Eqbal Ahmad was a Pakistani political scientist, author, and scholar well-known for his academic contributions to the study of the Near East, his anti-war activism, and his support of global resistance movements.
Early Life and Education
Eqbal Ahmed was born in the Indian state of Bihar, in the village of Irki within the Gaya District (now known as the Magadh Division). When he was a child, his father was assassinated in his presence by a Hindu sect over a property dispute. He and his older brother migrated to Pakistan on foot in 1947 during the partition of India.
Eqbal Ahmad earned a degree in Economics from Forman Christian College in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1951. Following a brief stint as an army officer, he became a Rotary Fellow and enrolled in Occidental College in California in 1957. He enrolled at Princeton University in 1958 and studied Middle Eastern History and Political Science there until 1965 when he earned a PhD.
Career
From 1960 to 1963, Ahmad lived in North Africa, particularly in Algeria, where he joined the National Liberation Front and collaborated with Frantz Fanon and other Algerian nationalists fighting a liberation struggle against the French. He turned down the chance to become a member of the first Algerian government and continued to live as an independent scholar. He went back to the United States.
After coming back to the US, Eqbal Ahmad worked as a professor at Cornell University’s School of Labour Relations (1965–68) and the University of Illinois at Chicago (1964–65). He left Cornell due to his isolation within the academic community as a result of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and the Palestinian rights. He served as a fellow at the University of Chicago from 1968 to 1972. Ahmad had been a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War during this period, which led to his indictment in January as one of the Harrisburg Seven. In 1972, Ahmad was found not guilty of any charges following the trial.He gained notoriety in these years as one of the first and most outspoken critics of US policy in Vietnam and Cambodia.
In Peshawar in 1986, Eqbal Ahmad had also conducted an interview with Osama bin Laden. In the early 1990s, he prophesied that, given Osama Bin Laden’s beliefs, he would eventually turn against his then-allies, the United States and Pakistan.
Ahmad served as a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies from 1972 to 1982. From 1973 to 1975, he was the first director of its overseas affiliate, the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. Ahmad began teaching at Hampshire College, a progressive institution in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1982. Hampshire College was the first college in the country to remove its South African affiliation. He was a political science and world politics professor there.
The government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif gave Ahmad a piece of land in Pakistan at the beginning of the 1990s so he could establish Khaldunia University, an independent alternative university.
He retired from Hampshire in 1997 and made Pakistan his permanent home. There, he continued to write a weekly column for Dawn, the oldest English-language newspaper in Pakistan. In order to stop extremism, poverty, and injustice in Muslim nations, he persisted in advocating for social democracy in those nations, just like he had done in Scandinavian countries.
Eqbal Ahmad served as the founding chancellor of the Textile Institute of Pakistan, a science, design, and business school that awarded degrees with an emphasis on textiles at the time. At its annual convocation, the institute, which claims to be guided by the principles that Eqbal Ahmad stood for, bestows its highest honour, the Dr. Eqbal Ahmed Achievement Award, upon a graduate who is unanimously considered by the faculty to be a shining example of Eqbal Ahmad’s values.
Personal Life
In 1969, he married Julie Diamond, a New York-born writer and teacher, and they had a daughter named Dohra.
Death and Legacy
On May 11, 1999, Eqbal Ahmad passed away from heart failure in a hospital in Islamabad while undergoing treatment for colon cancer.
A memorial lecture series honouring Eqbal Ahmed has been established at Hampshire College since his passing. Speakers have included Kofi Annan, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, and Arundhati Roy. “An intellectual unintimidated by power or authority” was how Ahmad was acknowledged.
Following Ahmad’s passing in 1999, Noam Chomsky wrote in an article that Ahmad was a “treasured friend, trusted comrade, counsellor and teacher” and that Ahmad recalls the Islamic Sufi tradition with warmth and feeling from his early years in a Bihari village, where the public’s admiration for the Sufis united Muslims and Hindus.
Eqbal Ahmad considered Islam as being primarily concerned with the well-being of ordinary people. Eqbal’s humanity was his leftism, and this just added to his pride in being a Pakistani during a difficult period. He contributed insight and integrity to the cause of oppressed peoples throughout the world.