Osama bin Laden
If Dr Ahmed were alive today, he would have agreed that he had a fairly eventful, well-travelled life. Born in Singapore on December 11, 1966 to Pakistani parents, Ahmed was raised in Malaysia and sent to Surrey, UK, to pursue his O and A Level studies at a British boarding school. Of the experience, Dr Noah Feldman – Professor of Law at Harvard University and a good friend of the deceased – states in a tribute written for Bloomberg: “I had the impression that the experience was fairly brutal for the only Muslim boy in the school, many thousands of miles from home – like something out of Roald Dahl. Ahmed sometimes said that what saved him from utter ostracism was his cricket skill as a spin bowler.” So despite being raised in every country other than Pakistan, cricket – the love of every Pakistani’s life – managed to make it through to Shahab Ahmed’s life.
After A Level, Ahmed went back to Malaysia and attained a degree in Law from International Islamic University, Kuala Lumpur, followed by a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degrees in Arabic Studies from American University, Cairo. Between the two, Shahab Ahmed came to work as a journalist in Pakistan, where he claimed to have played football with a six-and-a-half-feet tall Arab, whom his teammates called “the Shaykh” – possibly Osama bin Laden.
From Cairo, Shahab Ahmed went to Princeton where he attained a doctorate in Islamic Studies. After the PhD, Dr Ahmed went to Harvard for Post-doctorate studies, and continued to teach there until recently. Being a man of diverse interests, he taught Islamic Studies as well as Law at Harvard University. He also took a year-long leave from Harvard to teach at Islamabad’s International Islamic University during the academic year 2007-08, and planned to return to teach in Pakistan. But fate saw to it that many of his plans remained unfulfilled, and his career could never achieve the bloom that it looked to be destined for.
In June this year Dr Shahab Ahmed was diagnosed with a rare form of leukaemia. Despite plans for getting him a bone marrow transplant with his sister – London-based gynaecologist Dr Shahla Ahmed – the willing donor. She flew into Cambridge, Massachusetts, from London to donate bone marrow to her brother, but his deteriorating condition made the transplant impossible.
While still ill, Shahab married his fiancée Nora Lessersohn, a History and Middle Eastern Studies’ PhD candidate at Harvard University, on August 1. Doctors’ efforts and family’s support proved to be insufficient and Dr Shahab Ahmed left the world on September 17, 2015. He leaves behind a wife and a range of cutting edge Islamic studies research works – his gift to the world of academia.
A look at Dr Shahab Ahmed’s profile on academia.edu – academics’ preferred social media platform – tells us of the man’s creative depth. “Before Islamic Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses in the Thought of the Earliest Muslim Community (ca. 632-800)” reads the title of one paper. Unfortunately, the paper is not available for public viewing but, luckily, we have Dr Noah Feldman, who throws light on this research work: “He [Shahab Ahmed] discovered and proved that in the first two centuries of Islam, almost all Muslims believed the story according to which the Prophet Muhammad was briefly deceived by Satan into reciting the so-called Satanic verses, which described three Arabian goddesses as intercessors between man and Allah. Today, in contrast, essentially all believing Muslims reject the story as false. Ahmed charted and began to theorize the process of change.”
And then there is “What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic”, considered his magnum opus, due to be published in December this year. The book is believed to be one of the most important steps towards Islamic revisionism – which, notably, is also in line with Islamic teachings – that many key personalities across the globe have been advocating. Sadly, Shahab Ahmed himself would not be among us to see his book’s release.
Dr Ahmed’s death is tragic on two fronts: first is the obvious loss to global academia, and the second is its brutal exposé of Pakistan’s indifference to academia. On the day of Shahab Ahmed’s death, or a day, or even a week later, no Pakistani mainstream media outlet so much as mentioned the tragedy. Here is a man who spent nearly half of his life either studying or teaching at an Ivy League university, who has been lauded as “one of a kind” and “the most brilliant and creative scholar of Islam in his generation”, and who was reportedly a master of 15 languages – and his death could not merit a mention in any mainstream television channel, newspaper or website from his own country. Even our ever-so-active social media “activists” could not bother to bat an eye. And how could they? They didn’t even know.
This is the tragedy that Pakistanis are living through – and they have no one but themselves to blame for it.