Eqbal Ahmad and Edward Said

Critical Outsider in a Turbulent Age

STUART SCHAAR

2 Reflections on Eqbal’s Life

You c ould never predict how Eqbal would react to a given crisis, which meant that speaking to him about current events was always an adventure. Sometimes he would shock people whom he barely knew by defending positions diametrically opposed to what he surmised was their received knowledge. He did so not to provoke but to force those listening to rethink their positions and see events in a new light.

This approach, combined with significant rhetorical skills, meant that once you heard him, you never forgot him. And he did it all with such charm that even though his arguments may have appeared outrageous to some, they listened and paid attention. Others on his wavelength appreciated the clarity with which he presented his arguments, for he had the habit of packaging his talks in numerical order, three or four points, which followed from one to another. His humor, the force of his logic, and his clarity sometimes helped win over his opponents.

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Eqbal and Edward Said Eqbal met Edward Said for the first time in 1968. The U.S. war in Vietnam and the protests against it defined in those days America’s intellectual and political environment on the political left. Eqbal, as a leader of the antiwar movement, had become a prominent figure. He surmised that Edward already knew about him even before they met and that the critic would favor an outspoken dissenter who lived in the United States without becoming a citizen. Their friendship grew continuously and never broke. Eqbal wrote on December 7, 1992, about the circumstances of their meeting in a letter to Tim May and Frank Hanly, BBC producers working on a program about Edward’s life: [O]ur meeting and, later, . . . our friendship . . . had to do perhaps with the fact that we were both exiles. . . . We shared the exiles’ experience . . . as it induces a certain relationship of alienation and intimacy with one’s chosen environment, and of constant often secret negotiations between one’s colonial past and contemporary metropolitan life. I and Edward never talked about this. I should, nevertheless, note that he mentions in Culture & Imperialism the experience of exile with feeling and insight. . . .

I first came to know of Edward from an article—“Portrait of an Arab”—which I read in The Arab World, a magazine which used to be published by the Arab League. . . . It was an unusual piece to be printed in an official Arab organ. At the time when Israel was routinely referred to [in the Arab media] as . . . the Zionist entity, Edward wrote of the Palestinian Arab as a shadow of the Jew— tormented, persecuted, and devalued. More important, it was a seminal essay. [Its] themes . . . later [re]appeared full bloom in Orientalism — of representational forms and narratives as defi ning the moral epistemology of imperialism, instruments in the creation of imperial ethos, legitimacy, and identity. I was deeply moved and impressed by the essay and asked Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, a mutual friend, to introduce me to Said. He did a few months later.1

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Eqbal recalled to the TV producers that only a few dissenters spoke out in the United States after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. “Those around us, including the ‘peace people,’ considered Zionism and Israel to be blameless and [the] heroic survivor of wanton Arab aggression. The media was closed to us . . . there was no mainstream magazine open to our viewpoint on the Middle East.” Among those who “advocated the restitution of Palestinian rights Edward stood out for his open and critical posture not only towards the Arab governments, but also towards the PLO. . . . It was rare at the time to find pro-Palestinian critics of the PLO’s strategy and politics.”

Eqbal then recounted to May and Hanly the negative reactions to a talk he had given after the 1967 war at the second convention of the Organization of Arab Students. In it, he criticized the tactics used by the Arab states and argued that they could never defeat Israel militarily.

Eqbal thought that his talk was “fool hardy [sic]” and “given at the wrong time to the wrong audience.” When Eqbal and Edward first met, Edward asked him about this speech. He seemed quite curious, and he surprisingly agreed with Eqbal’s conclusions. Eqbal therefore appreciated Edward’s “consistently critical solidarity” with the PLO and its leaders.

Imperialism took many forms, and Eqbal reflected on that issue in his letter to May and Hanly. He explained his and Edward’s affi nities— especially their similar views on imperialism—and summarized the reasons why they had become close friends: [The year] 1967 had a lasting effect on Edward intellectually and politically. During the weeks that the Arab-Israeli conflict occupied center stage in the American discourse, an astounding system of beliefs, images, myths, and anxieties about Arabs and Islam unfolded before us. Layer after layer of libel were heaped daily by certified experts, columnists, and politicians. The simple minded [sic] Arab could dismiss it as the work of an influential lobby. But to a discerning intellect, it was obvious that on display was a historically rooted and complex culture of imperialism.

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Edward proceeded to excavate and expose its roots. His skills and methods as a critic were great assets, but what invested power and originality to his work in the next two decades was a seminal insight regarding the relationship of knowledge to imperial power. Orientalism was a milestone in this regard. What makes his current work extremely interesting is that he also elaborates on another set of relationships—between imperialism and the novel, poetry, and music, and the relationship between culture and resistance.

Edward wrote Orientalism to demonstrate the depths of imperial ideology within Western culture. He applied the lessons he learned from Michel Foucault, who demonstrated the importance of substructures of knowledge, which at first sight were not apparent but had to be excavated and extracted from cultural forms and constructs, the whole constituting patterns that assumed the power of institutions. Edward also mined Antonio Gramsci, the secret head of the Italian Communist Party whom Mussolini imprisoned, because Gramsci recognized the power of hegemonic knowledge and advocated creating alternate institutions in order to foment and spread new knowledge, the better to replace old dominant structures of thought and practice. 2 As Eqbal told May and Hanly, he recognized that “a common anti-imperialist outlook went into the making of [his and Edward’s] friendship more . . . than the shared experience of exile.”

