A “nationalist with left leanings,” a “public intellectual with a global vision” (p. 8), a man of impeccable culture and with an unimpeachable pedigree, Eqbal Ahmad was also a close friend, scholarly interlocutor, and fellow activist of Stuart Schaar, himself an academic-activist of standing and professor emeritus at the City University of New York. Schaar's intimate account of his comrade, once compared by Edward Said to Rudyard Kipling's Kim as a “friend of the whole world,”Footnote ²¹ is based both on the longtime acquaintance between the author and his protagonist, and on Ahmad's substantial archives housed at Hamilton College, where he had taught politics and Middle East studies from 1982 to 1997. Schaar's narrative is poignantly informed by personal interviews with friends, colleagues, and relatives in both the United States and Pakistan, indeed scattered around the “whole world,” tracing an orbit of global influence that still emanates from Ahmad's prodigiously productive lifework and probingly provocative writings.

If Ahmad was indeed recognized as a “friend of the whole world,” a terrain identified not least by those repeatedly contested arenas of Algeria, Bosnia, Palestine, and Pakistan, that friendship had to endure an all too violent trajectory of tempestuous times, a concatenating chronology that stretched from World War II, the subsequent partition of the subcontinent, decolonization and post-independence depredations, a Cold War, and a “new world order” unpromisingly proclaimed in 1990 by US President George H. W. Bush. Ahmad died in 1999 on the eve of a “global war on terror” launched by President George W. Bush, following the 9/11 attacks; his death was an untimely passing of what Schaar recognizes in his subtitle as a pressingly prescient “critical outsider in a turbulent age”—or, more aptly perhaps, “ages.” Schaar's narrative is introduced then by way of a rereading of the culturally informed and politically astute international visitor's involvement in the famously dramatic anti–Vietnam War case of the Harrisburg Seven, charged in 1971—unsuccessfully as it finally turned out—with criminal plotting against the US government. His discussion of this infamous litigation and its deleterious effects on the cohesion of the Seven allows Schaar to elaborate on his subject's political prowess, organizational insights, and relentlessly uncompromising principles, features that hallmark Ahmad's continued polemical contributions to international struggles for political independence and social justice over the last four decades of a century that he would not live out.

Following an extended excursus on the young Ahmad's bildung first in India, then in Pakistan, and succeeded by his undergraduate years at Princeton, the classmate/biographer turns to the already accomplished activist's classic “polemics” (chapter 3) in summations of Ahmad's hallmark challenge in the Times Literary Supplement to Ernest Gellner's failure to grasp Frantz Fanon's unrelenting critique of nationalism, his resolutely aggressive refutation of Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya's myopic endorsement of the first Gulf War in 1990–91, and his unfortunate confrontation with the editors of Race and Class, the London-based journal with which Ahmad had long been associated, over Aijaz Ahmad's critique of Edward Said and postcolonialism. The intellectual chronologies of these “polemics,” which range further from the fierce 1968 disputation with Regis Debray and his “foco” theory of revolution in the pages of Monthly Review to his more personal confrontations with representatives of the Palestinian leadership, are subsequently redistributed by Schaar in five chapters that deal first with “Islam and Islamic history” (chapter 4); followed by “imperialism, nationalism, revolutionary warfare, insurgency, and the need for democracy” (chapter 5); “the Middle East and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict” (chapter 6); “India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh” (chapter 7); and finally, the overarching “critique of U.S. foreign policy, the Cold War, and terrorism” (chapter 8). Cursory as these brief digests of critical argumentation might be, they are grounded in apt citations from and references to Ahmad's dynamic bibliography of intellectual interventions into the international contests and controversies that divided contestants and comrades alike in ever changed and changing political circumstances, fraught evidence of the pain that can also come from being a “friend of the whole world.” A forceful contributor to such intellectual initiatives as the Institute for Policy Studies, Monthly Review, the Institute of Race Relations, and the Middle East Research and Information Project, Ahmad's clear-sighted provocations remain “timely” and noteworthy for the prescient prognostications that recur in Schaar's citations of, for example, Ahmad's tripartite examination of “third world” post-independence dictatorial debacles (Arab Studies Quarterly 1980–81); the special issues on Lebanon and the Middle East edited for Race and Class; and Pakistan's post-partition predicaments as recounted in his columns in Dawn, the leftist Pakistani daily to which Ahmad was a regular contributor.

Schaar concludes by turning to the celebration of Ahmad on his retirement in 1997, just two years before his death, from teaching at Hampshire College. The program of that special event extended over an entire weekend, and the speakers who testified at the podium in recognition of Ahmad's political positions and his personal probity are recited by Schaar in an appraising recapitulation of Ahmad's uncommon career. Edward Said spoke first, followed by Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, and Howard Zinn, among other notables, several of whom lamented Ahmad's unfulfilled vision of Khaldunia University that the retiring professor had planned for Pakistan. At once an intellectual biography based on Ahmad's critically pointed bibliography and a personal memoir founded in the bonds of friendship, Schaar's tribute to the “critical outsider in a turbulent age” he knew so closely and for so long portrays a consummate partisan in and against the organizational and political developments and desecrations of the late twentieth century, an age that oversaw the demise of one imperial mission and the launch of another “global war on terror.”