Legacy

Hamza Alavi: Third World Thinker and Activist

Zafar Shaheed

‘ . . . each idea not yet realized curiously resembles a utopia; one would never do anything ifone thought that nothing is possible except that which exists already’.Simone de Beauvoir, Les Mandarins (1954) cited in Baran (1973: 28).

INTRODUCTION

Hamza Alavi was a thinker, a political activist and, above all, a teacher.History will remember him for his theories on the post-colonial state andrelated socio-political classes, peasant organization and movements, andanalysis of the Pakistan movement. Perhaps more than anything at this time,he should be remembered for having addressed, well before 9/11 and thecurrent global turmoil around the struggles within Islam, issues of religionin Muslim societies.

As the editorial in the leading Pakistani English daily Dawn said atHamza’s death: ‘Starved of minds which think independently and ratio-nally, our society — and establishment — has not really appreciated themen of scholarship who have refused to toe the conventional line’ (Dawn,2003). Moreover, as the editors of the Socialist Register wrote at that timein a web tribute, ‘Hamza’s consistent opposition to authoritarianism, fun-damentalism and capitalism was not calculated to earn him honours of theconventional kind, and his modesty would probably have made him quiteresistant to them, had they been offered’ (Panitch and Leys, 2003).

In that respect, he may be compared with another rare thinker-activist,Eqbal Ahmad. Both Eqbal Ahmad and Hamza Alavi were Pakistanis whoestablished international reputations for their outstanding intellectual and

I would like to gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of a number of friends on earlierdrafts: Karamat Ali, Kamran Asdar Ali, Rashid Amjad, Irfan ul Haque, Akmal Hussain, KhalidNadvi, S.M. Naseem, Abbas Rashid, Asad Sayeed, Werner Sengenberger and Farida Shaheed.While many of these individuals also knew Hamza Alavi, that does not absolve me of theresponsibility for the contents of this article, which I am happy to assume. I would like to thankAshwani Saith for initiating the idea of writing this article.

Development and Change 44(3): 753–768. DOI: 10.1111/dech.12022C© 2013 International Institute of Social Studies.Published by John Wiley & Sons, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA

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political integrity, and yet who wanted to do things in and for their countryand its people. They shared a generosity of spirit with which they met every-one, particularly young people, devoid of notions of hierarchy or ceremony.They hoped to inspire and encourage future generations to pursue criticalenquiry and develop an anti-imperialist vision that could challenge simplereductive religious formulas for understanding the past and current realityof post-colonial countries like Pakistan.

This Legacy article is divided into two parts. The first is a chronologicaloutline of Hamza Alavi’s life and activities; the second addresses some ofthe ideas that he left behind, and how these remain relevant today. Thisapproach seems appropriate since Alavi did not pursue the typically singularcursus of an academic, but undertook a number of activities in his lifethat all add up to the fruition of a thinker-activist. It should help us seethe person and how his ideas emerged through his life-activities (or praxis,as one is tempted to say). We will see a man who moved from centralbanking as part of post-colonial nation building, to farming, to anti-racist,anti-imperialist and anti-dictatorship activism, to an academic career in theUnited Kingdom and the Unites States, finally to return home to reflect uponthe democratic movement. In this journey, he moved academically fromfinance and economics, to political science, sociology and anthropology,culminating with history, religion and philosophy.

LIFE AND ACTIVITIES

Hamza Alavi was born in Karachi on 10 April 1921, and died in that city on1 December 2003. His grandfather and father were established businessmenand well-known philanthropists and educationalists. While coming from thebusiness-inclined Bohra Muslim community in Karachi, Alavi developedhis socialist conscience as he first came into contact with poor students atone of the schools run by his family’s education trust. Later, in the KarachiAcademy High School, he was also placed by his family in a stream wherethe bulk of the students came from poor backgrounds. He was educatedfurther at DJ Science College, Karachi, Wadia College, Poona, BombayUniversity, and Aligarh Muslim University (where he obtained a Master’sdegree in Economics). He joined the Gokhale Institute, Poona, for a PhDbut left that course to begin his working life.

In 1945, at the recommendation of his PhD supervisor, Alavi joined theReserve Bank of India as a research officer. Two years later, at the time ofpartition and independence of India and Pakistan, he played a leading role insetting up the State Bank of Pakistan, including taking the unilateral decisionto set up an Exchange Control in Karachi four months before the nationalState Bank of Pakistan was officially established, to allow the new state tohit the ground running. Having served as the authoritative State Bank officialin East Pakistan, with very wide ranging powers while still in his twenties,

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Alavi rose to become one of the five principal officers of the Bank in 1952,as Secretary of the Central Board. In these positions, he had to contend withgrowing conflicting pressures, from both national and international vestedinterests and the rising merchant and industrial economic barons who wereanxious, then as today, to benefit unfairly at the expense of the nation. Hemanaged to do this without fear or favour, maintaining his moral compass,with the support of Zahid Hussain, the Governor of the State Bank. However,the strain and stress of the job, combined with his ultimate desire to returnto academic pursuits, determined Alavi’s decision to leave the Bank.

