Eqbal Ahmad was born in Irki village in Bihar, India where, at an early age, he witnessed his father being murdered in a land dispute. Then, in his teens, at the time of Partition in 1947, he was forced, because they were Muslim, to flee with his mother and siblings to Pakistan. It was an experience he never forgot and it framed his life's work against religious extremism and communal and nationalist hatred.
An able student in Lahore, Eqbal won a scholarship to a college in the USA in 1957 where he was to study politics and Middle Eastern history, earning a PhD from Princeton. In the course of his studies, he went to Algeria where he joined the National Liberation Front which was fighting against the French occupiers. There, he met and briefly worked with Frantz Fanon, contributing to Fanon's underground paper, El Moudjahid. He also established a cultural centre in Tunis and travelled to Morocco.
During the 1960s, he taught at Cornell and Chicago universities and then became one of the first Fellows of the anti-war Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). An early and prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, he was arrested in 1970 and charged, with others, for conspiring to kidnap the US secretary of state Henry Kissinger. He and all the co-conspirators were eventually acquitted in what became an important show trial. Between 1973 and 1975 Ahmad established and headed an offshoot of the IPS in Amsterdam, called the Transnational Institute (TNI). It was to prove a fount of support for poor, European-based writers and thinkers carrying out independent research on nationalism and Third World struggle and transformation.
It was then that IRR's director, A.Sivanandan, met Eqbal Ahmad and discussed how the transformed IRR in London could work alongside the TNI. For many years the TNI provided support for the journal Race & Class and Eqbal Ahmad became one of its most important contributors, joining its editorial committee and becoming joint editor for some time. He also edited special issues of the journal on Palestine, on the Iranian revolution against the Shah and on the invasion of Lebanon in 1983.
In the course of his life, Eqbal Ahmad had rubbed shoulders with some of the most important revolutionary figures and political statesmen of the 20th century from Mahatma Gandhi and Tagore (whom he met as a child in India) to Fanon and Bourguiba (in north Africa), Bani Sadr (in Iran) Yasser Arafat (in Palestine) and US scholar/activists such as Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk and Edward Said.
Eqbal Ahmad was, without doubt, one of the most original and challenging of political thinkers on imperialism and nationalism and he was an excellent speaker and a very popular teacher. But, in addition to his outspoken support for unpopular causes (especially Palestinian rights), his uncompromising politics kept him an itinerant and untenured professor at various universities across the globe. Eventually, from 1982 till 1997 he held a post at Hampshire College, Massachusetts, where he taught politics until his retirement to Pakistan. There, apart from trying to establish a university, he wrote a regular column in the English-language weekly Dawn in which he continued to analyse developments in the Middle East and began to warn of the rise of religious fundamentalisms and of the world's growing neglect of the fate of Muslim peoples - from Bosnia to Chechnya and Afghanistan.
Find out more about the people who made a difference on the HomeBeats: Struggles for Racial Justice CDROM.