DAWN - Mazdak; 22 May, 1999
'Here lies a man...'
By Irfan Husain
AS I write this, nine days have passed since Eqbal Ahmad died. But memorial meetings continue to be held for him, just as letters mourning his death and articles honouring his memory are still being printed in the national dailies.
Indeed, so much has been written and said about Eqbal that it might seem redundant for me to write this piece about him. But I would like to share with readers the personal side of Eqbal that I was privileged to see.
All the thousands of people around the world whose lives he touched still feel a sense of profound loss and bereavement. When a public figure dies, there is a ritualistic and public expression of grief: the high and the mighty send their condolences to the family that are printed in the press, and there is an obligatory, formal condolence meeting. But there has been nothing formal about the spontaneous outpouring of grief for Eqbal's passing, and the fact that nobody in power publicly condoled his death must have given great satisfaction to his spirit. All his life, he stood four-square against the establishment and only met its representatives when he had to, and with great reluctance and distaste.
Our paths first crossed in 1973 or 1974 when I was writing for that iconoclastic weekly, Outlook. The editor, I.H. Burney, rang me in Lahore and told me about a maverick Pakistani academic who was in Pakistan on a visit and asked me to interview him. When he mentioned the famous trial of the Berrigan brothers and their associates for the alleged plot to kidnap Henry Kissinger in 1970, the penny dropped. I made an appointment for the same afternoon at Eqbal's hotel, and quickly jotted down a few questions.
I must have spent over an hour with him in his room; the late Safdar Mir was present, but only joined in the conversation when the interview was over and Eqbal ordered tea. The interview was duly published, and some months later when I met Burney in Karachi, he said Eqbal had told him that no interviewer had asked him such perceptive questions about the changing international scenario. While I was flattered at the time, I came to cherish the compliment more than any other I have ever received when I got to know him better.
Indeed, when I met him again some years later, I was sure he must have forgotten me, and introduced myself. He replied that he remembered me very well, and referred to the interview. We became closer when I moved to Washington in 1989, and he came and stayed with me on several occasions, introducing me to his wide circle of friends there. He and his wife Julie welcomed me graciously to their apartment whenever I visited New York. I moved back to Pakistan toward the end of 1990, and he followed a few months later.
Almost immediately after his return, he plunged into his Khaldunia University project. When he showed me the draft feasibility report, I was overwhelmed by the scope of the project, and secretly afraid for him as he had no experience of the Pakistani bureaucracy or the power structure. I urged him not to ask the government for land as all kinds of conditions would be imposed on him. He suggested I leave government service and join him on the project, painting a rosy picture of us sharing a house in Islamabad.
While nothing would have pleased me more than to have worked on the project with him, the caution bred into me by all my years in the bureaucracy made me suggest that he get government approval before he took on any overheads. In fact, we even discussed my salary. However, the real reason I did not accept the offer immediately was that I valued our friendship too much to jeopardize it by working so closely with Eqbal. We had disagreed strongly over politics before, and while these arguments did not strain our friendship in the least, I wished to avoid potential conflict.
But while Eqbal waited nearly eight years for the permission that never came, I did take early retirement and took over the helm of the Textile Institute of Pakistan. When our board agreed that he should become our first chancellor, I was delighted to persuade him to accept. Although he was with us all too briefly, he was wonderful with the board, the students and faculty. Eloquent, enthusiastic and unfailingly considerate, he was always there when I asked him to come to Karachi for a meeting. Right at the end, I suggested that he use some of the space at our large new campus to run a social studies programme. He was agreeable in principle, but was also looking at another offer, again in Karachi shortly before he became ill.
When I convened our students and faculty last week to tell them about the kind of a man they had lost in their chancellor, I dwelt on his gift to listen to people. While we all hear, we seldom listen, thus ending up in talking at cross-purposes. This is as true for inter-personal relationships as it is for public debate and dialogue. But Eqbal had the rare ability of making other people feel that he was really interested in what they were saying. This made people relax immediately in his presence, and made them cherish the briefest contact with him. I read an article about Eqbal recently by a person who only spent one evening with him.
I have never come across a better public speaker than Eqbal. Marshalling his facts and arguments meticulously, he would speak with a conviction and passion grounded in his immense erudition and his humanity. I once heard him address a congressional committee in Washington on the thorny subject of Palestine. Although he was a legendary scourge of Zionism, his address was measured, devoid of the fire he was normally given to, especially on a subject so close to his heart. He realized instinctively that if he was going to influence his hard-boiled audience of Israel supporters, he would have to do so by logic and facts, and not by emotion.
Although he was one of the least acquisitive people I have ever known, he enjoyed his collection of Gandhara pieces. Towards the end, I think he must have had some sort of premonition, because one evening in Islamabad a fortnight before the end, he said to his close friend Agha Imran Hamid and me: "Yar, what will happen to my Gandhara collection after I go?" Surprised at the question, I replied: "I suppose it'll go to your daughter Dohra." He explained that it couldn't as Dohra lived in the United States and it was illegal to export antiquities. Imran and I urged him to stop talking such morbid rot, and changed the topic.
In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, when Mark Antony is delivering the funeral oration for the murdered Caesar, he points at the corps of his friend and says: "Here lies a man! When comes such another?" In Eqbal's case, we will not see his like in our life-time.