The Courage to Doubt: Khaled Ahmed (1943-2024)

He was too much of an academic to be a journalist, and too much of a journalist to be an academic.

Khaled Ahmed lived in the liminal. His writings summon the past to triage the present, mediating furious extremes in society, and offering doorways to broader reflection. This was his creative creed, one formed in classical liberalism, stressing social progress through individual freedom, equality, protection of civil liberties, representative government, rule of law – and free markets.

But “liberalism is not an ideology,” Khaled wrote in his Indian Express column of March 28, 2014, Liberals, Losers and Spoilsports. It is, he said, “a moment of conscience, an attitude.”

This hypnotic piece captures Khaled’s essence, and it could well be autobiographical: “The conservative is surer of his thinking because it is connected to the known past; the liberal is less surefooted because he wants to question entrenched attitudes of the past… In doubt, there is freedom to make concessions to those who think differently. Doubt here includes self-doubt to allow for a measure of altruism. It is also from doubt that moderation emanates: the instinct to stand in the middle when everyone is taking sides and is getting ready to clash.”

The sentinels of small-town virtue vilify the liberal for interrogating ingrained attitudes of our social and political history, for lacking the certitude of the conservative, and for rescuing the underdog.

“Authors who defend liberalism must often struggle just to get the word out without facing incomprehension or abuse,” he said. This leaves defenders of liberalism as faint but poignantly brave, flickers in an enveloping darkness.

Khaled lamented his country’s cart-crash collapse into immoderate sickness, the metastasising desecration of its spirit. This is the elegiac throughline in his body of work, which analysed the careening with a liberal’s deeply invested but dispassionate rationalism. Rationalism’s retreat and the historical revisionism by Pakistan’s illiberal forces of hinge moments aggrieved Khaled.

Evidence of such egregious rewriting is the fact that vinyl pressings of Jinnah’s pivotal “secularist” speech vanished shortly after Partition, and his aspirations for the country he founded have been stretched to their elastic most. Jinnah’s original tagline for Pakistan, “Unity, Faith, Discipline,” was a call for cohesion. But on Rawalpindi’s approach to Islamabad, the order has been conspicuously altered, in large floodlit metal letters, to “Faith, Unity, Discipline.” Where Jinnah’s “faith” once symbolised belief in collective national achievement, it has been reinterpreted as fiat for religious priority.

What made Khaled, Khaled?

His origin story is conveyed in his unpublished autobiographical sketch, My Life Story: The Obscure Saga of a Mediocre (he was anything but). This work provides rare, textured insight into the man – revealing the resilience and real-world experiences that shaped his intellectual depth.

He writes: “I got out of Jalandhar in 1947 at the age of four in a truck with my maternal grandfather because my father, serving in the Indian Army, was still fighting the Second World War, waiting to be demobilised in Malaya. I recall how my grandfather’s fez flew off when the truck, overloaded with relatives from the Pathan settlements, passed under a tree.”

In Lahore, he writes, “We lived in a flat on top of the house of Pakistan’s test cricketer Shafqat Rana until my [army major] father returned and took us to Zaman Park, where his father had occupied a house next to his brother’s, that of Ahmad Hassan Khan, [former prime minister] Imran Khan’s maternal grandfather. My unlettered mother somehow hired a tonga and took me to the Convent of Jesus and Mary school and got me admitted in ‘baby class,’ of which I only have bad memories. We soon moved to Jhelum, where I joined Class One in a cantonment primary school and learnt to ride a bicycle.”

He continues: “From Jhelum, I wrote my first letter in Urdu to my maternal uncle Judge Bashiruddin Ahmed Khan in Rawalpindi… and received a money order from him of Rs 50.”

This princely generosity was Khaled’s first payday as a writer.

Khaled’s peripatetic life wound through Murree and Lyallpur (where he studied in an abandoned Gurdwara) before finally settling for good in Lahore’s Zaman Park. His Class Three open-air classroom met in a cemetery. (“What we, the students, did to the graves is unprintable,” he writes.) He started Class Six at a school on Infantry Road near the graveyard of Mian Mir – a revered 17th-century Sufi saint. Some 70 years later, Khaled was buried in the same real estate on November 18.

