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Eqbal Ahmad is probably the most globally respected Pakistani intellectual most Pakistanis have never heard of.

Edward Said called him one of the two greatest influences on his own thinking.

Noam Chomsky considered him a close friend.

And the FBI once raided an office in Chicago to arrest him for allegedly conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger.

Born in 1933 in the village of Irki in Bihar, into a Muslim zamindar family when he was around 4 his father a Gandhian who had been redistributing parcels of family land to landless peasants was murdered in his presence by rival landowners at least one of them a relative.

Ahmad later said that moment taught him

*Class is more important than blood relationship and property is more dear to people than friendship or loyalties.

in 1947 he and his elder brother walked to lahore he carried a gun.

He fought in the 1948 Kashmir war as a second lieutenant and was wounded.

Then came Forman Christian College (economics 1951) an MA in modern history from Punjab University a Rotary fellowship at Occidental in California where he first read deeply about the genocide of Native Americans, and finally a PhD from Princeton on the Tunisian labour movement.

That research pulled him into north africa where he joined the Algerian National Liberation Front and worked directly with Frantz Fanon during the war against France.

He was even part of the FLN delegation at the Evian peace talks. He was offered a position in the first independent Algerian government and turned it down. He wanted to remain an independent intellectual not a state functionary.

Back in the US in the 60s he became one of the earliest and sharpest critics of the Vietnam War.

His public defence of Palestinian rights after 1967 cost him a job at Cornell.

In 1971 the FBI charged him along with the Berrigan brothers and others, the Harrisburg Seven with conspiring to kidnap Kissinger.

The case ended in a mistrial the plot was according to those involved an idea casually floated at one of his dinner parties about making a citizens arrest of the man bombing Cambodia.

What makes him worth remembering for us is what he said about Pakistan and the wider Muslim world:

He called nationalism and religious fanaticism a twin curse and spent the 90s campaigning against nuclear weapons in both India and Pakistan and his lectures inside Pakistan were regularly disrupted by shadow figures.

Pervez Hoodbhoy has noted that arrest warrants and death sentences were issued against him under successive martial law regimes.

His predictive record is uncomfortable to read now

He interviewed Osama bin Laden in Peshawar in 986 back when bin Laden was a us and Pakistani asset and warned in the early 90s that bin Laden's ideology would eventually turn him against both Washington and Islamabad.

In 1990 he warned the US that toppling Saddam would trigger sectarian violence and regional chaos, 13 years before the 2003 invasion.

He also warned that the Pakistani state's support for Islamist proxies in Afghanistan would blow back on Pakistan itself.

His dream in his final years was to build an independent liberal arts university in Islamabad called Khaldunia named after Ibn Khaldun, blending the Western university tradition with the older madrassa tradition.

Nawaz Sharif's government allotted land and asif Zardari lota reportedly seized the plot later allegedly for a golf course.

Ahmad died of heart failure in Islamabad on 11 May 1999 a week after being diagnosed with colon cancer. The university was never built.

He spoke Ur Eng Pern Arabic and Frh.

He advised revolutionaries and refused governments. and he remains in Shahid Alam words the most astute political thinker the Islamic world produced in the twentieth century which is true what do think about our unsong hero comment below thank you very much.

Source on Twitter as @indusland

https://x.com/Indusland_/status/1624801970656800771?s=20

This stucco head of the Buddha comes from the Gandhara region which is Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northern Punjab, Pakistan.

The serene half closed eyes the wavy hair pulled into a topknot, the Greek-influenced facial proportions and this is Gandharan art at its most refined.

Gandhara was where Buddhist devotion mixed Greco-Roman sculptural technique.

After Alexander's campaigns brought Hellenistic culture to the Indus region of Pakistan in the 4th century bce, a fusion emerged that would change the visual history of Buddhism forever.

Before Gandhara the Buddha was never depicted in human form only as symbols like a footprint a wheel or an empty throne.

It was Indus soil of Pakistan in whom workshops of Taxila, and Swat, where artists first gave the Buddha a face.

That face then traveled the Silk Road. The Gandharan model serene expression, draped robes topknot became the template for Buddhist imagery across Central Asia, China, Korea, and Japan etc.

Every giant Buddha statue in East Asia traces its visual DNA back to sculptors working in indus aka Pakistan.

This particular piece shows the classic Gandharan blend the dot between the brows are Buddhist iconographic markers, while the naturalistic modeling thee material stucco over a clay core was the preferred medium at later Gandharan sites like Takht-i-Bahi and Jamal Garhi in Mardan district of Pakistan.

The world's first images of the Buddha were made in indus Pakistan Not in republic of india Not in China but in indus by the ancestors today's Pakistanis the unique the identity of Indus which was Carved into Pakistan in 47.

This bearded face flanked by floral rosettes is a piece of Gandharan art. The unique sculptural tradition that flourished in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northern Punjab, Pakistan between roughly the 1st and 5th centuries CE.

