Eqbal Ahmed - As I Knew Him

Thank you sir for sharing with us, this part of a great man`s life.

Faisal

What a man of conviction, what a giant among pygmies, what a crusader, Dr. Ekbal Ahmed was. What was that Iqbal line---- HazaarouN saal nargis apni bay-noori pay roati hay?

regards

Prof. Hoodhboy:

Thank you for your moving words. I had the pleasure of meeting Dr Eqbal a number of times in the mid-1980s, a time when we were looking for a way to rid ourselves of Gen. Zia. You describe him just as I remember him: always patient, listening, and a man, who to us college students, was a source of inspiration and wisdom. Dr. Eqbal changed the way I viewed Pakistan. Here I was, a third generation émigré with no links to the country, yet Dr Eqbal and his friends helped me strengthen that tenuous connection.

The last time I met him was in the early 1990s and his concern for our rudderless country was unchanged. There are few people in this world who have the courage of their convictions - Dr. Eqbal was one of them. I gave in to the call of ``professional growth`` and regret my weakness. But I live with the hope that there are more people out there, like Dr. Eqbal and yourself, who will act as the conscience of a nation that has never seemed as clueless as it is today. Please don`t let his legacy die.

A fine farewell from Pervez Hoodbhoy to whom I consider as one of the three greatest Pakistanis
after Jinnah. Dr. Eqbal Ahmed, along with Faiz
Ahmed Faiz and Dr. Salam were all true Internationalists who were globalists before their
time.
And Yes, I too consider myself a part of the ``Clan`` via remote. Not having the good fortune
of meeting this Leader of intellectuals who rose
to the occasion in the 1960`s and 70`s, I am well
aware of this ``Clan`` through ``The Pakistan Progressive`` that use to come out till almost
the middle of the 1980`s.
I admit that when I first talked to one of the founders of CHOWK, I decided to join in because I
was hoping that the old Progressive could be revived.
Dr. Feroz Ahmed whom we lost too early in life
was also a member. Dr Aijaz Ahmed has made his choice with which I do not agree (He moved to
India, I believe?. Hasan Gardezi, Hamza Alvi and
the list goes on. And Najam Sethi?
All people who believed in people and not the ruling elite of Pakistan. All who considered Fascism as the enemy of us all.
Interesting story about Eqbal Ahmed recently revealed by Khald Hasan in The News. He had the
audacity of calling Eqbal ``A Man For Seasons``.
Khalid Hasan has made his own Journey through many seasons and I will not continue on that, but what
was interesting is that in the early 70`s he came
across a request from Eqbal to meet Z. A. Bhutto.
The request was ignored by Bhutto which Khalid interpreted to mean that it was Eqbal`s stand
on behalf of the Bengalis (Bangladeshis) against
the Pakistan Army that got him this cold shoulder.
I interpret this differently. I believe that Bhutto was intimidated by people more intelligent then himself and more worldly. Eqbal`s appearence
may have reminded him that he was to meet not an equal but a giant. And Bhutto hated reminders of
this nature.
And last but not least, what is this about these
Pakistanis who are welcome everywhere in the world
but Pakistan (Faiz, Salam and Eqbal) that they leave us with with this strange habit of NOT GIVING UP THEIR PAKISTANI PASSPORTS?

Ras

PS: Again thank you Pervez Hoodbhoy for this writing that means a lot to some people around the world.

Pervez,

My sincere condolences at a tragic personal loss for you and the rest of Dr. Ahmed`s family and friends, and for the rest of us who believe. Thank you for an extremely sincere epitaph that taught people like me (who know very little of people such as the late Dr. Eqbal Ahmed) far more than the work and life of one man.

Umair

Re Wasiq

Thank you for your candour.

I met Eqbal ahmed once after an academic meeting. He came across as the gentlest, kindest, warmest and friendliest people I have ever met. I will never forget him. I got interested and read his work and found him articulate, insightful.

Like you said none of us our perfect, and our different experiences with Eqbal speak to that.

I feel a great sense of loss at his death. He was truly a remarkable human being.

``painful, bloody painful`` write-up PH. Should`ve taken more writing courses at MIT, eh mate.

Khaled Ahmed`s Ten Great Pakistanis

Khaled Ahmad`s following tribute to ten great Pakistanis is worth commending. Although many of us may not fully agree with his list, he has simply identified his ``personal`` favorites. Interestingly, this list does not include any politician, army chief, bureaucrat, sportsman/sportswomen, musician, artist, feudal lord, businessperson, educationist, doctor/engineer, etc.

What role does geography play in such a selection? Can you identify a better list of ``Ten Great/Greatest Pakistanis``?