During his salad years, most of Khaled’s teachers were “not of high quality” – the Hindu teachers who monopolised science subjects all left for India, setting the stage for a STEM-poor Pakistan – but “some of the boys were brilliant, coming from the streets of Dharampura of illiterate parents.”

The teachers who most influenced Khaled were a roll call of ascetic souls. “One teacher of Persian… was from the North-West Frontier Province who slept in the nearby mosque and led funeral prayers there.” But Khaled also took to heart Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s saying: “No religion can survive without work ethic, but work ethic can survive without religion.” Khaled’s work ethic was religious.

As a youth, Khaled was spending his pocket money on publications like Adab-e-Latif, Saturday Evening Post and Lail-o-Nihar, edited by the scholar Syed Sibte Hasan, an issue of which carried Khaled’s first ever byline – a letter to the editor. He held on to copies of all his formative readings to the last. His small room at his father’s house in Zaman Park was a fire hazard, his son tells me. It was a ceiling-high maze of yellowed books requiring athletic nimbleness to navigate. Once, when some of the worst-worn of his library was discarded, he marched to the flea market to buy it back.

Khaled’s bibliomania traced to his father: “My father was an avid reader of English novels, mostly ‘action’ Westerns with cowboys acting rough like Jallandhar Pathans [who]… identified with the character of the tight-lipped, somewhat taciturn cowboy,” he writes. “I got locked into English fiction… I kept a dictionary, and judging from the red marks on the cowboy novels I read, I consulted the dictionary 10 times on each page. (I kept a tally: by matriculation, I had read 186!).” This got him excited about language structures: “I electively read French at Government College, German at Punjab University, and Russian at Moscow State University during my foreign service career.”

He recalls cricketing “all the time” with his cousins – some of whom would go on to captain the national team – and neighbours, including lawyer and politician Aitzaz Ahsan and his more “well-behaved brother.” It was cricket that carried Khaled into Government College on a scholarship.

There, Shoaib Hashmi left an impression, teaching him economics. (Khaled would later teach my father the subject at the same campus.) “I saw [Hashmi] being subjected to rehearsed harassment in class by [intellectually pedigreed] Tariq Ali, Salmaan Taseer, Shahid Rahman.” But from Hashmi, a riotously rebellious powerhouse who brought the skit show Such Gup to PTV, Khaled learned “how to succeed in life non-confrontationally.” Probably inspired by him, Khaled took to college theatre and verse writing.

Of course, Government College had seen better times, but it still offered some entrancing rhythms. Khaled tuned into disciplines previously deprived him. He stood first in his MA degree in English and taught at Government College for another four years. He referred to one of his pupils, Javed Ahmad Ghamidi, who, to his lights, became “the greatest Islamic scholar of our times.” In turn, Khaled writes, he learnt from Ghamidi. Another lasting influence was the poet Taufiq Rafat—who “lived a life without final conclusions, creating pathos and beauty by refraining from imposing any moral assessment.”

This shared outlook with his teacher Rafat made Khaled fit for a diplomatic career, which is all about incremental progress rather than definitive endings. But he abandoned that track after a poor experience in Prague and launched into what would become an acclaimed 40-year career in journalism and nonfiction. Two days prior to his sudden passing, Khaled was plotting the week ahead at The Standard, formerly Newsweek Pakistan, where we worked closely for some 13 years. Khaled was 80.

Khaled scythed through shibboleths with an academic’s flair and reported his analysis with a journalist’s accessibility. In typical Khaled humility, he said his work was “a sustained public offence probably responsible for the decline of English in Pakistan.” His readers will bear witness that his words only elevated the discourse. In the end, Khaled stood as a voice – often solitary but never ignorable – of reason and humanity in a world increasingly losing its way. His work remains a testament to the enduring strength of doubt, moderation, and the liberal creed.

Fasih Ahmed is Editor, The Standard and knew Khaled Ahmed for some 30 years. fasih@newsweek.pk