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© 2001 Hampshire College. All rights reserved.
Eqbal Ahmad, scholar, teacher, writer, international political activist.
Eqbal Ahmad was born in the state of Bihar, India in 1932. When he was 4, his father was killed in a land dispute; in 1948, during the partition of India, he and his family (who were Muslims) moved to Lahore, Pakistan. He attended Foreman Christian College in Lahore, then came to Occidental College in California on a Rotary scholarship in the mid-1950s. He entered Princeton in 1958, where he obtained his doctorate in 1965. He taught at Cornell in the 1960s, was appointed a fellow at the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs, at the University of Chicago, and later joined the Washington Institute for Policy Studies. He was the first directory of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. He married Julie Diamond in 1969, and had one daughter, Dohra.
In 1971, he was one of the Harrisburg 7 indicted for plotting to kidnap Henry Kissinger to protest the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He was acquitted in 1972, along with all the other alleged co-conspirators. After teaching at various universities, in 1982 he became Professor of Politics and Middle East Studies at Hampshire College, where he taught until he retired in 1997. In his later years he pursued a project of creating an alternative liberal arts college, Khaldunia, for Pakistan, and also wrote a regular column for the Pakistani newpaper, Dawn. Eqbal Ahmad died in 1999, in Islamabad, Pakistan, of complications following surgery for cancer.
A prolific writer, Ahmad wrote extensively on the relationship between the West and the post-colonial states of Africa and Asia. His constant concern for the welfare of people as individuals led him to vehement opposition to war and violence, whether by nation states or by ideological, nationalist or fundamentalist movements. His power of critical analysis made him a valued counselor, as well as an unsparing critic, of leaders and intellectuals in the Middle East and Pakistan, as well as many other parts of the world.
Edward Said wrote of him, "His life was an epic and poetic one, full of wanderings, border crossings, and an almost instinctive attraction to liberation movements, movements of the oppressed and the persecuted, causes of people who were unfairly punished--whether they lived in the great metropolitan centres of Europe and America, or in the refugee camps, besieged cities, and bombed or disadvantaged villages of Bosnia, Chechnya, south Lebanon, Vietnam, Iraq, Iran, and, of course, the Indian subcontinent." (AlAhram Weekly, May 9, 1999)
Correspondence, notes and writings document the life and thought of this eminent Third World scholar. Eqbal Ahmad's major interest in politics and political theory led him to analyze many of the revolutionary and liberation movements of the modern Third World, while remaining vehemently opposed to war and violence. His work examines the consequences of imperialism for developing countries, including anti-imperialist movements, revolutions, and terrorism. His particular area of concern was the Middle East, North Africa, and India and Pakistan, but his interests were wide ranging, and his published writings include works on China, Japan, the Balkans, Latin America and South-east Asia. He was outspoken in his opposition to oppression of all kinds, and many of his columns for the Pakistani newspaper Dawn castigate government corruption, inefficiency and indifference to the plight of the common people. He was an inspiring teacher and an untiring promoter of the value of education, as shown by his work on the Khaldunia University project which proposed an alternative liberal arts college for Pakistan.
Also present are records of the Harrisburg 7 conspiracy trial of 1971-1972, which exemplified the FBI's response to Vietnam war protestors, among whom Eqbal Ahmad must be considered a charter member.
The collection is primarily in English, though a small amount of material is present in French, Arabic, Urdu, Spanish and other modern European languages.
The collection consists of 12 boxes (32 x 27 x 39 cm., 14 cu. ft.) of paper records and AV materials, and 4 tubes (10 x 110 cm., 1.25 cu. ft.) of rolled posters. It includes material dating from 1956 to 1999, with the bulk from 1966 to 1999.
It is organized into eight series:
Although the collection was donated to Hampshire College for use by qualified scholars, copyright for unpublished material was retained by the donor. Contact information is available from the Hampshire College Archives.
Please use the following format when citing materials from this collection:
Ahmad, Eqbal, The Eqbal Ahmad Papers, 1956-1999. Archives, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA 01002.
The Eqbal Ahmad Papers were donated to the Hampshire College library in June 1999 by his daughter Dohra Ahmad. The collection was received in two filing cabinets, one large and one small, and in several boxes of papers and miscellaneous materials removed from Ahmad's on-campus apartment. Additional material was received in two boxes in the spring of 2001. The collection includes correspondence, subject files, notes, research material, published and unpublished writings, AV materials, and posters. The collection was received in file folders usually labeled with subjects or names, but was in no discernable order, except that most of the material relating to the conspiracy trial was in the same file drawer. During processing, the collection was organized by type of material, refiled in acid-free folders, and filed alphabetically by the original heading, where one was present. Writings were filed alphabetically by title. Material weeded during processing consisted of four boxes of newspaper clippings on various subjects not directly related to Eqbal Ahmad but used by him in his work. Clippings about Ahmad were filed in the Subject Files section; also all clippings concerning the conspiracy trial were kept with that section. Five boxes of photocopied articles appearing in academic and popular periodicals were also weeded. A bibliography of these articles was prepared and is included as the first file under Research Material.
Miscellaneous correspondence is filed first by date, followed by correspondence filed in alphabetical order by correspondent or subject. Ahmad did not keep copies of his own letters as a general rule; the files contain letters almost exclusively addressed to him. Notable correspondents include Daniel Berrigan, Noam Chomsky and Edward Said.
These files contain material listed by subject which are predominantly not correspondence. Several files relate to courses taught, and include syllabi and bibliographies. Also present are files of newspaper clippings about Ahmad, and several files relating to the Khaldunia University project. Three files contain work by Ahmad's brother Saghir Ahmad, who was interested in many of the same topics as Eqbal, but who was killed in an accident in the 1970s.
Material relating to the Harrisburg 7 conspiracy trial of 1971-72 is filed in this series, including legal documents, correspondence and clippings, as well as Ahmad's notes taken at the trial proceedings.
Filed alphabetically by subject, these are voluminous handwritten notes kept by Ahmad on all subjects in which he was interested. They are distinguished from material filed in the Writings Series in that they do not form a coherent narrative.
These files contain material collected by Ahmad for his own research. Much of this material consists of printed material from Pakistan or other Third World countries, or original (unpublished) material. A bibliography of the journal articles which were weeded during processing appears as the first item in this series. The remaining material is filed alphabetically by subject. There are large amounts of material on Pakistan, Algeria, Israel and Palestine, and Vietnam.
This series contains published and unpublished writings filed alphabetically by title. In some cases, articles may appear twice due to title/subtitle confusion or in cases where the draft of an article has a different title from the published version. In his later years, Ahmad wrote weekly columns for news magazines published in Pakistan (Dawn) and Egypt (AlAhram). There are several files of Dawn columns filed by date in addition to the individual columns filed by title. Also present are some collected files of letters to the editor for various publications. A partial bibliography of published writings by Eqbal Ahmad was prepared by Yogesh Chandrani, a former student and colleague, in the spring of 1999. This bibliography appears as the first folder in this series.
Present in this section are videotapes, audiotapes, a small collection of photographs, and miscellaneous material. The collection includes material by and about Ahmad, including the autobiographical Stories My Country Told Me produced by BBC Arena. It also includes items collected by Ahmad for his work. Individual items are listed for this series.
Tube 1 contains posters relating to Eqbal Ahmad. Tube 2 contains organizational charts of the revolutionary movement (FLN) in Algiers in the 1950s. Tubes 3 and 4 contain posters for various movements and causes, among them a collection of Cuban posters. Individual items are listed for this series.