Eqbal ahmad articles about health
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Upon the partition of India in 1947, he and his elder brothers migrated to Pakistan. The case with its spectacular charges received considerable attention in the year between the arrests and the trial. While many of the articles in the 1971 publication of Pakistan Forum would address South Asian national liberation struggles in Kashmir and Bangladesh, the inclusion of Eqbal’s interview about Palestine could perhaps be seen as out of place.
Eqbal cites two pivotal realizations that cemented his staunch anti-imperialism. His columns also regularly appeared in Al Ahram in Egypt.
In the early 1990s, he was granted a parcel of land in Pakistan by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's government to build an independent, secular, alternative university, Khaldunia, named for the 14th-century Arab historian and sociologist, Ibn Khaldun, and patterned on Hampshire College.
The prospects for building a robust and unified global anti-imperialist movement seem to be further constrained by the rise of the counterterrorist state during the long war on terror.
Historians Pamela Pennock and Suraya Khan have analyzed how the AAUG strategically integrated Palestine into the broader Third World context, enabling Arab Americans to address the Palestinian issue within the larger framework of decolonization around the globe.
He was Assistant Director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, Amherst, MA from 1993-2000. What Eqbal understood about the experience of empire was the domination of empire in all its forms, but also the creativity, originality, and vision created in resistance to it.
Eqbal’s ability to articulate his anti-imperialist views was vividly demonstrated on the eve of the 1970s when he addressed the AAUG audience in place of the renowned British Pakistani intellectual, Tariq Ali.
Ali was unable to attend due to a visa denial by the US State Department after the burning of an American flag at an anti-war demonstration in London. As Eqbal described, it was the fact that they were both exiles: “We shared the exiles’ experience in several ways, particularly in how it induces a certain relationship of alienation and intimacy with one’s chosen environment, and constant secret negotiations between one’s colonial past and contemporary metropolitan life.” Theirs was a relationship forged out of colonial dispossession and displacement, shaping their anti-imperialist outlook amid the turbulent backdrop of the Vietnam War and the continued Israeli settler colonization of Palestine.
When intellectuals lose sight of these choices, of this symbiosis, intellect begins to stagnate. However, it was not just their shared intellectual interests that defined their relationship.
During this period, Eqbal, along with his colleagues Aijaz Ahmad and Feroz Ahmad, and his brother Saghir Ahmad (before Saghir’s unexpected passing), became involved with Pakistan Forum, a leftist journal.
Khaldunia remained Ahmad's living dream and the focus of his considerable energies for the remainder of his life. He would have inspired us to think critically and take bold risks. Eqbal lost contact with his family members in New Delhi and went North to Lahore carrying a gun. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, just two months before had informed Congress of an incipient plot on the part of an anarchist group, the so-called East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives, a militant group of Catholic priests and nuns, teachers, students, and former students aimed at ending the bombing in Southeast Asia, and securing the release of all political prisoners as ransom.
Their daughter, Dohra, was born in 1971.
In January 1971, Ahmad was indicted with the anti-war Catholic priest Phillip Berrigan, and six other Catholic pacifists, on federal charges of conspiracy to kidnap Henry Kissinger and to blow up the heating systems of several federal buildings in Washington, D.C. (Daniel Berrigan was an unindicted co-conspirator in the case).
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Eqbal would have pushed us to rethink our entrenched political frameworks, urging us to recognize as ethical that which builds a resilient anti-imperialist network.
In Said’s words:
Eqbal embodied not just the politics of empire but that whole fabric of experience expressed in human life itself, rather than in economic rules and reductive formulas.