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The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad by Eqbal Ahmad
Activist, journalist, and theorist, Eqbal Ahmad (1934-1999) was admired and consulted by revolutionaries and activists as well as policymakers and academics. In articles and columns published in such journals as the Nation, New York Review of Books, Monthly Review, and newspapers in Pakistan and Cairo, Ahmad inspired new ways of thinking about global issues. Whether writing on the rise of militant Islam, the conflict in Kashmir, U.S. involvement in Vietnam, or the cynical logic of Cold War geopolitics, Ahmad offered incisive, passionate, and often prophetic analyses of the major political events and movements of the second half of the twentieth century.This work is the first to collect Ahmad's writings in a single volume. It reflects his distinct understanding of world politics as well as his profound sense of empathy for those living in poverty and oppression. He was a fierce opponent of imperialism and corruption and advocated democratic transformations in postcolonial and third-world societies. A uniquely perceptive critic of colonialism and U.S. foreign policy, Ahmad was equally vigilant in his criticisms of third-world dictatorships.Like few other writers, Ahmad's life experiences shaped his political views. He grew up amidst the turmoil of postcolonial India, worked alongside the Algerian FLN in their fight against the French occupation, and later became a prominent spokesperson for peace between Israel and Palestine.
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First published May 30, 2006
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About the author
Eqbal Ahmad
17 books142 followersEqbal Ahmad was a Pakistani political scientist, 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.
Eqbal Ahmad was born in the village of Irki in Bihar, India in 1933 or 1934. A few years later, his father was murdered over a land dispute, while the young Eqbal lay beside him. During the partition of India in 1947, he and his elder brothers migrated to Pakistan.
Ahmad graduated from Foreman 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 as a Rotary Fellow in American History in 1957. From 1958 to 1960, he studied political science and middle eastern history at Princeton, 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 and worked with Frantz Fanon. He was a member of the Algerian delegation to peace talks at Evian.
When he returned to the United States, Ahmad taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago (1964 - 1965) and Cornell University in the school of Labour Relations (1965 - 1968). During these years, he became known as "one of the earliest and most vocal opponents of American policies in Vietnam and Cambodia". In 1969, he married the teacher and writer Julie Diamond. 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, Daniel and Phillip Berrigan, 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 Institution 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 1990's he 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.
A prolific writer and journalist, Eqbal was widely consulted by revolutionaries, journalists, activist leaders and policymakers around the world. He was an editor of the journal Race and Class, contributing editor of Middle East Report and L'Economiste du Tiers Monde, co-founder of Pakistan Forum, and an editorial board member of Arab Studies Quarterly. Ahmad was "that rare thing, an intellectual unintimidated by power or authority, a companion in arms to such diverse figures as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Richard Falk, Fred Jameson, Alexander Cockburn and Daniel Berrigan."
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 on May 11, 1999, of heart failure following surgery for colon cancer, diagnosed just one week before.
http://web.archive.org/web/2009102617...
Eqbal Ahmad was born in the village of Irki in Bihar, India in 1933 or 1934. A few years later, his father was murdered over a land dispute, while the young Eqbal lay beside him. During the partition of India in 1947, he and his elder brothers migrated to Pakistan.
Ahmad graduated from Foreman 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 as a Rotary Fellow in American History in 1957. From 1958 to 1960, he studied political science and middle eastern history at Princeton, 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 and worked with Frantz Fanon. He was a member of the Algerian delegation to peace talks at Evian.
When he returned to the United States, Ahmad taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago (1964 - 1965) and Cornell University in the school of Labour Relations (1965 - 1968). During these years, he became known as "one of the earliest and most vocal opponents of American policies in Vietnam and Cambodia". In 1969, he married the teacher and writer Julie Diamond. 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, Daniel and Phillip Berrigan, 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 Institution 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 1990's he 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.
A prolific writer and journalist, Eqbal was widely consulted by revolutionaries, journalists, activist leaders and policymakers around the world. He was an editor of the journal Race and Class, contributing editor of Middle East Report and L'Economiste du Tiers Monde, co-founder of Pakistan Forum, and an editorial board member of Arab Studies Quarterly. Ahmad was "that rare thing, an intellectual unintimidated by power or authority, a companion in arms to such diverse figures as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Richard Falk, Fred Jameson, Alexander Cockburn and Daniel Berrigan."