Had he stayed on at the State Bank, Alavi would in all likelihood havebecome its youngest Governor, and from there could have gone on to asuccessful career at the IMF or the World Bank, or gone into the familybusiness, had he been so inclined. Instead, he made a total break with thisfirst career in 1953. As an antidote, he moved with his wife Khatoun to herhome in East Africa, where he took up farming in the Urumba Mountains— and started his study of the peasantry, which was to become his firstspecialization in development studies.

In 1955, in part due to health reasons, Alavi moved with his wife to theUK and joined the London School of Economics for a PhD on banking inPakistan. As he says in his auto-biographical sketch, he could have writtenthat thesis blindfolded, so instrumental had he been in setting up the system.Tired of that subject, he began to attend seminars on sociology, anthropologyand political science, as part of his life-long study and writings on historyand social science more generally.

General Ayub Khan’s military coup of 1958 in Pakistan and the precedingdegradation of national democratic processes propelled Alavi into a decadeof intense political activism. He and his wife joined a few like-mindedfriends in the task of sensitizing the early Pakistani diaspora in London tothe social injustice under the dictatorship back home, the social injusticeexperienced by students and immigrant workers in the UK, and the socialinjustice of neo-imperialism. They started a variety of groups, includinga broad forum that brought together people from Asia, Africa and LatinAmerica to discuss post-colonial issues. Another group, the Pakistan YouthLeague, a broad liberal-to-socialist forum, held fortnightly meetings thatwere addressed by non-Pakistanis as well, including Tony Benn, StuartHolland and Eric Hobsbawm. A more restricted Pakistani Socialist Societyled to the Committee for the Restoration of Democracy of Pakistanis againstthe Ayub Khan regime. There were two Pakistani Welfare Associations —one in East London, consisting mainly of Bengali East Pakistanis and theother in Slough, with mainly Punjabi West Pakistanis — through whichAlavi and his friends organized workers.

From 1957 to 1962, Alavi edited the quarterly journal that he initiated,Pakistan Today, providing a trenchant analysis of his homeland under mil-itary dictatorship. The final number was dedicated entirely to Alavi’s 1961article ‘The Burden of US Aid’ (later reprinted and distributed in Pakistan

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by the renowned socialist activist poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz). With David (laterLord) Pitt, Alavi co-founded a key pressure group of that era, the CampaignAgainst Racial Discrimination (CARD), of which he was Vice-Chair, whilePitt, a West Indian, was Chair. Two women — one an Indian Maoist, theother an American Trotskyist — were elected as Joint Secretaries. CARD,a multi-racial organization of Pakistanis, Indians, West Indians as well assympathetic white Britons, was an important part of the larger movementto fight the rising tide of racism. Some of these diverse community repre-sentatives, including Alavi, were invited by Martin Luther King, en route toreceiving his Nobel Peace prize, to talk about racism at his London hotel.This meeting helped these activists realize the value of joining forces againstracism in Britain, and influenced the decision to launch CARD.

As a political activist in Britain in the early 1960s, Alavi became an activemember of the Labour Party, resigning because of what he considered theracist politics of the Wilson government. Concerned with problems of post-colonialism both at the first and the third world levels, Alavi became anactive figure in the New Left movement of Britain, contributing regularlyto the newly founded Socialist Register and the New Left Review. He wasalso involved with the precursor of the New Left Review, the Universitiesand the Left Review (ULR). While the first issue of ULR included articlesfrom his friend Isaac Deutscher and other leading figures of the Left, Alavi’scontribution appeared in the second issue in 1957 (under the pseudonym ofGordon Henderson, since he did not want to ruin his chances of going backto Pakistan!).

ACADEMIC CAREER

Hamza Alavi started his first academic job at the interdisciplinary Institute ofDevelopment Studies (IDS) at Sussex University in 1966, the year that IDSwas established. It was from here that he undertook, in 1968–69, his seminalsocio-anthropological study of peasant society in Pakistan, highlighting thecentrality of the biraderi kinship system to the electoral political system.The intensive participant-observation he conducted during fifteen monthsin a village in Sahiwal district of Punjab Province helped him to develophis insights into the rural bases of political power, ethnicity and kinshipnetworks, and the green revolution in Pakistan.

In 1971, Alavi’s aim of returning home was thwarted by the war with Indiaand the break-up of Pakistan; in a more stable, less militaristic Pakistan, hehad intended to start an Institute of Peasant Studies.1 In 1972, Alavi took up a

1. Following the collapse of the Ayub Khan dictatorship in 1969, Hamza Alavi returned brieflyto Pakistan. During this short period, he attended and addressed a Cabinet meeting regardinglabour policy. It is reported that his forceful presentation to the Cabinet contributed to theadoption of a new labour policy with respect to rights at work.

