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...the noteworthy arguments of anti-imperialist theory, which translates most often in the struggle of Palestinians for self-determination, connect Said, Ahmad, and Rushdie. Said's views on Naipaul and Bhabha, shared by both Rushdie and Ahmad, are critically elaborated and contextualized within the major debates on the politics of postcolonial theory.
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The strength of Said's personal and intellectual relationship to Eqbal Abroad and Salman Rushdie, two highly visible South Asian intellectuals, rests in a shared notion that history, narrative, and politics are inextricably intertwined. This view can be traced back to the anti-imperialist discourse shaped by Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, and C. L. R. James. These formative thinkers foregrounded ways of articulating the materialities and violences of colonialism. They were involved in the fundamental obligation that Said understood later to be assigned to intellectuals: to speak against power, to question structures of coercion, injustice, and silencing. The task of the intellectual would be to create alternative readings of history and culture.
The intellectual's work should be adversarial. Eqbal Ahmad has occupied this position for a long time along side Said. He has played a major role in changing the American perception of Palestinians and their history. Ahmad relentlessly formed the meanings of revolutionary struggle against colonial power. His understanding of revolutionary thinking would always be based on a fundamental realization that opposition to ignorance, prejudice, and oppression will be more relevant after the alleged exuberance of territorial independence. The process of decolonizing especially the mind is desperately incomplete and dynamic. The depth and long-term orientation of Ahmad's theory of anti-imperialism has always impelled Said's indefatigable watchfulness of new forms of Orientalism. Both have insistently identified emerging foundationalist images of American media--in "perfect synchrony," as Said would say, with the administration. Between Said and Rushdie the experience of "paradoxical identity" offers new imagined homelands and new intellectual frontiers to cross.
I propose that the influential arguments of anti-imperialism, which translates most often in the struggle of Palestinians for self-determination, connect Said, Ahmad, and Rushdie. Said and Rushdie's friendship is glued more by a shared condition of exile and cultural hybridity. I argue that despite vigorous advances made by other prominent South Asian intellectuals especially Homi Bhabha, and V. S. Naipaul (of Indian ancestry, born in Trinidad) to depoliticise the edifice of colonialism, Said, Ahmad, and Rushdie have cooperatively (and as far as Palestine is concerned) maintained that imperialism is structurally monolithic and historically intransigent. On this account, I shall discuss in my last section the major limitations of Bhabha's theories of ambivalence, mimicry, and translation. For Said a number of non-Western intellectuals have seriously reduced imperialism to dubious notions of Western charity and cultural relativism. They have emptied the very experience of colonialism from its materially raw realities of discrimination, stereotyping, and segregation. Homi Bhabha in particular was more seduced by academic professionalism and specialization. Said, Ahmad, and Rushdie have found V. S. Naipaul and Homi Bhabha's critical consensus on the ambivalence of imperial rule particularly unsettling. The theory of ambivalence has depended largely on ideological constructions of division and exclusion of the other.
I. Sharing the Realms of Empire
Said dedicated one of his most important works on colonial history, Culture and Imperialism (1993), to Ahmad. Said's gesture reminds us that Ahmad's work and thinking must be situated at the heart of anti-imperialist politics. Until the time of his death, Ahmad continued to speak against neo-colonialism, and especially against the US policies of regime change and its ongoing grand blueprint to "democratize" the Middle East.
