Khaled Ahmed Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

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Background

Mr. Ahmed, welcome to Berkeley.

Thank you.

Where were you born and raised?

I was born in 1943 in Jullundher, what is now India. In 1947, my parents came across [to what is now Pakistan]. We were migrants, and we settled in Lahore, and this is where I've grown up and gone to school, and ultimately to college and finished my education.

Do you remember those events of the birth of Pakistan?

Very vaguely, really. I remember my grandfather losing his cap while we were traveling on top of a truck across the border. That's all I remember.

In retrospect, how do you think your parents shaped your character? What did you learn from them?

I was lucky because I had a very liberal father. He was in the army, and he had a lot of common sense about issues which agitate the mind of the people. He was not narrow-minded. He treated his children like friends. I don't think he was a great authority figure. That actually gave us a lot of freedom to do whatever we wanted to do. Definitely, there was no religious firmness in our family.

What about your mother?

My mother was a hard-working person. She was the daughter of a very successful lawyer. She was also a very liberal person. I think my parents' personalities were formed by the tribes they came from, because the tribal identity was the foremost identity in our clan.

And what tribe was that?

We belonged to a tribe called the Burkis, and we lived among the Pakhtuns in south Waziristan, but we were not really Pakhtuns. We lived alongside them and picked up some of their characteristics. I think 300 or 400 years ago, we migrated from what is now the tribal areas of Pakistan into Jullundher. We were given lands by the king in Delhi, and that's where we lived.

You became a man of letters, obviously. Were there a lot of books around your household, a lot of reading going on that inspired you?

I encountered some extraordinary teachers when I was going to my primary school. Since it was still influenced by the Persian tradition, we had some very remarkable people teaching us. Later on, of course, there was a decline of standards. But I think the strongest influence on me was from our Persian teachers. So we went to poetry a great deal. There was another person who was very good at geography, and I became obsessed with geography and took it up in college also. There was yet another person who used to teach us religion, and I was greatly moved by the way he lived. He lived quite near our school, where he used to teach people in a mosque. He had a handicapped child whom he brought to class, and I think he was a great shaping influence in my life.

The cult in our part of the world was the weekly newspapers. Our journalism began with the religious centers. I remember reading a lot of religious literature in Lahore, which was the center of High Church Islam, in the sense that if down in the country it was popular religion and Low Church, the puritans lived in the cities, and they took out these very nicely written magazines, which I read a lot. Then, of course, the books came. I remember being influenced a great deal by two gentlemen who were actually debating whether Islam should be orthodox or should be rational. One was orthodox Abul-A'la al-Maududi, who is now a great influence all over the world. And the other person, who opposed him, was Ghulam Ahmad Perwez, who was a rationalist, and I was influenced by both.

As you describe this background, it's very different than our perception of Islam today, with its apparent dominance by radical fundamentalism. We should emphasize this point, that Islam is a place where there has been in the past much diversity of thinking.

Yes, there was a lot of diversity, and I think that was made possible by British Raj. In fact, the Muslims have produced greater scholars when they were not really free as people. They were mostly a reformist kind of people.

I later on became greatly influenced by the rationalist Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan from Aligarh, who was also a formative influence in the Pakistan movement. There were other schools of thought also, where a lot of scholarship was going on. I remember being quite surprised by the variety of points of view that existed, and that there was a tolerance of the rationalist point of view. In Islam, the debate over rationalism has gone on for centuries, and radicalism dominates when rationalism is beaten down. The moment you go into the rationalist scholarship, you find that the people are willing to reinterpret some of the messages of the Holy Writ, and they're willing to accept that there are parts of the Koran which are historical and parts which are eternal. And, you know, they end up somehow reinterpreting some of the early punishments. For instance, Allama Iqbal, whom we call the Philosopher of Pakistan, was such a rationalist, because in his Sixth Lecture (of his famous Six Lectures), he said that you cannot cut off people's hands in this day and age. I think he derived this thinking from the fact that there were no prisons in ancient Arabia. I am, myself, struck by the fact that when I became conscious, [I found] a lot of variety of opinion in religion.

Tell us a little bit about your university work. Where did you go to school, and what did you major in, as we say?

I matriculated from a nearby school, where we had normal physics, chemistry, geography, and English; I learned Persian on the side; there was compulsory English, which is still compulsory. Then I went to a very prestigious college in Lahore called the Government College Lahore. And there I did my intermediate, which is Class 12. I remember doing French and geography and Persian. Then in BA, I took what we used to call BA Honors. There were certain extra courses in the English language. I ultimately did my MA in the English language. But on the side, I've done a diploma in German because I was interested in languages, and I have done French up to BA. I think languages came easy to me because I had earlier acquaintance with Persian.

Has this skill in multiple languages opened you up to new ideas that you wouldn't have found just in your own tradition?

Definitely. I think there was this obsession with language and the way sentences are constructed, and I was attracted to style. Even now when I think of the English language authors that I like, they're mostly people who write a good style. The same goes for what I picked up in college and I loved Shibli because he wrote such wonderful prose in Urdu. He was a historian, but he could write very well. English came to us quite naturally because it was compulsory. I remember that we had John Stuart Mill in our English essays. I learned the meaning and signficance of liberalism through him. His influence was quite widespread in those early days of Pakistan, and one could find more liberals in our society then than now.

Are there one or two books that shaped your thinking, whether from your own tradition or from the West?

There was one person who influenced me who wrote about the Western intellectual tradition. His name was Jacob Bronowski. That was the first book I read, an account of the Western intellectual tradition, and how the Western mind has been shaped over the centuries. More accessible to us was Bertrand Russell. Since one lived in a society where emotion ran very strong, one puts a lot of premium on rationality. I think British positivism appealed to many of us, and that did appeal to me as well. Among the American authors, I remember the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne. And, of course, some of the poets. For instance, I remember in our class 11, it was Longfellow that we loved. And later on, the circle of authors that I used to read increased, and now there are more Americans. Even in fiction, there are more Americans there than the British.

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