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lectureship in the Department of Politics at Leeds University. The departmentwas chaired by Ralph Miliband, his old LSE friend and co-founder of theSocialist Register. Like him, Miliband had also worked on the role of thestate in the political economy, although in a different setting.

Two academic jobs that did not happen around this period are also worthmentioning, because they shed light on Alavi’s personal, collegial, familyand moral values. One was a Professorship at Queens University in Ontario,Canada, and the other was a Chair in Sociology and Anthropology at theUniversity of Amsterdam. The first one, for which the letter of appointmenthad been issued, did not materialize due to the inordinate interest of theintelligence services in his political background, even after the ‘landed im-migrant visa’ had been awarded in 1971, following three months of checks.Only months before they were to depart for Canada, Alavi and his wifewere summoned to the High Commission of Canada in London where theywere subjected to extensive interrogation regarding his political activitiesand beliefs, after which he was informed that he was banned from entry intoCanada. The Vice-Chancellor of Queens University finally managed to getthe ban lifted. By then, however, Alavi found the idea of going to Canadaquite offensive, particularly disappointed at how a liberal facade had hiddenwhat he considered vicious scrutiny and discrimination against progressivethinkers. He notes in his memoirs that other distinguished scholars sufferedsimilar treatment, including Andre Gunder Frank, Gabriel Kolko and IstvanMezsaros. What disturbed him in particular was that, despite the Vice-Chancellor’s combative stance, none of his prospective colleagues stoodup for him, not even to send him a word of support in private. So muchfor ‘the hypocritical liberalism and freedom of thought of the DemocraticWest . . . empty slogans. McCarthy lives on’. He gave up a professorship thatwould have paid three times as much as what he earned at Leeds University,but his honour was safe and his moral stand strong.

The Chair being vacated by Professor Wertheim at the Sociology and So-cial Anthropology Centre at the University of Amsterdam was an excitingproposition — and after all, the Netherlands in the early 1970s was rela-tively liberal if not progressive. Invited by Wertheim to apply, Alavi wasselected above a number of other applicants, because his work ran parallelto Wertheim’s in the areas of sociology and anthropology, and because theuniversity wanted to broaden its focus from Indonesia to encompass otherAsian countries. The appointments board selected Alavi for the Chair; butwhile the lengthy procedure of formal approval — going all the way to theMinister of Education — was still under way, his wife Khatoun expressedserious doubts about moving to Amsterdam. She felt more at home by nowin the UK. Aware that his life partner — they had no children, and shewas not as socially gregarious as him — had already made considerablesacrifices for the sake of his career changes and geographical shifts to date,Alavi withdrew his candidature. This was a little to his embarrassment andmuch to the astonishment of the members of the appointment board and

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the Centre in Amsterdam. Foregoing the distinguished Chair, he opted fora simple lectureship at Leeds University, largely for the sake of his wife.He felt more than compensated by the cordial and fruitful working relationswith Ralph Miliband and other members of the Department of Politics whichthey helped to revamp, and with the research students they attracted to theirprogramme.

Alavi subsequently moved to Manchester University as Reader in Soci-ology in 1977, in the department run by his friend Teodor Shanin, anotherleading scholar of peasant society. There followed a rich decade of reward-ing work with colleagues and students from different parts of the world. Asmall story is worth relating here, since it illustrates Alavi’s refusal to panderto formalistic requirements. He recalled that at one stage, with the growingneed for university departments to compete and market themselves based onthe star-like quality of their staff, Shanin said something like, ‘Hamza, weneed to get you a PhD. It will look better in the staff list and our brochure.We know that any one of your various works can qualify you. Why don’tyou simply register whatever topic you are currently working on — and ata mutually agreed time, when you feel you are ready, you submit the workand obtain a PhD’. Alavi thought for a moment, and then recounted a storyalong the following lines.

‘In the Sahiwal village that I was studying, there was an old man who was one of the leadingcommunity figures, well regarded by everyone. One day, the villagers sent a small delegationto him. “Uncle, you know we respect and love you. You are everything to us. However, thevillagers next door are saying funny things because they have learned that you are still . . .uncircumcised!”. Everyone laughed, the old man unrestrainedly, the others uncomfortably.One of them said, “We are glad you are laughing — now, to solve the matter, why don’twe get the best barber [used traditionally for circumcisions in rural settings] and get yourcircumcision done with?”. The old man laughed some more, and said: “You know, it’s funnythat after all these years, when I have children and grandchildren, and more than one wife overthis long life, you should ask me to consider circumcision. Now that the poor old instrumentin question has served its purpose through thick and thin, and I am well into the autumn ofmy life, why should I bother going through these formalities, simply for the sake of whatothers might think?”.’

