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May 11, 2003
Author: Insights that made sense
WE have missed Eqbal Ahmad sorely since his passing, and many events of the last year and a half — the 9/11 attacks, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — have made his wisdom seem more prescient than ever.
“You are creating a monster here,” he used to tell his American friends, speaking of CIA support for the anti-Soviet guerrillas in Afghanistan. “It will come back to haunt you.” And of course it did, in the dramatic attack on New York, the city Eqbal loved and lived in for so many years.
In a much broader way, as well, the insights of his last years help make sense of the world since then. We are thinking particularly of a series of three articles he wrote not long before he died, about the commonalities among the fundamentalist versions of Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism.
He pointed out how, in all four cases, this fundamentalism arises when a rigid, pastoral, patriarchal tradition encounters the anxieties and complexities of the modern world. The response is to idealize a mythical past (the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski calls this “The Great Yesterday”), and to see the world in bipolar terms: good and evil, friend and foe. Eqbal pointed out how in the west the word “fundamentalist” is applied only to Muslims, whereas similarly-minded Christians are called “right-wingers”, Jews “settlers”, and Hindus “nationalists”.
Sadly, all four fundamentalisms have only grown stronger since his death. Although Americans tend to fret most about the Islamic variety, these last few years have also seen the horrendous massacres of Muslims by Hindu fundamentalists in India and the movement of still more Jewish fundamentalists to the West Bank — making yet more difficult any prospect of the equitable peace with justice in the Middle East that was so dear to Eqbal’s heart. Perhaps happily, he was spared the chance to see George W. Bush become president of the United States. Has there ever been a more fundamentalist occupant of the White House?
Of all the possible lenses through which to look at the world of this past year and a half, none seem more useful to us than Eqbal’s way of looking at fundamentalisms. And, of course, as fundamentalisms clash, they strengthen each other. That is the great danger we now live with, all of us. It is a danger exacerbated by the fact that the means of one or another fundamentalism waging war — whether by unconventional means, as on September 11, or high-tech conventional battle, as in the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq — have become more sophisticated and more deadly.
The only answer to that vicious spiral is to affirm more vigorously than ever the values of human rights and of social and economic justice for all peoples of this earth, and to affirm not just the right to exist of cultures and religions other than one’s own, but the marvelous, fragile diversity of the world we live in. In a human society that the fundamentalists want to divide into black and white, heathen and believer, Eqbal Ahmad beheld celebrated a far richer and more complex tapestry, like that of the Persian rugs he collected and loved. Arlie Hochschild is professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Adam Hochschild is a journalist and has authored several books
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