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 on May 11, 1999, of heart failure following surgery for colon cancer, diagnosed just one week before.
http://web.archive.org/web/2009102617...
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
December 18, 2013
AN EXTRAORDINARY MAN
Eqbal Ahmad, to the best of my knowledge, never published a single book during his eventful life despite producing a great many essays for publication in journals, newspapers and periodicals. It was only after he had died of a heart attack during an operation for cancer that three of his former students Carollee Bengelsdorf, Margaret Cerullo and Yogesh Chandrani collected together a selection of his writings for publication. I didn't need to get far into this book before I felt an immense amount of gratitude for their efforts, Eqbal offers the reader a unique view, crisp and clear analysis of the 20th century world, his particular focus being on the 3rd world in which he travelled widely.
Born into a village in Bihar (India) in 1933 (or 1934 he never knew which) Eqbal was a boy of around 13 when the chaotic partition of India occurred. Separated from his brothers and mother (his father had been murdered in his presence over disputed land when he was a young boy) he made the hazardous 1000 mile journey to Pakistan himself on foot. After graduating with a degree in Economics he enjoyed a very brief career in the Pakistani military before enrolling in a University in the United States. After then his eventful life included joining the FLN anti-colonial struggle in Algeria but refusing a government post after independence, a time as an active and vocal campaigner against the Vietnam War, a spell in jail awaiting trial for his alleged part in a plan to kidnap Henry Kissinger (the jury threw it out of court). As well as this he had a full academic life, and indeed at the time of his death he was working on an ambitious and much need project to open a secular University in Pakistan which was to be called Khaldunia after the 14th Century North African Muslim polymath Ibn Khaldûn.
The 54 essays collected in this volume cover an astonishing range of topics, from his experience as an advisor on Gillo Pontecorvo landmark film "The Battle Of Algiers" to an unorthodox obituary for Richard Nixon. The book begins with a short foreward by Noam Chomsky. The essays themselves are collected under ten headings and each is put into context by means of short introduction by the editors mentioned above: (i) Revolutionary War and Counter-Insurgency; (ii) Third World Politics: Pathologies of Power, Pathologies of Resistance; (iii) The Cold War from the Standpoint of its Victims; (vi) After the Cold War: Worlds of Pain; (v) The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: Colonization in the Era of Decolonisation; (vi) Partition and Independence (India); (vii) On Jinnah (Founder of Pakistan); (viii) Pakistan's Military; (ix) Afghanistan & (x) Pakistan: The Return of the Generals.
His writing is striking for dealing with all those topics with an ever present sense of humanity, and despite the apparently dry nature of the headings listed above his writing reflects a warm, inclusive man with an ever present sense of humour which he brings to the darkest of events as well as a sense of culture often absent from political writings. His writings on the West's flirtation with Islamic Fundamentalism which he consistently opposed, especially in relation to Afghanistan in the late 1970's and 80's and the American support for General Zia-ul-Haq who promoted Islamists to provide a base for his unpopular regime. One 1988 essay is remarkably prophetic in that he warns the U.S. of the dangers that their "Jihadi chickens will eventually come home to roost", which as we now know is exactly what happened one day in September 2001. As someone who was born into the Muslim tradition and spent a many of his formative years in a predominantly Muslim country (Pakistan) his criticism of Islamists carries far more credibility than a good deal of the current outpouring that fraudulently postulates that the recent phenomena of Islamic Fundamentalism is implicit in the Muslim Religion, and denies the rich history and lived experience that have made up 1400 years of Islam.
His writing on Revolutionary Movements and Decolonisation is remarkable for the acuteness of his analysis, and his honest appraisal of what went wrong subsequently in so many of the newly "independent" states. He neither spares the Colonial Legacy (the Legacy to Pakistan was a Bureaucracy, an Army and nothing else) nor the limitations and failures of subsequent political elites. With regard to the United States he covers the vast panoply of post war interventions across the world, examining each one in its own context and providing a rich and rational commentary on them. His reading of Kissinger is brilliant and deservedly acid, he susses out the short comings of Samuel Huntingdon way back in the 70's when he was an assistant to Kissinger and long before his reductionist The Clash of Civilizations became flavour of the month.