Teodor got the message and never raised the issue again. After all, Alavi hadguided others for years through PhDs and MPhils, to say nothing of Mastersand Bachelors, without the benefit of a PhD after his name. Had he beeninterested in one for the sake of the title, he would have obtained it in the1940s in Poona, or in the 1950s at LSE.

After retiring from Manchester University in 1988, Alavi lectured at dif-ferent universities, obtaining a professorship at the University of Denverin Colorado, before completing his academic career at the University ofCalifornia. In all, Alavi’s research and teaching career had taken him toUniversity of California, Los Angeles, University of Denver, Universityof Sussex, University of Manchester, University of Leeds, University ofMalaysia, Kuala Lumpur, and Michigan State University.

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While active and recognized in the West, Hamza Alavi always yearned forPakistan, and to do something meaningful there. He kept in touch with like-minded friends and colleagues. In 1979, for instance, he visited Lahore, andaddressed a gathering of Left-leaning intellectuals known as the ‘TuesdayGroup’. After the loss of his wife Khatoun to cancer, Alavi returned for goodin 1997 to his ancestral home in Karachi, to be closer to his family. Despite hisdelicate and deteriorating health, he remained active until the end in this finalstage of his career, in a Pakistan quite changed from the country to whoseedification he had contributed half a century earlier at the State Bank. He gaveregular lectures in different cities, and continued writing and researching,and interacting with old and new friends and colleagues. In particular, heenjoyed interacting with younger people, some of them less known andmost of them less privileged. His study was open to all those who wished todiscuss ideas, as it had always been in the different universities he had taughtat, in the manner of informed and animated exchanges and gracious givingof his time and ideas — Alavi’s way of teaching. Some of his work wastranslated into Urdu. The first translation of one of his articles was publishedin the quarterly Tarikh, then two books were published, entitled JagirdariAur Samraj (Feudalism and Imperialism) and Pakistan: Riyasat Ka Bohran(Pakistan: The State in Crisis). He supported Tarikh and became an advisorymember on its board. He had a long association with the Irtiqa Instituteof Social Science, and supported the group of young people who startedto publish a monthly magazine Badalti Dunya, to which he occasionallycontributed articles. One might say that Alavi continued and crowned thefamily educationalist tradition, but with an attitude: in contrast to his fatherand grandfather, the education and ideas he imparted were clearly socialistand potentially revolutionary.

CONTRIBUTIONS OF IDEAS

Returning to Pakistan towards the end of his life and career, Hamza Alavi’sbroader global kinship with the international community of socialist activist-intellectuals remained intact. This was confirmed at the time of his death in2003, when people such as Andre Gunder Frank, Colin Leys and Leo Pan-itch contributed to web tributes to Alavi. His global analytical achievementsinclude theories of post-colonial societies, peasant political action, ethnicityand kinship ties, and religion and democracy. The collection of essays pub-lished towards the end of his life to honour his achievements attest to therich variety of these accomplishments. The collection was put together byProf S.M. Naseem and Dr Khalid Nadvi (2002); the editors are respectivelythe doyen of development economics in Pakistan, and a leading Pakistanidevelopment scientist at the international level.

Following his 1950s journal Pakistan Today, mentioned above, Alavi wasa founding member of the editorial board of the Journal of Contemporary

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Asia (1971–85) and the Journal of Peasant Studies (1973–96). In additionto the articles he kept writing and publishing throughout his career, he alsoedited a number of books, including Introduction to the Sociology of theDeveloping Societies (1982) and South Asia: The Sociology of DevelopingSocieties (1989).2

Perhaps Hamza Alavi’s first major contribution to the field of socialsciences was his 1965 article ‘Peasants and Revolution’, concerning theconditions under which different categories of peasants may contribute toprogressive movements. In the literature, it is bracketed with a comparablelater contribution in 1969 by Eric Wolf, distinguished professor of the CityUniversity of New York. The so-called Alavi–Wolf thesis, drawing on thepeasants’ role in the Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Algerian and Cubanrevolutions and Indian peasant uprisings, has been vigorously debated innumerous learned journals, books and PhD dissertations. The essay causeda considerable stir, with its focus on the role of the middle peasantry as themost militant section, at least initially, of that class in the countryside and,hence, a natural ally of the urban proletariat, as opposed to the poor peas-ants. This is due to a relative freedom of manoeuvre not enjoyed by the poorpeasants. Terry Byres (1985) joined the group arguing for the revolutionarypotential of the middle peasant. It may be posited that the major opponentof this thesis was Mao Tse Tung, who argued that the middle peasants werelikely to vacillate while the poor peasants had nothing to lose (Oommen,2010). Others who argued against the middle peasant theory include Gough(1968), Dhanagare (1983) and Oommen (1985). Be that as it may, the thesisis alive and well today, and needs further debate in today’s context, wheregreater polarization of class in the countryside may require a major review ofclass analysis that redefines what small, middle and big peasants might meanunder conditions in which rural agricultural production is beset with newproblems such as speculation on product prices and the rental of expansesof land to non-national giant corporations.

