbal Ahmad, “Pakistan’s Endangered History,”
Dawn (Karachi), June 4, 1995, first delivered as a speech at the introduction of the Jinnah Papers (curated by Dr. Z. H. Zaidi) and reprinted in Eqbal Ahmad,
Between Past & Future: Selected Essays on South Asia, ed. Dohra Ahmad, Iftikhar Ahmad, and Zia Mian (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 19–22, quote on 22.
2. Eqbal Ahmad, “India’s Partition—History, Memory, & Loss,”
Hindu (Chennai, India), December 27, 1998.
3. Radha Kumar,
The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women’
s Rights and Feminism in India, 1800–1900, 2nd ed. (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2002), and
Divide and Fall? Bosnia in the Annals of Partition (London: Verso, 1997).
4. Edward Said and Radha Kumar, “Remembering Eqbal Ahmad,” reminiscences given at the celebration of his life, Hampshire College, Amherst, Mass., September 18, 1999, recorded by David Barsamian for Alternative Radio, Program SAIE-KUMR001. The talk can be purchased from the site
http://www.alternativeradio.orgkproducts/saie-kumr001 (accessed January 22, 2015).
5. Radha Kumar,
Making Peace with Partition (New Delhi: Penguin, 2005).
6. David Barsamian,
Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire: Interviews with David Barsamian (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2000), 13.
7. According to Eqbal’s widow, “Eqbal was going through the process of applying for U.S. citizenship at the time of his death” (Julie Diamond to Stuart Schaar, e-mail, March 3, 2014).
8. Eqbal Ahmad, “‘Democrats’ Against Democracy,”
Dawn (Karachi), March 14, 1999.
10. Dr. Mubashir Hassan, “India-Pakistan: ‘Walls Must Come Down’: Nikhil Chakravartty and the Growing Momentum of Peace,”
Mainstream (New Delhi), November 22, 2003, 8.
13. Reported in ibid., 8–9, citing
Hindustan Times (New Delhi), April 16, 1990.
16. Nisar Osmani, “Pakistan Group Discusses Kashmir with Indian Intellectuals,”
Dawn (Karachi), June 5, 1990.
17. Asma Jahangir, conversation with the author, Lahore, April 8, 2004.
18. Quoted in Agha Imran Hamid, “The Amazing Eqbal Ahmad,”
Friday Times (Lahore), May 20, 2000. See also Pervez Hoodbhoy, “Eqbal Ahmad: Post-Pokhran Days,”
Chowk, May 11, 2000,
http://www.chowk.com/show_article.cgi?aid=00000768&channel=covic%20center&start=0&end=9&chapte…(accessed October 4, 2004, no longer available because the online magazine
Chowk crashed).
19. Eqbal wrote a number of columns about the need for peace between India and Pakistan. See, for example, “The Bus Can Bring a Nobel Prize,”
Dawn (Karachi), February 21, 1999, and “No Alternative to Dialogue,”
Dawn, June 28, 1998.
20. Subhas Chandra Bose was a controversial Indian nationalist who, in order to end British rule in India, wanted to ally his country with Nazi Germany and fascist Japan during World War II, according to Leonard A. Gordon,
Brothers Against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalists Surat and Subhas Chandra Bose (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
21. For an overview of such exchanges, see Smithu Kothari, Zia Mian, Kamla Bhasla, and A. H. Nayyar,
Bridging Partition: People’s Initiatives for Peace Between India and Pakistan (Hyderabad: Orient Black Swan, 2010).
22. Abdul Hamid Nayyar specializes in solid-state and quantum physics and quantum mechanics. He has been a visiting research scholar at Princeton University since 1998 and a faculty member at Lahore University of Management Sciences. In addition to his antinuclear work and publications, he has been actively engaged in public-school curriculum and textbook reform in Pakistan.
23. Barsamian,
Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire, 86.
25. Pervez Hoodbhoy, conversation with the author, Islamabad, April 8, 2004.
28. Abdul Hamid Nayyar, conversation with the author, Islamabad, April 9, 2004. See Eqbal’s recounting of the press conference in “Reason as Spectator,”
Dawn (Karachi), June 11, 1998, and “Reason on the Side Lines,”
Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo), June 6, 1998, both reprinted in Ahmad,
Between Past & Future, 107–111.
