A Civilizing Mission (Page 3)

One senses that Ahmad was deeply sensitive to the waning influence of radical secular politics in the Muslim world, where Islamists increasingly led the opposition to military regimes that had betrayed the dream of independence from colonialism. It may well have been this concern that led him to return, shortly before his death in 1999, to Pakistan, where he hoped to build a university that would teach the humanities. It was to be called Khaldunia University, after the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), whom UN General Secretary Kofi Annan described as "a globalist long before the age of globalization." (When Annan said that, he was delivering the first Eqbal Ahmad lecture at Hampshire College. Annan was no doubt also thinking of Ahmad when he reminded his audience that Khaldun had "argued that civilizations decline when they lose their capacity to comprehend and absorb change, and that 'the greatest of scholars err when they ignore the environment in which history unfolds.'") Alas, Khaldunia University was never built; according to The Economist's obituary of Ahmad, he "died before a rupee was raised for it."

Even if his dream had come to fruition, it is hard to imagine Ahmad running a university. He was too much the congenital outsider. Ahmad's independence from institutions and political parties allowed him to deliver criticism to those least inclined to listen, and it might have been the reason why he earned the trust of statesmen and revolutionaries throughout the Third World. A critic of power rather than an intellectual seeking power, he turned his weakness into a source of strength.

This past summer, Robin Varghese, a former student of Ahmad's at Hampshire, recounted a story to me that he had heard his teacher tell in class. When Ahmad was in his 20s, he received a Rotary fellowship to come to the United States for further studies. He knew that he wanted to see four things when he left the subcontinent. Three of those four sites he visited en route to this country. He went to the Highgate Cemetery in London to pay homage to Karl Marx; he also visited 21B Baker Street, for its well-known literary landmark; and he wandered through the British Museum, where his reaction was "Return the loot!" The fourth place that Ahmad wanted to visit was in the United States, in Chicago, and it was the site of the Haymarket riot of 1886. Ahmad wanted to go there because, as a boy, he had been taken to May Day celebrations in India. He now wanted to lay flowers at the Haymarket monument to honor the striking workers who had marched in the first May Day parade.

But several years were to pass before he could visit Chicago. He had arrived in the United States in 1957 to study history at Occidental College; a year later he enrolled at Princeton as a graduate student in political science and Middle East history. His research then took him to Tunisia, an even further detour from Chicago. It was not until 1967, during his three-year stint as a teacher at Cornell, that Ahmad found himself giving a job talk in the city where in 1886 laboring men and women had fought to win the eight-hour workday. He left his hotel, picked up a bouquet of flowers and, when he arrived at Haymarket, asked where he could find the monument. No one seemed to know of it. Finally someone pointed it out to him. It was a statue of a policeman who had preserved law and order on that day long ago. Ahmad brought the flowers back with him and gave them to his girlfriend, Julie Diamond, who eventually became his wife.

In 1968, in a speech at an antiwar sit-in, Ahmad, who was now a fellow at the Adlai Stevenson Institute in Chicago, spoke of his search for the Haymarket monument. He told the audience how shocked he had been that the historical memory of workers' resistance, recognized and celebrated throughout the world, had not been honored in its own place of origin. Not long after, two FBI agents showed up at Ahmad's door. They wanted to know what he had said about Haymarket and who had been in the audience. It turned out that the Weathermen had just blown up the offending statue of the Chicago policeman.

"I am inclined to tell stories," Eqbal Ahmad had once said, and, in one of his interviews, he offered a vignette about the visit from the two FBI agents:

They first asked me if I was a citizen of the United States. I said, "No." They said, "Don't you feel that as a guest in this country you should not be going about criticizing the host country's government?" I said, "I hear your point, but I do want you to know that while I am not a citizen, I am a taxpayer. And I thought it was a fundamental principle of American democracy that there is no taxation without representation. I have not been represented about this war. And my people, Asian people, are being bombed right now." Surprisingly, the FBI agents looked deeply moved and blushed at my throwing this argument at them. They were speechless. Then I understood something about the importance of having some congruence between American liberal traditions...and our rhetoric and tactics."

The story is revealing of Ahmad's cunning in a delicate situation, and of his sly talent for turning experience into political fable. But it also suggests his humanity, his belief in the power of reason to persuade and to elicit empathy. People like Ahmad do not come along often. That is why the publication of his Selected Writings is an occasion for sorrow as well as celebration.

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