Both men had cosmopolitan views, and by the time they met, they had seen a considerable part of the world. Their status as refugees had made them into critical outsiders. Both of them could see the societies in which they lived from without, and they had developed sufficient yardsticks with which to gauge with some detachment and discernment what they experienced and saw. Eqbal recognized this when he observed to May and Hanly that although Edward was a “Tory in life style [sic], and to some extent in taste,” he also was a “critical democrat, which explains, at least partially, the absence of third worldism, and the antipathy he feels to authoritarian minorities which rule the Arab world, their addiction to arms, narrow vision, and indifference towards the future”:

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The colonial encounter left a permanent mark on us as it did on the colonized lands. Fortunately, its impact has been more even on individuals like me and Edward than on our societies as a whole. To different degrees both of us have shared a consciously dual relationship to the West and to our native environment. We are, to paraphrase Nehru, at home in both civilizations, at ease in neither. Anti-imperialism has been a defining sentiment with us, but it has never degenerated into anti-westernism. In differing ways we both love and appreciate much about western civilization at the same time as we are appalled by the imperious patterns of sectarian prejudices, informed ignorance, callousness, and hypocrisy. . . .

As his latest book shows, Edward is a universalist despite or because of the anguish which sectarian ambitions inflicted upon him and his people. This may be yet another factor which explains the durability of our friendship.

And they certainly grew to depend on one another. They adored and admired each other and fed off of each other’s intelligence and wit. The fact that Edward’s and Eqbal’s own family and friends lived in New York was one of the main reasons why Eqbal returned to the city with regularity. Edward rarely let anyone read his completed manuscripts but published them mostly as they were written, so confident was he about the validity of his views. He made some exceptions to his policy of immediate publication without review in the 1990s, when he began showing his finished work to Eqbal and a few other close friends before sending manuscripts off for publication. Edward dedicated his book Culture and Imperialism to Eqbal, and that act was a tribute to the ongoing creative dialogue they had over the decades.

It was a delight to see them together, for they joked around, and each brought out the best in the other. Their letters and email exchanges over the years would make a remarkable book. Their correspondence, for fun, overflowed with imitations of the flowery language of medieval Muslim royalty, whose missives would begin with adoring words, comparing the other to a rose in bloom or the sun rising to majestic heights, but then

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announce abruptly that the wielder of such compliments had just conquered “his dear brother’s” prize city. Forgive the indiscretion, the bearer of bad tidings would then beg, but he knew that the receiver of the news would understand why the aggressive prince had to act the way he did.

Eqbal and Edward, in jest, incorporated these sorts of protocols into their letters and emails with hilarious effect. One salutation at the end of a letter Eqbal wrote to Edward on September 25, 1997, gives an idea of what went on in their voluminous correspondence: “With much humble affection and prayers that I stay a particle of dust under you[r] vigorous feet,” Eqbal rhapsodized, “I remain: Forever your homage paying chamcha [‘spoon,’ implying that he was a mere utensil in relation to his superior].”3 The humor had no bounds, and they reveled in thinking up such adornments to their correspondence, which gave them enormous pleasure.

The humor extended to gentle criticism Eqbal gave Edward on a subject as ponderous as the Kosovo crisis. In response to an article Edward had written on the subject for the Karachi newspaper Dawn, Eqbal sent his friend the following letter, which Edward read at the celebration of Eqbal’s life at Hampshire College on September 18, 1999, four months after he died: Son of Palestine, Moon over Jerusalem, Light of the Semites, Refuge of the World, Shadow of the Lord on Earth . . . a humble particle of dust offers salutations from down under your expensively dressed and glorious feet . . . and welcomes you back to the land of bombs and missiles, cold milk, and caned honey. With deep interest and in humble submission, I read your stirring thoughts in Dawn . . . on the plight of Kosovo and the nefarious imperial intervention therein to advance its own purposes. Since in your wisdom and forbearance you have forsaken your abject bat man, this august essay is the one august sign I have of your return to the not-so-glorious belly of the beast. I enclose an abject effort on the subject, which unfortunately was written and dispatched before I could enlighten my dusty self and decorate my humble effort with a quotation from your brilliant observations.4

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Edward thought the world of Eqbal, and it was fortuitous that they had found each other and become good friends. Edward expressed his admiration for Eqbal in a letter of recommendation he wrote for his friend when the latter applied for a job at Hampshire College in 1983, beginning it by calling him “a truly remarkable man”: Knowing him has been an education. He is . . . the finest, most astute and brilliant analyst of contemporary politics from a non-European and non-Western point of view that I have ever encountered. Deeply learned and humane, he is a man of great, genuine learning . . . he commands history, politics, society, culture and everyday life, and as a consequence his analyses are regularly enlivened by the insight and generosity that eludes most other people in his field. . . . He is also . . . a man of reason and dispassionate fairness, never more than when his own sympathies are engaged . . . no one has the command and learning that he has. . . . I cannot think of anyone more distinguished as man and as scholar than Dr. Ahmad.5

Eqbal was probably the most loyal friend anyone could ever have.

Friends could do no wrong, or if they did something he disapproved of, he would have it out with them privately but never in public. He defended friends beyond the call of duty, sometimes refusing to see shortcomings or the value of external criticism. That attribute solidified his friendships and created close bonds between him and many people. But such blind loyalty also had its drawbacks. He broke with several people with whom he had collaborated for decades when they criticized his closest friends publicly in print. Others broke with him. For example, he went on offensives on behalf of Edward time and again as Edward’s detractors mounted concerted campaigns to discredit the critic. Eqbal had no tolerance for anyone who joined the frenzy of attacks against Edward, one of his closest friends.

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