29. Eqbal Ahmad, “When Mountains Die,”
Dawn (Karachi), June 4, 1998, reprinted in Ahmad,
Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, 543–547, quote on 543, 547. See four other articles that Eqbal wrote on the nuclear issue in South Asia: “India’s Obsession, Our Choice,”
Dawn, May 17, 1998, reprinted in Ahmad,
Between Past & Future, 93–96; “Atomic Gains, Nuclear Losses,”
Dawn, June 18, 1998, and
Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo), June 18–24, 1998, reprinted as “Nuclear Gains and Losses,” in Ahmad,
Between Past & Future, 102–106;
Testing the Limits: Pakistan, Following India into the Pit [brochure] (Amsterdam: Transnational Institute; Washington, D.C.: Institute of Policy Studies, August 1998); and review of
India 2020: A Vision for the New Millennium, by A. P. J. Abdul Kalam and Y. S. Rajan,
Foreign Policy, no. 115 (1999): 122–125,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/sumbookpage.htm (accessed January 22, 2015), written just before he died in May 1999.
30. Beena Sarwar to Stuart Schaar, e-mail, September 13, 2004.
31. Abdul Hamid Nayyar, conversation.
32. Raza Kazim, conversation with the author, Lahore, April 7, 2004. Eqbal remembered Raza as a well-known Communist leader and activist at their alma mater, Foreman Christian College in Lahore. Raza had heard about Eqbal from other Pakistanis and from the notoriety of the Harrisburg trial. They met again in 1972, the year that Eqbal’s mother and younger brother Saghir died, and Eqbal traveled to Pakistan from the United States. Raza removed Eqbal’s bags from the hotel room and took him to his home to live with his family. In this way, every time Eqbal went to Lahore, he moved into Raza’s house and stayed there for as long as he pleased.
33. Raza Kazim, conversation.
34. Dohra Ahmad, conversation with the author, New York City, March 2004; Imran Hamid, conversation with the author, Islamabad, April 3, 2004.
35. Zia Mian, conversation with author, New York City, March 13, 2004.
36. Eqbal Ahmad, “Shotgun Governance,”
Dawn (Karachi), March 21, 1999, reprinted in Ahmad,
Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, 563–566, quote on 565–566.
37. Rani Mumtaz, conversation with the author, Lahore, April 8, 2004.
38. Eqbal Ahmad, “The Governor’s Challenge,”
Dawn (Karachi), November 10, 1998.
39. I first met Chotti in Eqbal’s apartment in Amherst when she was studying at Tufts University. I reconnected with her in Islamabad on April 9, 2004.
8. Critique of U.S. Foreign Policy, the Cold War, and Terrorism
1. Eqbal Ahmad, “Yet Again, a New Nixon,”
Dawn (Karachi), May 7, 1994, reprinted in Eqbal Ahmad,
The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, ed. Carollee Bengelsdorf, Margaret Cerullo, and Yogesh Chandrani (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 228–231, quote on 229.
2. Eqbal Ahmad, “Revolutionary Warfare and Counterinsurgency,”
Journal of International Affairs 25, no. 1 (1971): 1–47, excerpts reprinted as “Counterinsurgency” in Ahmad,
Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, 36–64, quote on 62–63.
3. This discussion is based on a conversation I had with Eqbal in 1987 about Irangate. See also Stuart Schaar, “Irangate: The Middle East Connections,” in
The United States and the Middle East: A Search for New Perspectives, ed. Hooshang Amirahmadi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 177–210.
4. For Eqbal’s ideas on terrorism, see Eqbal Ahmad,
Terrorism: Theirs and Ours, foreword and interview by David Barsamian, Open Media Pamphlet Series (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001).
5. Eqbal mentioned this in his closing remarks at a conference he attended on November 10, 1998, transcript, 6, Eqbal Ahmad Papers, Johnson Library, Hampshire College, Amherst, Mass. (no specific information is available on the conference).
6. Eqbal Ahmad and Richard J. Barnet, “A Reporter at Large: Bloody Games,”
New Yorker, April 11, 1988, 44–86, reprinted as “Bloody Games,” in Eqbal Ahmad,
Between Past & Future: Selected Essays on South Asia, ed. Dohra Ahmad, Iftikhar Ahmad, and Zia Mian (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 153–198, and
Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, 453–492.
7. David Barsamian,
Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire: Interviews with David Barsamian (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2000), 95.
12. Eqbal Ahmad, “Bill Clinton Turns to God,”
Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo), September 17–23, 1998.
13. Pressures to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan grew in the United States, and President Hamid Karzai, in an attempt to appease the Taliban, refused to sign a security agreement defining the terms of U.S. military presence in the country after 2014. As a result, President Barack Obama threatened to pull all U.S. military personnel out of the country by the end of 2014. As soon as the new Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, assumed his office, he signed an agreement with the United States allowing almost 10,000 U.S. troops to remain in the country as advisers.
14. Eqbal Ahmad, “Imperial Presidency Under Siege,”
Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo), August 13–19, 1998.
Conclusion
1. Unless otherwise noted, my descriptions of and quotations from the talks given at the commemoration of Eqbal’s retirement from Hampshire College come from a transcript of his retirement celebration, October 4, 1997, Box 12, filed under “my files,” and “veiled,” Eqbal Ahmad Papers (EAP), Johnson Library, Hampshire College, Amherst, Mass.
2. Samuel P. Huntington,
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Touchstone, 1996).
3. The Eqbal Ahmad Papers at Hampshire College contain letters from Eqbal Ahmad to Noam Chomsky from the 1970s and one from Chomsky to Eqbal in 1992 (file “Chomsky,” Box 1). They deal with organizing antiwar and anti-imperialist events, writings, and solidarity movements with Palestinians and Vietnamese. In a review of David Barsamian’s book
Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire: Interviews with David Barsamian (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2000) in 2000, Chomsky called Eqbal a “secular Sufi” who opposed “the twin curse of nationalism and religious fanaticism” (“Thoughts of a Secular Sufi,” n.d.,
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/2000----.htm [accessed November 7, 2014]). Chomsky delivered the third Eqbal Ahmad Distinguished Lecture in Lahore in 2001, sponsored by the Eqbal Ahmad Foundation and the newspapers
Dawn (Islamabad) and
Friday Times (Islamabad). See Najam Sethi, “Chomsky’s Relevance” [editorial],
Friday Times, November 30, 2001. In a lecture that Chomsky delivered by Skype from his MIT office to an audience at Café Bol in the Maine Market in Gulberg, Lahore, in May 2011, he referred to his late friend’s views on Pakistan. See Maria Amir, “In US-Pakistan Relations Stability Means Obedience: Chomsky,”
Express Tribune (Karachi), May 26, 2011.
4. Daniel Ellsberg,
Papers on the War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972).
5. Howard Zinn,
A People’s History of the United States, 1492–Present, rev. and updated ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995).
6. Eqbal met Iqbal Riza in 1972 in Washington, D.C., during the Bangladesh crisis. On December 15, when Dacca fell, Iqbal became despondent and told his wife, Parveen, that he could not remain a diplomat for Pakistan if the army fired on its own people. He would resign his diplomatic post if that happened. Early in 1972, Iqbal read one of Eqbal’s columns, which so impressed him that he made it his business to find him. Tracking him down, Iqbal went to Eqbal’s house in Washington, D.C., beginning a long friendship. In 1977, Iqbal was posted to Paris as deputy chief of the Pakistani embassy. During elections in Pakistan in 1977, however, the military fired on civilians, triggering Iqbal’s dramatic response. He consulted with his wife, called Eqbal, and announced his decision to resign from the Pakistan foreign service. Eqbal approved of the move and in doing so cemented their friendship. Iqbal set up a meeting between Eqbal and Mubashir Hassan, who later worked closely with Eqbal to facilitate exchanges between Indian and Pakistani intellectuals and politicians in order to break the deadlock in the peace process between the two countries. Iqbal also introduced Eqbal in the 1990s to the chief of staff and commander in chief of the Pakistani army from 1998 to 2007 and Pakistan’s tenth president from 2001 to 2008, Pervez Musharraf (b.1943), who told Iqbal that he had read with great interest Eqbal’s columns in the Pakistani press. Iqbal’s position as Secretary-General Kofi Anan’s chief of cabinet at the United Nations opened up many new contacts for Eqbal within the United Nations and larger diplomatic circles.
7. This talk was expanded in Edward Said, “Foreword: Cherish the Man’s Courage,” in Barsamian,
Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire, quote on xxi–xxii.
8. Bernard Lown, M.D., to Eqbal Ahmad, October 20, 1997, Correspondence 1996–1998, Box 1, EAP.
9. The trial took place in 1972, but pretrial motions were heard in 1971.
10. Eqbal Ahmad to Dohra Ahmad, Islamabad, October 25, 1992, zip files on disks made as backup to Eqbal’s computer hard drive on March 25, 1996, files “my files,” “letters,” “Dohra,” Box 12, EAP.
11. David Barsamian, who interviewed Eqbal extensively at the end of his life, wrote that during a walk he took with Eqbal between interviews in Mount Holyoke, Massachusetts, in August 1998, Eqbal “was in a pensive and reflective mood. It was then that he told me that his health was not so good. Ten months later, he was dead” (
Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire, xvi).
12. Pervez Hoodbhoy, foreword to Eqbal Ahmad,
Between Past & Present: Selected Essays on South Asia, ed. Dohra Ahmad, Iftikhar Ahmad, and Zia Mian (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004), vii.
13. Pervez Hoodbhoy, conversation with the author, Pakistan, 2004. Pervez interpreted Eqbal’s response differently than I did. He thought that Eqbal did not want to hurt Rashida’s feelings and therefore let her continue reciting the Qur
ʾan. But I do not think that he realized the depth of Eqbal’s attachment to Islamic culture, which was a profound aspect of his being. On Pervez’s view, see Hoodbhoy, foreword to Ahmad,
Between Past & Future, xxiv.