DAWN - 12 May, 1999
Eqbal Ahmed - a writer with deep insight
By Ashraf Jehangir Qazi
(Pakistan High Commissioner in India)
IT was only during the past two years since my assignment to New Delhi that I came to know Professor Eqbal Ahmad on a personal basis although I had long been an avid reader of his column in your newspaper.
There was simply no other who wrote like him in the subcontinent. Each article of his was an essay, a compressed tutorial, an education - yes, a joy to read. He imparted an insight, a sense of historical context and an unwavering and transcending human focus to whatever subject that exercised him - the domestic situation in Pakistan, historical and contemporary Islam, the Kashmir dispute, the Middle East, Bosnia, Kosovo, Algeria, the United States, the international balance of power and equity, the evolution of political communities, etc.
Eqbal's opinions were always robust and clear, the product of prodigious learning and the marshalling of a fascinating range of argument and fact. One might, of course, differ with him on specific points. Indeed his writings challenged one to do so in the most intellectually stimulating way. But he was almost always right, if only because he was so unfailingly sincere and so humanely concerned in the use to which he put his learning and his verbal felicity. And because of this the assurance with which Eqbal wrote and spoke could never be mistaken for arrogance.
What a horrible hollow his going has left us with. How sad that he might have died sad for all that he cherished. How I wish that those who could make a difference could have found the time and inclination to have plucked a few nuggets from this wonderfully irritating gadfly. He was there to be mined. He was largely ignored, mislabelled and misunderstood by the establishment.
Eqbal was not religious. Nor did he pretend to a spirituality he might not have had. But he saw all religions - and Islam in particular - as concerned above all with the welfare of man (and woman) and the enrichment of human experience. He decried all that he saw as deviation from this norm no matter how it dressed itself up. Did this make him "secular?" In the eyes of many, especially those who little understood the term, it certainly did. But Eqbal's secularism and leftism was his humanity - part of his sense of condition in being a human being - and this only reinforced the pride and pain he took in being a Muslim - and a Pakistani - in a challenging time.
Eqbal was one of the most priceless Pakistanis it was my privilege to have known. I shall miss him along with many, many hundreds and thousands of his compatriots.