Home > Work > Eqbal Ahmad: Confronting Empire
1 " We are living in modern times throughout the world and yet are dominated by medieval minds. "
― Eqbal Ahmad , Eqbal Ahmad: Confronting Empire
2 " Those who glorify the past and seek to re-create it, almost invariably fail, while those who view it comprehensively and critically are able to draw on the past in meaningful and lasting ways. "
3 " Colonial battles were never remembered unless a Custer was killed or a Gordon besieged. Millions of people may die, but the memories are of Custer and Gordon. "
4 " My argument is that we will not be able to fight fundamentalism until we produce a modern progressive secular educated class of people who know the traditions and take the best of it. "
5 " the idea of Pakistan was very strongly opposed by the Islamic religious scholars of India. The reason for that was, among others, an argument on the part of the ulema, the religious scholars of Islam in India, that nationalism was an anti-Islamic ideology, because nationalism proceeds to create boundaries where Islam is a faith without boundaries. It interferes with the universalism that is the Koranic commitment of Islam. It is a universal religion that will not be subject to drawn boundaries. "
6 " I argued that Israel’s fundamental contradiction was that it was founded as a symbol of the suffering of humanity . . . at the expense of another people who were innocent of guilt. It’s this contradiction that you have to bring out. And you don’t bring it out by armed struggle. In fact, you suppress this contradiction by armed struggle. The Israeli Zionist organizations continue to portray the Jews as victims of Arab violence. "
7 " So the primary task of revolutionary struggle is to achieve the moral isolation of the adversary in its own eyes and in the eyes of the world. . . . "
8 " I argued that armed struggle was supremely unsuited to the Palestinian condition, that it was a mistake to put so much emphasis on it. I argued that armed struggle is less about arms and more about organization, that a successful armed struggle proceeds to out-administer the adversary and not out-fight him. And that the task of out-administration was a task of out-legitimizing the enemy. Finally, I argued that this out-administration occurs when you identify the primary contradiction of your adversary and expose that contradiction not only to yourselves, which you don’t need to do so much, but to the world at large, and more important, to the people of the adversarial country itself. I argued that Israel’s fundamental contradiction was that it was founded as a symbol of the suffering of humanity . . . at the expense of another people who were innocent of guilt. It’s this contradiction that you have to bring out. And you don’t bring it out by armed struggle. In fact, you suppress this contradiction by armed struggle. The Israeli Zionist organizations continue to portray the Jews as victims of Arab violence. "
9 " Every policy that begins on the assumption of keeping someone weak forever is doomed to fail. "