Regards, Bilal Ahmad

The Friday Times, Lahore

August 13, 1999

My personal `Ten great Pakistanis

Khaled Ahmed



At the end of the century and millennium and Pakistan`s half-century, one often feels like summing up. I have frequently asked my friends to name the ten great Pakistanis they thought deserved to be celebrated in the year 2000, and they have come up with interesting lists. The lists of course reveal more the selector than anything else. In my case too my personal bias will be obvious. I leave out the `obvious` great persons like Jinnah and Allama Iqbal because their status is higher than my presumption to select. The list I have compiled reads like this:

Ashiq Hussain Batalvi (Historian)

Ghulam Ahmad Parvez (Scholar)

Sibte Hassan (Thinker)

Ali Abbas Jalalpuri (Philosopher)

Faiz Ahmad Faiz (Poet)

Saadat Hassan Manto (Writer)

Abdus Salam (Scientist)

Akhtar Hameed Khan (Social Worker)

Abdus Sattar Edhi (Social Worker)

Asma Jehangir (Lawyer)



I grew up in Lahore reading the polemic between the rationalist interpreter of the Quran, Ghulam Ahmad Parvez, and the orthodox scholar, Maulana Maududi. In the 1950s, religious debates did not end in apostatisation. Tulu-ul-Islam of Parvez and Tarjumanul Quran of Maududi were the two journals that engaged each other in disputation. I have admired Maududi for his scholarship which no one has since surpassed, but I was converted to rationalism by Parvez`s Maqam-e-Hadith. Later in life I was to be enlightened by his interpretation of the Quran through his famous Letters and his magnum opus Lughatul Quran, a work on the etymology of the words of the Quran. I am saddened by the fact that today he is considered a heretic and his books have been seized in Kuwait.



Over the years I have grown to admire the wisdom of Maulana Waheeduddin of India because I think that wisdom too is the domain of the ulema, not only `warning` and `correction`. The ulema have usually written on the Quran for an inner audience and very few have cared to index the Holy Book properly for the common reader. I have to pay tribute here to journalist Zahid Malik for his epoch-making Mazaminul Quran, an arrangement of topics according to a comprehensive alphabetic arrangement of themes. Another work, Index-cum-Concordance for the Holy Quran, by Khan Bahadur Altaf Ahmed Kherie of India adorns my library along with the tafseer books of Sir Syed, Maulana Islahi, Maududi and Waheeduddin.



Ashiq Hussain Batalvi is undoubtedly the greatest historian in my view on the basis of his classic, Allama Iqbal kay Akhri do sal, his three volumes on the Pakistan Movement, and his most entertaining sketches of the personalities of the years prior to the creation of Pakistan. He was Allama Iqbal`s secretary when the great poet was running the Punjab Muslim League under the Unionist rule. His book on Allama Iqbal is actually Punjab`s history from 1900 onwards when the Land Alienation Act was imposed on the province. His inside stories about how some of the great personalities of the Pakistani pantheon looked to their personal profit rather than the cause of the Muslims read like offending apocrypha. His eye-witness accounts, backed by documents which he tracked down in London`s India Library, give proof of his natural historian`s instinct. He wrote a beautiful style and knew his Persian well. In the 1950s, his writings angered the Muslim League leaders of Punjab, which forced him to live in exile in London. Pakistani historian, Ayesha Jalal, close to being my `great` Pakistani, has read him avidly. Another historian in exile, K.K. Aziz, living in London these days, reminds me of Ashiq Hussain Batalvi.

Faiz Ahmad Faiz was in the classical tradition, a votary of Iqbal when his fellow-progressives thought him reactionary. If Iqbal represents masculine assertion of power against tyranny, Faiz represents an almost feminine resistance, which lends lyricism to his verse. Despite critic Fateh Muhammad Malik`s right-wing critique, Faiz is a poet who grows on you as you mature, like Ghalib. Faiz and Sibte Hassan were twice guests in my apartment in Moscow in 1972. Later in Lahore, I spent magic moments with him in the Lahore Gymkhana room of Dr Imdad Husain, a Faiz-lover, when Faiz talked to me about his great, much-married father Sultan Muhammad Khan, mir munshi of Amir Abdur Rehman of Afghanistan, a historian and finally Afghan ambassador to Great Britain. Like Pasternak, Faiz eclipsed his legitimately great father.

Sibte Hassan was to be Pakistan`s great writer of the history of ideas. His Pakistan mein tehzeeb ka irtiqa is my favourite, but he went on to write several volumes on the history of ideas of the world from a secular perspective. Like Faiz, he was not hostile to the right-wing classics of the past and showed great reverence to religious scholars if he thought them original, as in the case of Maulana Abdul Majid Daryabadi, whose comprehensive account has now been written by my friend Tehseen Firaqi. In Hassan Zaheer`s book on the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case, Sibte is the mysterious man who drove up to Pindi with Faiz, but then went on to Peshawar instead of going to the fateful meeting with General Akbar Khan. Sibte was editor of Lail-o-Nihar weekly in Lahore and wrote a style in Urdu that I loved. He belonged in the bilingual tradition of Iqbal and Faiz and was perhaps the most learned man among the Muslim Communists of India.



