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Published in The Muslim News (London); 27 October, 2000 (No: 138), p 12. |
The World according to a Muslim Secularist
Eqbal
Ahmad: Confronting Empire. Interviews with David Barsamian. Pluto Press, London, 2000. Pp. 177.
ISBN 0-7453-1713-8.
Eqbal Ahmad,
the Pakistani-American academic and activist, to whose memory this work is
dedicated, was a living embodiment of the courage, compassion and commitment of
the secularist intellect. Throughout his nomadic life, Ahmad confronted power,
championed universal causes and challenged the ideologies of dominance and
exploitation. He was in Algeria during the early sixties where he joined the
National Liberation Front and worked with Franz Fanon; he was an outspoken
critic of the War in Vietnam and was even indicted, together with anti-war
Catholic priests Daniel and Phillip Berrigan and others, on the charges of
‘conspiracy to kidnap Henry Kissinger’; and his involvement with the
Palestinian struggle was unswerving and lifelong. Attaining notoriety as the guru
of the Third-World left, he articulated its aspirations in various radical
journals but ultimately came to belong to the select crowd of nonconformist
celebrities like Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Alexander Cockburn and the rest.
After his retirement in 1997, Ahmad settled permanently in Pakistan and even
had the ambition to establish an independent university named Khaldunia (The
land granted to him in the early 1990’s was reportedly seized by Asif Zardari,
Benazir Bhutto’s ‘feudal lord’ and husband). Eqbal Ahmad passed away on May 11,
1999.
Though an
academic and an intellectual, Eqbal Ahmad’s peculiar brand of ideational
sharpness and analytical acumen found its full rein only in political
challenges. His was essentially an activist’s vision and his thought shows
every trace of the existential involvement, the concrete specificity of the
historical moment, that elicits his intellectual response. Not surprisingly,
his bibliography is comprised almost exclusively of terse retorts, brief
statements and rapid flashes of insight that are all lacking in sustained
thought and extended reflection. In fact, Edward Said, who in this volume
supplies an extremely warm and generous, but also insightful and revealing,
portrait of his close friend Eqbal, laments that though Eqbal wrote ‘a great
deal, scattered, in his typically thoughtless way, all over the globe in
articles, scholarly pieces, journalistic interventions, and interviews’, he did
not author any ‘big book’.
Part of the
reason for this, according to Said, was that Eqbal ‘could never resist being
interviewed.’ Thus, ‘wherever he went, he was surrounded by people with tape
recorders and notepads, anxious to have one-on-one with him. Trying to get
Eqbal to act like a professional was like trying to plow the sea. It was
hopeless.’ Eqbal was not unaware of his failings and he sought Said’s counsel.
Unfortunately, however, before he could comply with Said’s solicitation ‘not to
leave his words scattered to the winds, or even recorded on tape, but collected
and published in several volumes for everyone to read’, he died. It is all the
more gratifying therefore that David Barsamian has produced this volume where
Eqbal Ahmad’s provoking ideas are brought together, befittingly in a series of
intimate and wide-ranging conversations, in order to provide a genuine insight
into the mind and passions of this gifted thinker and incurable activist.
Eqbal Ahmad
is affectionately described as ‘a genius at sympathy’, and there’s no doubt
that he was a man possessed by the demands of universal solidarity and torn by
his compassion for the oppressed. Nevertheless, his was an anti-imperialist
worldview, acquired through the perspective of the marginalized and the
dispossessed, that allowed him to express the obscenity of global zulm (tyranny),
with full comprehension of its mechanics, in the most economical and
unsentimental of languages: ‘For three hundred years before the twentieth
century dawned, the world had been transforming, a transformation brought about
by modern science, technology and imperialism. It was through the age of
capitalist and European expansion that a world system came to be dominated by
the West and the international market came to be controlled entirely for the
West’s benefit. This sounds rather benign, as though the free market was really
free and worked to the advantage of the fittest. Far from it; Western
domination was achieved by force so widespread, institutionalized, and
legitimized by religion and morality that to date the epistemology of this
universal violence still shapes relations between the Western and non-Western
worlds.’ In fact, Ahmad kept on reminding the West that imperialism was at the
heart of its ‘civilizing mission’, that its historical project too entailed a
unity of din and dawla, or that the West without the empire would
not be the West at all. Further, he asserted that though there is great
emphasis in Western gospel on rationalism, democracy, liberalism and
enlightenment etc., the role of imperialism in the shaping of the West’s identity
and civilization is conveniently left out. That the same argument has been
pursued, in greater detail and with greater fervour, by Edward Said merely
testifies to the ideological and intellectual affinity that exist between these
two thinkers.
Eqbal Ahmad,
however, was not a glib anti-Western rhetorician whose ideology was devoid of
all political plans and moral imperatives for engaging with history. Nor was
his indictment of the pathology of power in the non-Western world, of the
beneficiaries of Empire as it were, any less severe. And he had a genuine
loathing for all the ideologies of hate and separation; nationalism,
sectarianism, fundamentalism and the rest. Nevertheless, as a true Marxist,
Eqbal was not willing to renounce the category of ‘class’. For instance,
recounting Malcom X’s experience of Hajj, which profoundly altered his
colour-consciousness and race-centred perception of the world, Eqbal opines:
‘what he (Malcom) was not fully grasping was that another kind of division was
already there – the division of class – which is obliterated during that short
pilgrimage during which nobody is allowed to ask, “Are you rich or
poor?”.’ For all this, and
notwithstanding his self-proclaimed secularism, Eqbal finds himself drawn
towards, emotionally if not intellectually, all the respectable Muslim causes.
His rage at Naipaul’s chicanery and affectation, in connection with the
latter’s depiction of Zia-ul-Haq’s Pakistan in Among the Believers, is
genuine, just as his analysis of the current Western mania for the
‘demonization of Islam’ is both cogent and anguished.
Ahmad
describes his own politics as being ‘socialist and democratic’, but defines its
content as: ‘By democratic, I mean genuine commitment to equality, freedom of
association, critical thought and the accountability of rulers to citizens. By
socialism, I mean control of wealth by the people rather than by the state or
by corporations.’ Certainly, these commitments are not incompatible with the
ideals of Islam – even if the concept of a ‘people’ - and its wealth - that is
independent of the state is naïve and self-contradictory! Similarly, Eqbal
claims that he is ‘very harshly secular’, but limits it to the functional
separation of state and church and to the equality of all citizens. He does not
seem to subscribe to the kind of philosophical and metaphysical secularism that
posits a materialistic explanation of ‘all that is’ and acquires the trappings
of a doctrine. In other words, even Eqbal´s ‘harsh secularism’ is not
inherently and incontrovertibly ‘un-Islamic’. It is ironic therefore that when
he takes a circuitous rout, through Fanon, to come to the insight about ‘the
importance of resistance, of struggle in the discovery of one’s own and the
other’s humanity, of coming into the fullness of collective self’, he appears
to be articulating nothing but the Islamic ideal of jihad! That a man of
Eqbal Ahmad’s intellect, compassion and humanity found no indigenous discourse
within which to express his hopes and pains, that he discovered no ‘Islamic’
platform for proclaiming his solidarity with fellow humans existing beyond the
ideological prison of his own ‘history’ – though his faith endorsed, nay
encouraged, it – is a grim reminder of the inhospitality of traditional
discourses to humanitarian conscience. The failure however was not his but
ours.
ends