[Originally published in The Climax.]
November 12 marked the tenth anniversary of Hampshire College’s annual Eqbal Ahmad lecture. The series, established in honor of Ahmad’s 1997 retirement from Hampshire after fifteen years of teaching, has previously welcomed speakers including Kofi Annan, Judith Butler, and Noam Chomsky. This year’s speaker was Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi. While Ahmad himself died in Pakistan in 1999, many in the Hampshire community and beyond still remember him fondly.
“The images that stand out most clearly in my mind,” Noam Chomsky said, “are his calm and thoughtful and eminently reasonable reactions even in the face of horrors that among others evoked reactions of violence and despair that were emotionally valid, and that he appreciated and sympathetically understood, but that he could perceive would be catastrophic in their human consequences. That’s a rare gift.”
Chomsky remembered a claim by Ahmad that a certain Johnson Administration official deserved to be charged with war crimes. “I was intrigued and looked into the rich documentary record and found that Eqbal was, as usual, not only accurate but quite measured in his observation,” Chomsky said. “But what I learned most about from Eqbal concerned the realities of life and struggle in the Third World, the pitfalls and the opportunities.”
Professor Michael Klare also noted Ahmad’s status as a preeminent scholar of the Third World. “This was the height of the Cold War and politics was about the U.S., Europe, and the Soviet Union,” Klare said. “That’s all we knew anything about. We knew nothing about the Middle East. None of us would know anything about the difference between Sunnis and Shi’ites or about the varieties of Islam in the developing world. He taught us about the complexities of the developing world in a way that few other scholars at the time could do. I think that was his other great contribution and that also of course is deeply relevant today.”
Klare was one of the first Hampshire community members to know Ahmad. They first met when Klare was in graduate school in New York City in the sixties. Ahmad eventually became his Ph.D. advisor and they worked together at the Institute for Policy Studies before both arrived at Hampshire in the early eighties.
“Eqbal was a brilliant analyst of counter-insurgency warfare, the most brilliant analyst I’ve ever met,” Klare said. “He understood the nature of insurgency warfare and what it took to defeat an insurgency and why the American strategy in Vietnam was doomed to failure. A careful reading of his works would explain why American counter-insurgency in Iraq is doomed to failure.”
Chomsky shared a similar assessment of Ahmad’s continuing relevance. “Eqbal’s unique insight and understanding of the forces driving policy decisions, and the lives and societies and cultures of the victims on all sides, would be of inestimable value in the grim circumstances of today’s world,” he said.
“Eqbal was one of these people who wasn’t so afraid of where the dots started to lead,” Dean of Faculty Aaron Berman noted. “He had the courage of his convictions.”
Professor Frank Holmquist remembered the breadth of his knowledge. “He kind of inhaled the world,” Holmquist explained. “He couldn’t have a conversation without sometimes dipping back two hundred years. That’s unique. None of us do that.”
Ahmad’s public lectures were lauded. At the Family and Friends Weekend just after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Ahmad gave a talk in Franklin Patterson Hall. The event was packed with parents and Ahmad stood at the podium speaking conversationally. “It’s not so clear he actually knows where he’s going to go next in the conversation,” Berman remembered thinking. But Ahmad gave a “brilliant analysis” of the situation in Afghanistan. “I’m 98% sure he didn’t have a piece of paper in front of him,” Berman said. “But you never would have known that, listening to him. It was amazingly perceptive. Parents loved it. It was a really memorable evening. He just had that kind of intellect.”
Berman and Ahmad were sometimes on exams together. Berman said he often told his students working on issues surrounding Israel and Palestine that it is okay to disagree, but not to get angry. Ahmad disagreed. “He looked at me one day and he said, ‘You’re out of your mind. People kill each other every day over this. You can’t tell people not to get angry.’” Berman added, “I think he was right that anger doesn’t necessarily get in the way of clear analysis or dialogue.”
Berman also mentioned Ahmad’s stories, some of which he said seemed too good to be true. Ahmad once claimed to Berman, for instance, that just after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, he addressed a group of Palestinian activists in a Lebanese refugee camp at a time when the PLO was “moving to a model of terrorism.” Ahmad, a committed pacifist, chided advocates of violence and instead advised a different strategy: Every time a Palestinian refugee died, he told them, they should organize a funeral procession to the Israeli border and ask to be let back in to bury the person in their own village. The political point was, as Berman described, “to confront Israelis with the essential tension in Zionism, which is that a movement to create a home for a homeless people creates another homeless people.”
“It was a great story,” Berman said, although he wondered if it was exaggerated. But later, while giving a talk one summer, Berman mentioned the story to his audience. “This person came up to me afterwards and said it’s absolutely true. I was there. It’s exactly what happened.”
Many of Ahmad’s colleagues also remember his personal side. “Anyone who knows him knew of his great generosity of spirit,” Klare said. “His concern for people was quite extraordinary,” Holmquist agreed. “If someone’s daughter was sick or son was having trouble at school, or somebody had some anxiety, Eqbal would remember it.” Berman remembered Ahmad’s sense of humor and surprising ability to connect with young children. Berman’s youngest son was particularly taken by him. “The day I found out that Eqbal had died I came back and told my family, and he just burst into tears,” Berman said. “That ability to operate at this very high level intellectual plane and then be able to connect to little kids like that was interesting.”