Said and Ahmad were largely formed by colonial histories and by a hybrid and peripheral existence within the West. Both were born in the mid-thirties under British rule in Palestine and Pakistan. They both migrated to the US and studied at Princeton University and later taught in American universities. Ahmad grew up in colonial India and witnessed the Partition of India and Pakistan. After the Partition of 1947, he migrated to Pakistan. Ahmad was associated with Frantz Fanon in the Algerian National Liberation Front. His anti-colonial activism found its expression during the years 1964-1968 as he became one of the most vocal and notable voices against American brutalities in Vietnam and Cambodia, and a disciplined commentator on the Palestinian resistance movement since 1968. Ahmad remained, for Said, "that rare thing, an intellectual unintimidated by power or authority, a companion in arms to such diverse figures as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Richard Falk, Fred Jameson, Alexander Cockburn, and Daniel Berrigan." (1) The Arab defeat of 1967 by Israel sharpened Said's political consciousness and brought him in line with Ahmad's essentially revolutionary and anti-imperialist affiliation, developed during his politically formative years in French Algeria and British India. Said and Ahmad were formed by the colonial experience itself. Born and brought up in the political and cultural realms of European and American empires, Said and Ahmad were made by the very matter and knowledge of peripherality. When Ahmad died of heart failure in Islamabad on May 11, 1999, Said described him in the foreword to Confronting Empire (2000) as straightforwardly "our dear friend and comrade." Because he lived and witnessed colonial control with its relentless dehumanization of the natives, Ahmad, for Said, remained "a real friend in the struggle" for the rights of Palestinians.
Since their meeting in Beirut in 1980 with the renowned Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Said and Ahmad wanted to develop common strategies of opposition to Israeli colonialism. Before the Oslo Accords, David Barsamian recounts in his interview that Ahmad conferred with Arafat at that time to build a flexible approach based on principles of equality and inclusion. He argued to the leadership and in a lecture in Beirut," The PLO has been entrapped in a rejectionist posture to its enemy's benefit, that it should tactically pass the burden of rejectionism to its adversaries, that rejectionism is historically and theoretically alien to the revolutionary tradition." (2)
Said and Ahmad agreed very early on that the Palestinian leadership must acknowledge the fact that the new state of Israel came into being to stay indefinitely. The PLO must now focus more creatively and constructively on the struggle to actualize its own right for self-determination. They persuasively argued that revolutionary struggle must involve political plasticity, distinguishing tactic from strategy, understanding the enemy's moves, deploying clandestinity when necessary, and unremittingly re-examining one's premises. (3) In the early 1980s, Ahmad maintained that the PLO's "tactical inflexibility," "rejectionist posture," and physical isolation in the South of Lebanon during the Camp David negotiations were irrevocable mistakes. As a consequence, the post-Camp David period, according to Ahmad's analysis, was characterized mainly by increased settlements, more expropriation of Palestinian land, and a systematic interruption of Palestinian life. By insisting on the complex connections that Israel has with US economic interests and hegemony in the Middle East, Ahmad was responding to a PLO at that stage fixated on the absolutism of armed struggle. He went further by formulating alternative strategies that would strengthen the idea of resistance to the Zionist scheme to annihilate Palestinian collective memory. During some of the most decisive junctures of the Palestinian struggle against Israeli systematic uprooting and annexation of Palestinian land, Ahmad proposed a number of action plans. In 1968-1969 he wished that
large marches ... be organized into the West Bank and Gaza. Return home. When old men and women die in refugee camps, they wish to be buried in their ancestral villages. Funeral processions should move across the frontiers into Israel. The symbol of exodus must be reversed. A liberation movement seeks to expose the basic contradictions of the adversarial society. Israel seeks legitimacy as the haven of a long persecuted people, but it is founded on and still expands at another people's cost. (4)
Ahmad theorized that a liberation movement must be creative and alert to historical details. In the light of similar policies of land grabbing in 1989, he further warned the PLO to make the cessation of Jewish settlements in Occupied Territories the ultimate priority. He advised the leadership to "address the question of Jewish immigration ... [and] do more in the area of public education." (5) Said himself depended on Ahmad's practical propositions, and on his ability to deliver precise and persuasive strategies. He called him simply "my guru in political matters." (6) Said notes that Ahmad, who is not a Palestinian, "was a genius at sympathy." (7) For Said, the facility to think in terms of alternative ideas, alternative political strategies, and alternative readings for the sake of others was what determined Ahmad's immense contribution to the Palestinian cause. Ahmad not only influenced...
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