Alavi’s analysis of power in peasant societies and the methodologicaland theoretical lessons drawn from that could be, and were, extrapolated toother settings. For instance, he contrasted the situation of the peasant withthat of the industrial worker. In his view, the latter ‘can engage in militantclass action with relative impunity, insofar as he is able to find alternativeemployment and (unlike the poor peasant) does not place at risk the entirelivelihood of himself and his family, his home and his entire social existencein doing so’ (Alavi, 1974: 417; see also Alavi, 1975a). This hypothesis,and the concepts of ‘dependence’ and ‘autonomy’ suggested by Alavi, wereimportant aspects of the theoretical underpinning of the major study carriedout in Pakistan on the structures of power and of leadership of industrial

2. For a comprehensive list of Alavi’s publications, please see the Hamza Alavi InternetArchive: www.hamzaalavi.com.

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workers (see Shaheed, 2007 and the review in Asdar Ali, 2008). Similarly,while Khalid Nadvi’s (1999) field research in Sialkot had an urban focus,it also used Alavi’s earlier work on biraderi and social identities and theirimplications for economic inter-relations. More recently, the lawyers’ move-ment of 2007 in Pakistan, in support of the independence of the SupremeCourt, which contributed to the ousting of the last military dictator, GeneralMusharraf, may be analysed within the framework of relative autonomyposited by Alavi. Lawyers are urban, middle class, independent profession-als, not dependent on ‘salariat’ jobs (see below), but requiring a functioningand autonomous legal system and process in order to make a living. It maythus be argued that, in the particular and exceptional conjuncture that forcedGeneral Musharraf to step down from power, the lawyers had the relativeautonomy to stand up for the rule of law and resist the emergency imposedby the military regime.

In his web tribute to Hamza Alavi in 2003, Andre Gunder Frank —renowned for his work on imperialism, neo-colonialism and the globalityof capitalist development, and a founder of the ‘dependency’ and ‘worldsystems’ theories within development studies — remarked on the paralleltracks that their intellectual development had taken. Writing a couple ofyears before his own death, Frank recognized that Alavi’s structural analysisof colonial capitalism and the burden of US aid, published originally inPakistan Today and subsequently in Economic and Political Weekly in theearly 1960s, provided important source material for his own analysis ofcapitalist underdevelopment.

In their web tribute, Panitch and Leys, the co-editors of the SocialistRegister, noted that Alavi contributed his path-breaking essay ‘ImperialismOld and New’ to the Register’s first volume in 1964, and two further essaysin the following decade, ‘Bangladesh and the Crises of Pakistan’ in 1971, and‘India and the Colonial Mode of Production’ in 1975 (the latter especiallybecoming almost as influential as the first essay on imperialism). A measureof his lasting impact on progressive thinking was the fact that in the 2004volume of the Register, entitled The New Imperial Challenge, Gregory Albobegan a major contribution on ‘The Economics of the New Imperialism’with an extended quotation from Alavi’s (1964) essay. He noted that thetheoretical and political insights of that essay — written four decades earlier— remain central to the analysis of the new imperialism today.

Alavi’s work on the colonial mode of production fed into an importantdebate of the time regarding diversity in the paths of transition to capi-talism, and how best to analyse and address the resulting social relations(see Patnaik, 1990). This area of work has been taken forward by, for in-stance, Jairus Banaji (involved in the debate since the 1970s), whose 2011publication Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Ex-ploitation has recently been awarded the Isaac Deutscher Prize. The analysisand arguments put forward have relevance not only for scholars of history,

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but for a critical and revolutionary understanding of the inner workings ofcapitalism and its crises today. At the national level, Taimur Rahman (2012)has adopted the lens of the colonial mode of production through which tostart an analysis of class structure in Pakistan today (where, in addition toanalysing current modes of production and class structure in Pakistan, healso provides an overview of the ‘modes of production’ debate in South Asiaand elsewhere).

The current situation in Pakistan, where aid (with strings, ribbons andchains attached) constitutes the third largest source of foreign exchange —export earnings and remittances by the Pakistani diaspora, some of whomAlavi sought to sensitize and organize back in the late 1950s and early1960s, are the primary contributors — reminds us that neo-imperialism isalive and kicking. The new old imperialist game for securing Middle Easternand Central Asian oil and other resources continues to be played out dailyunder our eyes.

One of Alavi’s seminal contributions to the discourse on the dynamics ofstate and society was the thesis of the overdeveloped state in post-colonialsocieties. It helped to explain the kind of questions often posed in post-colonial underdeveloped countries with regard to frequent interventions bythe military. In such societies, state institutions such as the army and thebureaucracy are overdeveloped during colonial rule whose ends are socialand political control and regulation in metropolitan interests rather than thedevelopment of the colonized. This structural imbalance is inherited by thestate upon independence, with all its implications for imbalanced nationalsocio-economic development. Alavi defined the Pakistan that emerged in1947 as an ‘overdeveloped state’, by virtue of the overwhelming influenceof its bureaucratic–military complex.

The notion of the relative autonomy of the state bureaucracy in a post-colonial state may benefit from revisiting, in the light of elite bureaucraciesin Pakistan and elsewhere in South Asia and beyond having become increas-ingly subjugated to political interests and political groupings. However, atleast one element of the state in Pakistan and perhaps elsewhere continuesto have growing relative autonomy, and that is the military. In her 2007book Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy, Ayesha Siddiqanaturally refers to this identification by Alavi of the weaknesses of post-colonial political institutions (Siddiqa, 2007: 66–9), that the counterpointto an overdeveloped role for the military and bureaucracy is fragmentationand factionalism among civil society and the political class. In the role ofmediating between rival interests and competing demands within the nation,the balance in civil–military bureaucracy tipped increasingly towards themilitary. Over time, the military began to benefit from land, postings in statecorporations and even in the civil service, and ultimately lucrative positionsthroughout the economy.

When Alavi’s article ‘The State in Post-colonial Societies’ appeared inthe New Left Review in 1972, it gave rise to a lively debate. After that

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article, John Saul wrote on the subject with particular reference to Africa in1974, followed by Colin Leys in 1976. The subject remains alive today, withparticular reference to the appropriation of the concept by the internationalfinancial institutions (IFIs) and their structural adjustment programmes start-ing in the 1990s, seeking to down-size the role of the state and its institutions.This may be considered a somewhat backhanded confirmation that Alavi andhis colleagues were right on target as regards the overdeveloped nature ofstate institutions. However, they were referring to the civil–military bureau-cracy, its corrupt rent-seeking and exploitation of civil society, and not thesectors of health and education and other public goods provided by the state,which have been assailed by the policies of the IFIs. Of course, this is likethrowing the baby out with the bathwater — the bathwater is those aspectsof the post-colonial state that are not imbedded in and essential for nationalsociety.

Within Hamza Alavi’s conceptualization of the post-colonial state, of sem-inal influence is the concept of a ‘salariat’, a class of educated governmentjob-seekers whose role he argued was pivotal in the making of Pakistan.Breaking with the idea that the movement for an independent Pakistan in the1930s and 1940s had been inspired solely by religious motives, Alavi con-tended that it had been led by the salary-dependent class of Muslim govern-ment servants, whom he dubbed the ‘salariat’. The Hindu and Muslim salari-ats competed for jobs and power in pre-partition India. Having experienceda diminution in its share of state jobs, this newly emergent salariat saw that itstood to gain most from the creation of a new state. This concept helps us tocomprehend better both the Pakistan movement and the subsequent rise ofethnic movements in Pakistan — and indeed the rise of regional movementsin the politics of South Asia as a whole. Thus, Alavi’s analysis underlinesthat Pakistan was not obtained for Islam but for Muslims. The difference iscrucial and relevant today. The creation of a theocracy was not approved ofby Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the leader of the movement for Pakistan. He was aliberal democrat who wanted Muslims to live without fear of Hindu domina-tion but did not want a theocracy. In his address to the Constituent Assemblyon the eve of Pakistan’s birth, Jinnah had declared ‘You may belong to anyreligion or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business ofthe State’ (Rashid, 2004: 82–83). Jinnah’s colleague and successor, PrimeMinister Liaquat Ali Khan, declared in March 1949: ‘The people are the realrecipients of power. This naturally eliminates all danger of the establishmentof a theocracy’ (ibid.: 90). This is an important argument that needs to be un-derstood, refined and elaborated in the light of the current struggles againstfundamentalism.

In a manner comparable to the inter-communal competition for state jobsin pre-partition India, provincial and ethnic rivalry among the salariat hascontributed to ethnic conflict in Pakistan. It may be argued that currentconcerns in Pakistan to create new provinces based on linguistic and ethnic

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characteristics reflect at least in part the desire to create new governmentjobs in an expanded salariat, as well as new political positions.

A related implication of this concept is that members of the middle classcompeting to join the salariat were interested not so much in pursuing ed-ucation for knowledge as in obtaining educational qualifications in orderto compete for jobs and positions. This important distinction may be oneexplanation for the apathy and lack of seriousness that have persistently andtragically characterized national efforts to address the critical issue of educa-tional reform. In this context, it is illuminating to note the recent proclamationby a member of the Pakistani Parliament with regard to educational qualifi-cations. Addressing the issue of fake college degrees in a system which atthat time stipulated that a requirement for being elected to parliament wasa university undergraduate degree, this parliamentarian argued, ‘A degreeis a degree. Whether fake or genuine, it’s a degree. It makes no difference’(Ellick, 2010). It was found at the time that many members of parliamenthad fake degrees. This may be considered an advanced form of commod-ity fetishism regarding educational degrees — i.e. the ‘paper qualification’syndrome required for formal sector employment that has been of concernin most post-colonial societies.

In the long and continuing intense debate over the secular versus religiousbasis of Pakistani nationalism, Alavi’s contribution has been significant. Itwas engagement with this debate that led him to closely examine the Khilafatmovement in British India, which he believed had laid the foundations of thepolitical ascendancy of the Muslim clergy. The movement was a pan-Islamiccall to defend the Caliphate of Istanbul, at a time when Ottoman Turkey —having sided with the Central Powers in the First World War — saw itspolitical influence severely limited. While the movement was idealized inBritish India as being anti-colonial in nature, its main ‘achievement’ wasto promote a religious and communalist understanding of politics amongIndian Muslims at the expense of a secular one. It was no small irony thatthe Khilafat movement was supported by Gandhi and opposed by Jinnah.3

Alavi spoke about the territorial dimension of Pakistani nationhood —as distinct from the religious dimension — at the Lahore Press Club in1997, which was included in an article in Rashid’s 2004 book Pakistan:Perspectives on States and Society. He argued forcefully that the sharedlegacy of the Indus Basin could go a long way in ‘building up a sense of ourcommon history and destiny’.

On the issue of secular politics and equality of citizenship, Alavi studiedthe Constitution of Medina at the time of the Holy Prophet, the first Islamicpolitical state. By virtue of the Misaq-e-Medina, he argued, all residentsof Medina, including those Jewish clans that had thrown in their lot withthe new state and were mentioned by name, had become members of the

3. Perry Anderson (2012: 9–10) has noted most recently Gandhi’s support of the Khilafatmovement.

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Ummah. From this precedent fourteen centuries ago, Alavi reminds us — inthe midst of a growing penchant for divisiveness and exclusion in Pakistanand other states with Muslim-majority populations — that there is muchto be learned from the Holy Prophet about equality. This has far-reachinglessons for tolerance and non-discrimination in Islam that may be drawnupon for a better inter-faith understanding that is essential for peace today.

The Daily Times editorial said that while Hamza Alavi may have beenknown mostly as a Left-wing intellectual:

. . . in truth he was a rational philosopher in the tradition of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan whothought that Pakistan as a Muslim state could survive only if it read its Scripture rationallyand interpreted it pluralistically. Mr Alavi therefore was a great supporter of the Quaid-e-Azam and wrote about him in his characteristic investigative manner, only to put off thereligious establishment in Pakistan. (Daily Times, 2003)

In a sense returning to his initial work in banking, the editorial continues, itmay be argued that ‘his last great work was a series of articles on the imprac-tical interpretation of the Quranic edict on interest (riba) by the SupremeCourt of Pakistan. (Pakistan couldn’t implement it.) Ever the man of reason,he demonstrated once again how a religious state may hurt itself by beingliteralist’ (ibid.). The editorial concludes: ‘If he hadn’t declined in healthin recent years, he could have been in the vanguard of the anti-capitalistmovement whose importance we all recognise as we approach the year 2005under the WTO’ (ibid.).

CONCLUDING REMARKS

The personal, political and intellectual contributions of Hamza Alavi wereclosely inter-related throughout his life. He was propelled into seeking socialjustice and radical change by the situation he found himself in, in a post-colonial state that he served initially, which he then left and whose trajectoryof development he criticized systematically. He did this within a broadercritique of post-colonial and neo-imperialist developmental processes, hiscritique growing global with time. He came back to a Pakistan much changed,especially as regards the interpretation of Islam by important segments ofsociety, within a further complicated neo-imperial version of globalization.He took on this reality and criticized it, to the end, never losing sight of theindividuals, families and communities that state and society are supposed toserve.

Much of what Alavi wrote about and taught is still relevant today. Theseideas naturally need to be reviewed critically in the light of current reality:for instance, the nature of the post-colonial state has been transformed con-siderably, especially as a result of structural adjustment programmes, withsignificant weaknesses in bureaucracies and simultaneous growth in thepower of military establishments. Both rural and urban class analysis needs

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to be carried out in changing settings, taking into account new entrants tothe workforce such as women and those dispersed in the small-scale andinformal economy. Perhaps most importantly, the role of religion in nationbuilding and defining national identity needs to be studied from a variety ofangles. In all this, the character and role of a new imperialism, further refinedand complex in its concerns relating to energy and resources and perceivednational interests of global security, need a renewed critical analysis. As animportant part of his legacy, then, Hamza Alavi has thus left considerablework to be done by others today.

Alavi’s legacy underlines the need for academics today to be engaged inthe world of praxis while at the same time permitting the policy world tobenefit from deeper intellectual roots. This is something that is increasinglylacking. Academics tend not only to be driven too often by what one mightregard as a deluxe ‘paper-qualification’ syndrome (or what might in futurebe referred to as the ‘academic-circumcision’ syndrome, for those who nowknow the village tale recounted above), but by the demands of academicreputation (research and grants merely for the sake of publications, citationindices, etc.). They tend too easily to forget that the aim of what academicsdo is to change the lives of people for the better.

Alavi’s life-story also serves to remind us that those with the best brainsmay well study subjects like mathematical economics and finance, and cer-tainly understand and even work in those areas. But they need not stop there;there is always room for human agency to do something more meaning-ful for the greater public good. Personally, politically and professionally,Hamza Alavi was dedicated to the common good of humanity. He appliedthis dedication through his varied life career, in the state bank, in farming, inacademia, in his empirical, ideological and theoretical writing, in politicalactivism in Britain and Pakistan and — above all — in the formation ofyounger activist-intellectuals. They are the ones to carry forward the legacyAlavi has left us.

REFERENCES

Alavi, H. (writing as ‘Gordon Henderson’) (1957) ‘Can Capitalism Survive?’, Universities andLeft Review (Summer).

Alavi, H. and Amir Khusro (1961) ‘Pakistan: The Burden of US Aid’, Pakistan Today (Autumn).Alavi, H. (1964) ‘Imperialism Old and New’, Socialist Register 1964: 104–26.Alavi, H. (1965) ‘Peasants and Revolution’, Socialist Register 1965: 241–77.Alavi, H. (1971) ‘Bangladesh and the Crises of Pakistan’, Socialist Register 1971: 289–317.Alavi, H. (1972) ‘The State in Post-Colonial Societies: Pakistan and Bangladesh’, New Left

Review I (74): 59–81.Alavi, H. (1974) ‘Rural Bases of Political Power in South Asia’, Journal of Contemporary Asia

4(4): 413–22.Alavi, H. (1975a) ‘Armee et Bureaucratie dans la Politique du Pakistan’ [‘The Role of the Army

and Bureaucracy in Pakistani Politics’], in Anouar Abdel Malek (ed.) L’Armee dans la nation[The Army in the Nation]. Algiers: Societe nationale d’edition et de diffusion.

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Alavi, H. (1975b) ‘India and the Colonial Mode of Production’, Socialist Register 1975: 160–97.Alavi, H. (1983) ‘Rural Bases of Political Power in South Asia’, Journal of Contemporary Asia

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co.uk/v34/n13/perry-anderson/gandhi-centre-stageAsdar Ali, K. (2008) ‘Review of Shaheed, Z., The Labour Movement in Pakistan’, The Interna-

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Brill.Baran, P.A. (1973) The Political Economy of Growth. London: Pelican.de Beauvoir, S. (1954) Les Mandarins [The Mandarins]. Paris: Editions Gallimard.Byres, T.J. (1985) ‘The Agrarian Question and Differentiation of the Peasantry’, Foreword in A.

Rahman (ed.) Peasants and Classes: A Study in Differentiation – Bangladesh, pp. ix–xxxvii.New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Daily Times (2003) ‘Hamza Alavi: Greatness We Rebuffed’, 3 December.Dawn (2003) ‘Editorial’, 12 December.Dhanagare, D.N. (1983) Peasant Movements in India 1920–1950. New Delhi: Oxford University

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Gough, K. (1968) ‘Peasant Resistance and Revolt in South India’, Pacific Affairs 4(4): 526–44.Leys, C. (1976) ‘The “Overdeveloped” Post-colonial State: A Re-evaluation’, Review of African

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Pakistan’, Development and Change 30(1): 141–75Naseem, S.M and K. Nadvi (eds) (2002) The Post-Colonial State and Social Transformation in

India and Pakistan: Essays in Honour of Hamza Alavi. Karachi: Oxford University Press.Oommen, T.K. (1985) From Mobilization to Institutionalization: The Dynamics of Agrarian

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in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Rahman, T. (2012) The Class Structure of Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University Press.Rashid, A. (ed.) (2004) Pakistan: Perspectives on State and Society. Lahore: SAHE.Saul, J. (1974) ‘The State in Post-colonial Societies: Tanzania’, Socialist Register 11: 349–72.Shaheed, Z. (2007) The Labour Movement in Pakistan: Organization and Leadership in Karachi

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Following doctoral studies with Hamza Alavi, Zafar Shaheed worked forthe United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Laos and in Sudan,before joining the International Labour Office in Geneva, until 2009. Heworked first as a wages and industrial relations specialist, and then on rightsat work, areas in which he has a number of publications. He can be contactedat e-mail address: zshaheed1@gmail.com.