Yahoo linked to Dawn, Pakistan's English-language newspaper. I like their editorial section. (If I felt like I had any kind of control or authority over information at the moment I would say something other than I liked it, and that it seems more less full of religious dogma than American news (who knew?!), and that it's heartening simply to hear comments from another country as deep in sh!t as we are right now, but I feel like I have a tenuous grip on everything at the moment.)

Eqbal Ahmad wrote editorials for Dawn, which is why I went and looked. I desperately miss Eqbal. I didn’t really know him well when I was a student and he a teacher at Hampshire. My first encounter with him was during the first semester of my second year. I must have been about as depressed then as I am now; at the time my work with Michael Lesy was causing me a great deal of pain.

Anyway, I was standing in the Greenwich laundry rooms when this small man with a face like a Boston terrier's comes in and starts loading his whites into one of the machines. And I’m standing there staring at my own machine, like a goof.

You’re just going to stand there and watch the laundry? Eqbal asked me.

I have nothing better to do, I said. Eqbal gave me a look of reproach. It wasn’t until I later watched him at the post office putting stamps on a large envelope crooked, then realized the package was addressed to Noam Chomsky, then saw Chomsky and Zinn and Said and later Kofi Annan speak to honor Eqbal’s career, that I realized what that look was about.

I remember feeling terrified when we lost Eqbal, because he knew so much about the history of South Asia and the Middle East and he seemed to have inspired so many people to think critically about nationalism and international policy. My terror at losing such a center of knowledge has now been renewed.

I found some good essays in the course of tracking down a solid link on Eqbal. Here's an interview Eqbal did with David Barsamian on India, Pakistan, and Bosnia; an essay Edward Said wrote about Palestine; more about Eqbal and Palestine from the editorial section at Dawn. These articles are good just because they are by Said and by Eqbal, both of whom spend more time making their prose writerly than any other academics I know.

I feel better now that I’ve linked to this stuff. Please digest these articles thoroughly and take the smarts they give you to your communities, for the sake of the peace activists you know. We're all of us a little overworked right now. Remember, you can’t learn to be a firefighter overnight, and they won’t let you help out in the rescue efforts if you go downtown, but the struggle for peace will love you for helping even if you don’t have any special training.