I can't recommend this writer enough, the range of his knowledge and interests, his humour and his analysis are awesome and still immensely relevant even a decade after his death. Read him, you will never see the world in quite the same way again.
Eqbal Ahmad, to the best of my knowledge, never published a single book during his eventful life despite producing a great many essays for publication in journals, newspapers and periodicals. It was only after he had died of a heart attack during an operation for cancer that three of his former students Carollee Bengelsdorf, Margaret Cerullo and Yogesh Chandrani collected together a selection of his writings for publication. I didn't need to get far into this book before I felt an immense amount of gratitude for their efforts, Eqbal offers the reader a unique view, crisp and clear analysis of the 20th century world, his particular focus being on the 3rd world in which he travelled widely.
Born into a village in Bihar (India) in 1933 (or 1934 he never knew which) Eqbal was a boy of around 13 when the chaotic partition of India occurred. Separated from his brothers and mother (his father had been murdered in his presence over disputed land when he was a young boy) he made the hazardous 1000 mile journey to Pakistan himself on foot. After graduating with a degree in Economics he enjoyed a very brief career in the Pakistani military before enrolling in a University in the United States. After then his eventful life included joining the FLN anti-colonial struggle in Algeria but refusing a government post after independence, a time as an active and vocal campaigner against the Vietnam War, a spell in jail awaiting trial for his alleged part in a plan to kidnap Henry Kissinger (the jury threw it out of court). As well as this he had a full academic life, and indeed at the time of his death he was working on an ambitious and much need project to open a secular University in Pakistan which was to be called Khaldunia after the 14th Century North African Muslim polymath Ibn Khaldûn.
The 54 essays collected in this volume cover an astonishing range of topics, from his experience as an advisor on Gillo Pontecorvo landmark film "The Battle Of Algiers" to an unorthodox obituary for Richard Nixon. The book begins with a short foreward by Noam Chomsky. The essays themselves are collected under ten headings and each is put into context by means of short introduction by the editors mentioned above: (i) Revolutionary War and Counter-Insurgency; (ii) Third World Politics: Pathologies of Power, Pathologies of Resistance; (iii) The Cold War from the Standpoint of its Victims; (vi) After the Cold War: Worlds of Pain; (v) The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: Colonization in the Era of Decolonisation; (vi) Partition and Independence (India); (vii) On Jinnah (Founder of Pakistan); (viii) Pakistan's Military; (ix) Afghanistan & (x) Pakistan: The Return of the Generals.
His writing is striking for dealing with all those topics with an ever present sense of humanity, and despite the apparently dry nature of the headings listed above his writing reflects a warm, inclusive man with an ever present sense of humour which he brings to the darkest of events as well as a sense of culture often absent from political writings. His writings on the West's flirtation with Islamic Fundamentalism which he consistently opposed, especially in relation to Afghanistan in the late 1970's and 80's and the American support for General Zia-ul-Haq who promoted Islamists to provide a base for his unpopular regime. One 1988 essay is remarkably prophetic in that he warns the U.S. of the dangers that their "Jihadi chickens will eventually come home to roost", which as we now know is exactly what happened one day in September 2001. As someone who was born into the Muslim tradition and spent a many of his formative years in a predominantly Muslim country (Pakistan) his criticism of Islamists carries far more credibility than a good deal of the current outpouring that fraudulently postulates that the recent phenomena of Islamic Fundamentalism is implicit in the Muslim Religion, and denies the rich history and lived experience that have made up 1400 years of Islam.
His writing on Revolutionary Movements and Decolonisation is remarkable for the acuteness of his analysis, and his honest appraisal of what went wrong subsequently in so many of the newly "independent" states. He neither spares the Colonial Legacy (the Legacy to Pakistan was a Bureaucracy, an Army and nothing else) nor the limitations and failures of subsequent political elites. With regard to the United States he covers the vast panoply of post war interventions across the world, examining each one in its own context and providing a rich and rational commentary on them. His reading of Kissinger is brilliant and deservedly acid, he susses out the short comings of Samuel Huntingdon way back in the 70's when he was an assistant to Kissinger and long before his reductionist The Clash of Civilizations became flavour of the month.