Ali Abbas Jalalpuri comes close to being the history of ideas man like Sibte and that forgotten author Bari Alig. After his death all his 15 books have come in the market. I first read his Punjabi Wahdatul wujud tey Punjabi shaeri and was taken aback by his knowledge of civilisation. His Iqbal ka ilm-e-kalam convinced me of his grounding in philosophy. It is perhaps the best critical work on Iqbal`s understanding of Western philosophy and Oriental wisdom. Another favourite of mine is his Maqamat-e-Waris Shah on the great Punjabi classic, the best so far on the theme. His Ruh-e-asar and Aam fikri mughaltay confirm his greatness in my eyes. In his last days, Jalalpuri, who began his career in Gujrat like Safdar Mir, became a recluse in his village, ignoring the fact that his work was no longer available to the public.



Akhtar Hameed Khan belongs in the realm of service, in company with late Hakim Said, Imran Khan and Abdus Sattar Edhi. He began by leaving the revered ICS cadre of civil servants and devoting himself to rural welfare. The success of rural development in Bangladesh today is owed to his seminal cooperatives movement which he began in East Pakistan in the Comilla district, and for which he is worshipped by the Bangladeshis. After 1970, he began working in Karachi where his Orangi Project is now known all over the world and is an inspiration to dozens of other housing projects in Karachi and Hyderabad. He lectured in Harvard on rural development and has an intellectual world view encompassing Islamic philosophy and world economics.



Abdus Sattar Edhi is comparable to Akhtar Hameed Khan and also late Hakim Said in his organisational ability. Edhi sits in the middle of a vast international charity empire clad in rags and speaking a dialect that enhances his individualism. He is the darling of the donors because of his organisational talent and collects crores of rupees annually in a poor country without trying too much. Like Akhtar Hameed Khan, he is known all over the world as an activist of charity, but he is far more dramatic because of his humble origin. His political views are at times quite naive, like those of late Hakim Said and Imran Khan, but his work speaks louder than his statements.



The greatness of Prof Abdus Salam, in my view, lay in his genius to transcend the village environment where he grew up in Punjab in a humble family. In Government College Lahore he was penalised by principal Prof Siraj for attending a Nobel Laureates` conference in India, which was just as well because that made Salam go to Cambridge for doctorates in Maths and Physics, joining the world coterie of scientists on the cutting edge of theoretical discovery. As a Nobel Laureate he emerged as an accomplished public speaker, an adept of the Islamic heritage of science, greatly sought after in the Islamic world as a lecturer. At a UAE forum, he faulted Ibn Khaldun for decrying the renaissance of Muslim Age of Reason in Spain. He affirmed his identity of a Pakistani when he patronised Pakistani young scientists at his institute in Trieste. A stamp commemorating him is Pakistan`s tribute to the great man although the orthodoxy rejects him.



Saadat Hassan Manto`s complete works are out and anyone who is in doubt about the greatness of this prose-writer of Urdu should look at him in entirety. As a lover of prose, I cannot think of anyone in contemporary Urdu literature who wrote with better awareness of the Urdu idiom, except perhaps Daud Rehbar in his famous Kalchar key ruhani anasir and Salamo-Payam, his collection of letters. As a Punjabi, he proved once again that Urdu doesn`t only belong in Delhi and Lucknow. His short stories are among the best in world literature although he was prosecuted for obscenity for writing some of them. He was not a gentle writer. His account of his days in Lahore and Bombay are personal sketches flecked with acid assessments, except in the case of Shyam and Ashok Kumar who must therefore have been extraordinary people.



Last but not least, the great living Pakistani is Asma Jehangir, a Lahore lawyer who has led the human rights movement in Pakistan, surviving the dictatorship of General Zia and the environment of religious extremism that has followed his rule. She has provided legal protection to woman who suffer under a misinterpreted Islamic order and speaks out for the rights of the minorities under the Constitution. Her survival is crucial to the protection of people`s rights in Pakistan. I simply can`t imagine a human rights movement in the country without her, a fact that has been recognised by the world community and the Geneva-based Human Rights Commission. The numerous international awards she has received guarantee her status within a country where the orthodoxy and the right-wing press have actually dubbed her an apostate.

__________

Bilal`s P.S.: I must admit my ignorance, I was not aware of Dr. Eqbal Ahmad until I read some of his obituaries.

Dr Hoodbhoy, I`d barely heard of Eqbal Ahmed before I read your article. I look forward to reading him now; he seems like an excellent human being.

Aamir

Eqbal Ahmad was a man of unmatched intellect and honour. I am proud be an alumnus of Textile Istitute of Pakistan, whose founding chancellor was EA. Those interested in reading EA`s works, should read CONFRONTING EMPIRE: Interviews by David Barsamian.
Also, there is a collection of his newspaper columns (I am forgetting its name) out in the market. The above article by PH is the book`s foreword.