The reason it looks European is no mystery. For over 600 years, Greek artistic technique was continuously practised in this region.

In 327 to 325 BCE, Alexander the Great crossed the Hindu Kush and campaigned through Gandhara. After his death in 323 BCE, Greek influence stayed put. His general Seleucus founded the Seleucid Empire, and the Indo (Indus) Greek Kingdoms (c. 200 BCE – 10 CE) followed. Greek-descended kings ruling cities like Sirkap at Taxila.

Minting coins with Greek inscriptions, and patronizing Buddhism. King Menander I, known in Pali sources as Milinda, engaged in famous philosophical dialogues with Buddhist monks, preserved in the text Milindapanha.

By the time the Kushan Empire, a Buddhist and zoroastrian power, rose in the 1st century CE, greek artistic technique had been practised in Gandhara for 300 years. The Kushans inherited that tradition and applied it to a new subject. The Buddha.

The sculpture shows the hallmarks of late Hellenistic technique.

Naturalistic facial modelling. Brow, nose, and beard in deep three-dimensional relief. Wavy, voluminous hair. A convention inherited from Greek depictions of figures like Zeus and Poseidon.

Floral rosettes flanking the face. A Greco-Roman architectural motif adapted by Gandharan workshops in Ancient Pakistan.

This was likely part of a frieze or cornice on a Buddhist stupa or monastic complex. Possibly an Atlas figure or mythological mask. Decorative elements borrowed from Greek architecture and placed on Buddhist religious buildings.

Gandharan art was the first tradition in history to depict the Buddha in human form. Before Gandhara, the Buddha was represented only by symbols. A footprint. A tree. An empty throne. The earliest standing Buddha statues came out of workshops in Taxila, Peshawar, Swat, and Charsadda. All from Ancient Pakistan.

When Buddhism spread along the Silk Road into Central Asia, China, Korea, and Japan, the Buddha image travelled with it.

Every later Buddha statue across East Asia. The Bamiyan Buddhas, the Longmen Grottoes, the Great Buddha at Kamakura. All of them descend stylistically from these Pakistani originals.

>The image of the Buddha as developed in Gandhara became the prototype for the representation of the Master throughout the entire Buddhist world.

— Rowland, The Art and Architecture (Pelican, 1953)

This weathered face is a small fragment of one of the most extraordinary cultural fusions in human history. It happened inside Pakistan and shaped the visual imagination of half the world.

The photograph captures something specific about the mood (smiles) of September 1965 a country of just from its independence 18 years suddenly at full-scale war with a neighbour seven times its size, and the men going forward to fight were doing it with grins on their faces.

The 1965 war began on the night of 6 September 1965, when India launched a three-pronged offensive across the international border into Pakistani Punjab aiming for Lahore, Sialkot, and Kasur.

The plan was reportedly to capture Lahore by breakfast. Indian forces crossed the BRB Canal and reached the outskirts of the city. They never got further.

What followed was 17 days of some of the largest tank battles since the Second World War, the Battle of Chawinda in the Sialkot sector saw over 600 tanks engaged, making it one of the biggest armoured clashes of the post-WWII era.

The Battle of Asal Uttar in the Khem Karan sector saw Pakistani forces hold against superior numbers. The Pakistan Air Force flying largely American F-86 Sabres against a numerically superior Indian Air Force, established remarkable parity in the air pilots like MM Alam and Sarfraz Rafiqui and Sajjad Haider became national legends.

The men in this jeep, kit on their backs and rifles between their knees, were part of the infantry surge that held the line at the Lahore and Sialkot fronts. The dust on their faces is from the roads of central Punjab, somewhere between cantonment and forward position.

The war ended in a UN-brokered ceasefire on 23 September 1965 and was formally settled by the Tashkent Declaration in January 1966.

Both sides claimed victory the territorial map ended up roughly where it had started. But for Pakistan, 1965 became a foundational national memory the year a young state stood its ground against an army many times its size.

Photo was taken from PakDef.info archives.

Ex-Sawar Shah Baz served in the 34th Poona Horse Regiment and was pensioned off in 1916 he couldn't remember exactly when he enlisted, but recalled he had seen not quite five years service when Queen Victoria died in 1901 putting his enlistment somewhere around 1896-97.

By 1955 he was roughly 80 years old, still on horseback, still tent-pegging.

His son had also completed 25 years of army service by this point.

For those unfamiliar tent-pegging is picking a peg from the ground with a lance while riding at full gallop. It's been a cavalry sport on the subcontinent for centuries and remains a competitive discipline in Pakistan's military today and common sport through out Pakistan and especially in Punjab.

Some Indus seals seem to show possible Mesopotamian influence, as in the motif of a man fighting two lions (2500–1500 BCE)

Several Indus Valley seals show a fighting scene between a tiger-like beast and a man with horns, hooves and a tail, who has been compared to the Mesopotamian bull-man Enkidu, also a partner of Gilgamesh, and suggests a transmission of Mesopotamian mythology