I can't recommend this writer enough, the range of his knowledge and interests, his humour and his analysis are awesome and still immensely relevant even a decade after his death. Read him, you will never see the world in quite the same way again.
October 26, 2007
one of the most brilliant men i've ever read. his profound knowledge of conflict in the third world, in india, pakistan, algeirs and vietnam offers his readers a clear understanding of the politics in third world progress.
arundhati roy said it best:
"Eqbal Ahmad is a brilliant man with brilliant insights. My only complaint about him is that he is not here now, when we need him most."
arundhati roy said it best:
"Eqbal Ahmad is a brilliant man with brilliant insights. My only complaint about him is that he is not here now, when we need him most."
November 19, 2024
Please don't mistake the 3 stars as an indication of the quality of Eqbal's writing and brilliance. This is a dense collection of essays and for me personally, some essays, more than others, really stuck with me.
It was not my first time reading Terrorism: Theirs and Ours , but I enjoyed the re-read regardless. Eqbal Ahmad challenges the Western double-standards when it comes to terrorism and how it is defined. We must all consider the broader historical and geopolitical contexts that give rise to violence and how this is not something that can be resolved using more violence. Terrorism is a deeply political matter and it requires political and humane solutions. NOT military intervention.
An Address in Gaza cut to the point. The tragedy of Palestine is that it became colonized at the dawn of decolonization. Eqbal was brilliant enough to identify and call out the deadly combination of wealth but weakness, material resources but moral bankruptcy in the Arab world when it comes to the question of Palestine.
I really loved the Post-partition essays and how Eqbal could tell that both Pakistan and India failed to learn any lessons from the partition itself.
It was not my first time reading Terrorism: Theirs and Ours , but I enjoyed the re-read regardless. Eqbal Ahmad challenges the Western double-standards when it comes to terrorism and how it is defined. We must all consider the broader historical and geopolitical contexts that give rise to violence and how this is not something that can be resolved using more violence. Terrorism is a deeply political matter and it requires political and humane solutions. NOT military intervention.
An Address in Gaza cut to the point. The tragedy of Palestine is that it became colonized at the dawn of decolonization. Eqbal was brilliant enough to identify and call out the deadly combination of wealth but weakness, material resources but moral bankruptcy in the Arab world when it comes to the question of Palestine.
I really loved the Post-partition essays and how Eqbal could tell that both Pakistan and India failed to learn any lessons from the partition itself.
February 7, 2017
Superb, a real eye-opener. A review of contemporary history and politics in the Third World from c. 1960-1999, from a Third World perspective and by a prescient, sophisitcated analyst who thinks outside the First World box.
January 7, 2010
"Revolutionary Warfare: How to Tell When the Rebels Have Won" is a good example of the fascinating lessons from the Algerian Revolution in this handbook of guerilla warfare.
Another highlight is "The Making of The Battle of Algiers." Eqbal Ahmad helped research the script and was present during the filming of "The Battle of Algiers." This section is an edited transcript of a lecture about the making of that seminal '60s film that he gave at Hampshire College in 1998.
I bought a videotape of "The Battle of Algiers" from The Bookshelf liquidation sale and it is a revelation to see it again in the context of the War in Iraq.
Another highlight is "The Making of The Battle of Algiers." Eqbal Ahmad helped research the script and was present during the filming of "The Battle of Algiers." This section is an edited transcript of a lecture about the making of that seminal '60s film that he gave at Hampshire College in 1998.
I bought a videotape of "The Battle of Algiers" from The Bookshelf liquidation sale and it is a revelation to see it again in the context of the War in Iraq.
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December 30, 2012Read several taimes and coming back again.Brcause the line,way Eqbal talks in the way is diffrent from mine.I talks more close to Franz Fanon.But Eqbal was with Fanon past.In that point I have to remain,keep remenber the breath,to real communicate.
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September 30, 2010i love him!
November 11, 2024
An extraordinary thinker and an inspiring human being .. this compilation of his life's work is truly a treasure.
November 26, 2014
A must read for any curious citizen of the world!
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews