Eqbal Ahmad (1933/34 - May 11, 1999) was a Pakistani writer, journalist, and anti-war activist. He was strongly critical of the Middle East strategy of the United States as well as what he saw as the "twin curse" of nationalism and religious fanaticism in such countries as Pakistan.

Ahmad was born in the village of Irki in Bihar. When he was a young boy, his father was murdered over a land dispute in his presence. During the partition of India in 1947, he and his elder brothers migrated to Pakistan.

Ahmad graduated from Forman Christian College in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1951 with a degree in economics. After serving briefly as an army officer, he enrolled at Occidental College in California in 1957. From 1958 to 1960, he studied political science and Middle Eastern history at Princeton University, later earning his Ph.D..

From 1960 to 1963, Ahmad lived in North Africa, working primarily in Algeria, where he joined the National Liberation Front. However, he never worked with Frantz Fanon as is commonly believed -- according to his biographer Stuart Schaar (a close friend and former roommate of Ahmad), the two never met; Fanon died on December 12, and Eqbal arrived in Algeria on December 20. He was a member of the Algerian delegation to peace talks at Évian, France.

When he returned to the United States, Ahmad taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago (1964-65) and Cornell University in the school of Labour Relations (1965-68). During these years, he became known as one of the earliest and most vocal opponents of American policies in Vietnam and Cambodia. From 1968 to 1972, he was a fellow at the Adlai Stevenson Institute in Chicago.

In 1971, Ahmad was indicted with the anti-war Catholic priests Philip Berrigan and his brother Daniel, along with four other Catholic pacifists, on charges of conspiracy to kidnap Henry Kissinger. After fifty-nine hours of deliberations, the jury declared a mistrial.

From 1972 to 1982, Ahmad was Senior Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. From 1973 to 1975, he served as the first director of its overseas affiliate, the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam.

In 1982, Ahmad joined the faculty at Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he taught world politics and political science.

In the early 1990s, Ahmad was granted a parcel of land in Pakistan by Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's government to build an independent, alternative university, named Khaldunia. The land was later seized by Bhutto's husband, Asif Zardari, reportedly to build a golf course and club.

Upon his retirement from Hampshire in 1997, he settled permanently in Pakistan, where he continued to write a weekly column, for Dawn, Pakistan's oldest English-language newspaper. Eqbal died in Islamabad 1999 of heart failure following an operation for colon cancer.

Since his death, a memorial lecture series has been established at Hampshire in his honor. Speakers have included in Kofi Annan, Edward Said, and Arundhati Roy.

Ahmad was admired as "an intellectual unintimidated by power or authority", and collaborated with such left-wing journalists and activists as Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Howard Zinn, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Richard Falk, Fredric Jameson, Alexander Cockburn and Daniel Berrigan.

Quote

[Ahmad was] perhaps the shrewdest and most original anti-imperialist analyst of the post-war world, especially in the dynamics between the West and the post-colonial states of Asia and Africa. — Edward Said

References

• Confronting Empire. ISBN 0896086151.
• Terrorism: Theirs and Ours. ISBN 1583224904.

External link

• Website dedicated to Eqbal Ahmad
• A tribute to Eqbal Ahmad, by Edward W. Said
• Eqbal Ahmad Archive
• The Eqbal Ahmad page
• Dawn article by Eqbal Ahmad - 'In a Land Without Music'