On Dr. Ekbal Ahmed - Amitava Kumar
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."
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Today, many writers from the subcontinent--notably the Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen, also an admirer of Tagore--echo Ahmad's assertion that "nationalism is an ideology of difference." In his recent book Identity and Violence, Sen argues against the imposition of singular nationalist or civilizational affiliations on our robustly plural identities. "The same person," he writes, "can, for example, be a British citizen, of Malaysian origin, with Chinese racial characteristics, a stockbroker, a nonvegetarian, an asthmatic, a linguist, a bodybuilder, a poet, an opponent of abortion, a bird-watcher, an astrologer, and one who believes that God created Darwin to test the gullible." Like Ahmad, Sen a witnessed, as a child, the brutality of Hindu-Muslim riots. And for Sen, the way out of belligerent, civilizational partitioning lies in cultivating--even acquiring--a complex social identity. This should be true not only of individuals but also of cultures. No civilization has a monopoly on tolerance; each is capable of bigotry. In saying this, Sen is contesting the modern myth that Europe, and Europe alone, has been home to democracy and freedom. In Identity and Violence, Sen points to the tolerant regimes ruled by the Indian emperors Ashoka (third century BC) and Akbar (sixteenth century AD). When, in the 1590s, "the Inquisitions were quite extensive in Europe, and heretics were still being burned at the stake," Akbar forbade the forcible imposition of faith and advocated individual choice in matters of religious practice.
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To read these passages is to be struck not only by Ahmad's prescience but by his loathing of fundamentalism, his hatred of imperial hypocrisy, his belief in the value of history, and his commitment to resolving political problems through diplomacy, not war. His writing on the Muslim world in particular was notable for its critical vigilance and integrity, its resistance to received wisdom. In a 1984 essay titled "Islam and Politics," Ahmad wrote that the truth of "the Muslim condition" had "slipped beyond the grasp of most 'experts.'" In his view, Islam in its exemplary form was a religion of the oppressed. Because its rise was dialectically linked to social revolt, he felt, the "religious force and cultural force of Islam continues to outpace its political capabilities." The structural unity that Islamic societies had achieved, especially in culture and education, had been disrupted by Western imperialism. As he put it:
The remarkable continuity which, over centuries of growth and expansion, tragedies and disasters, had distinguished Islamic civilization was interrupted. This change, labeled modernization by social scientists, has been experienced by contemporary Muslims as a disjointed, disorienting, unwilled reality. The history of Muslim peoples in the last one hundred years has been largely a history of groping--between betrayals and losses--toward ways to break this impasse, to somehow gain control over their collective lives, and link their past to the future.
Islamic fundamentalists, although they had little trouble raising their voices, only spoke for a minority; the majority of Muslims, Ahmad believed, had their faces turned to the future even as they remained rooted in the past. As he pointed out, the political heroes of the Muslim world in the twentieth century had been "secular, generally Westernized individuals": Kemal Atatürk in Turkey, Muhammad Ali Jinnah in Pakistan, Sukarno in Indonesia, Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia and the nine "historic chiefs" of the Algerian Revolution. Even the PLO, he added, claimed to represent a "secular and democratic" polity, and "two of its three most prominent leaders [Marxist leaders George Habash and Nayef Hawatmeh] are Christian."
On Dr. Ekbal Ahmed - Amitava Kumar
***
Today, many writers from the subcontinent--notably the Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen, also an admirer of Tagore--echo Ahmad's assertion that "nationalism is an ideology of difference." In his recent book Identity and Violence, Sen argues against the imposition of singular nationalist or civilizational affiliations on our robustly plural identities. "The same person," he writes, "can, for example, be a British citizen, of Malaysian origin, with Chinese racial characteristics, a stockbroker, a nonvegetarian, an asthmatic, a linguist, a bodybuilder, a poet, an opponent of abortion, a bird-watcher, an astrologer, and one who believes that God created Darwin to test the gullible." Like Ahmad, Sen a witnessed, as a child, the brutality of Hindu-Muslim riots. And for Sen, the way out of belligerent, civilizational partitioning lies in cultivating--even acquiring--a complex social identity. This should be true not only of individuals but also of cultures. No civilization has a monopoly on tolerance; each is capable of bigotry. In saying this, Sen is contesting the modern myth that Europe, and Europe alone, has been home to democracy and freedom. In Identity and Violence, Sen points to the tolerant regimes ruled by the Indian emperors Ashoka (third century BC) and Akbar (sixteenth century AD). When, in the 1590s, "the Inquisitions were quite extensive in Europe, and heretics were still being burned at the stake," Akbar forbade the forcible imposition of faith and advocated individual choice in matters of religious practice.
***
To read these passages is to be struck not only by Ahmad's prescience but by his loathing of fundamentalism, his hatred of imperial hypocrisy, his belief in the value of history, and his commitment to resolving political problems through diplomacy, not war. His writing on the Muslim world in particular was notable for its critical vigilance and integrity, its resistance to received wisdom. In a 1984 essay titled "Islam and Politics," Ahmad wrote that the truth of "the Muslim condition" had "slipped beyond the grasp of most 'experts.'" In his view, Islam in its exemplary form was a religion of the oppressed. Because its rise was dialectically linked to social revolt, he felt, the "religious force and cultural force of Islam continues to outpace its political capabilities." The structural unity that Islamic societies had achieved, especially in culture and education, had been disrupted by Western imperialism. As he put it:
The remarkable continuity which, over centuries of growth and expansion, tragedies and disasters, had distinguished Islamic civilization was interrupted. This change, labeled modernization by social scientists, has been experienced by contemporary Muslims as a disjointed, disorienting, unwilled reality. The history of Muslim peoples in the last one hundred years has been largely a history of groping--between betrayals and losses--toward ways to break this impasse, to somehow gain control over their collective lives, and link their past to the future.
Islamic fundamentalists, although they had little trouble raising their voices, only spoke for a minority; the majority of Muslims, Ahmad believed, had their faces turned to the future even as they remained rooted in the past. As he pointed out, the political heroes of the Muslim world in the twentieth century had been "secular, generally Westernized individuals": Kemal Atatürk in Turkey, Muhammad Ali Jinnah in Pakistan, Sukarno in Indonesia, Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia and the nine "historic chiefs" of the Algerian Revolution. Even the PLO, he added, claimed to represent a "secular and democratic" polity, and "two of its three most prominent leaders [Marxist leaders George Habash and Nayef Hawatmeh] are Christian."
On Dr. Ekbal Ahmed - Amitava Kumar
posted by temporal at 5/02/2008
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