From: Rakesh Bhandari (rakeshb@STANFORD.EDU)
Date: Thu Sep 25 2003 - 13:32:05 EDT
What Edward Said wrote of the late Eqbal Ahmad to whom he had dedicated his Culture of Imperialism applies in spirit no less to himself: No one more than Eqbal Ahmad captured and understood the human suffering and distorted vision that produced the reckless violence of people or movements who, in his memorable phrase, were radical but wrong. Whether it was the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, or India and Pakistan, he was a force paradoxically for a just struggle but also for just reconciliation. Everyone who knew him turned to him for advice, wise council, encouragement. He never spoke about his own problems, his failing health, or his frustrations. He was that rare thing, an intellectual unintimidated by power or authority, a sophisticated man who remained simply true to his ideals and his insight till his last breath, a companion in arms to such exemplary and diverse figures of our time as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Tariq Ali, Ibrahim Abu Lughod, Richard Falk, Fred Jameson, Alexander Cockburn, and Daniel Berrigan, all of whom admired him greatly. Bantering, ironic, sporty, unpedantic, gracious, immaculate in dress and expression, faultlessly kind, an unpretentious connoisseur of food and wine, Eqbal's themes in the end were always liberation and injustice, or how to achieve the first without reproducing more of the second. He saw himself perceptively as a man of the eighteenth century, modern because of enlightenment and breadth of outlook, not because of technological or quasi-scientific "progress"...Humanity and genuine secularism in this blood-drenched old century of ours had no finer champion. His innumerable friends grieve inconsolably. _____________________ See also http://www.zmag.org/saidclash.htm
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Sep 26 2003 - 00:00:00 EDT