Esteemed Pakistani writer and politician Khurshid Ahmad passed away this week after a long career in Islamic thought and politics. Once deputy leader of the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami party in Pakistan as well as a senator and government advisor, Khurshid was best known for his contributions to Muslim political and economic thought and his mobilization among Muslim communities and thinkers around the world.

Born in Delhi in 1932, Khurshid was a teenager when his family moved to Pakistan in what is known as a hijrah to a new Muslim land: the millions of Indian Muslims who made the dangerous westward trip would be known as muhajirs in a reference to the longstanding Muslim practice. He was already influenced by a family friend, the political thinker and activist Abulala Maududi, whose Jamaat party he joined. More fundamentally, from his first article written as a teenager right into his old age, Khurshid engaged in and promoted activism and intellectualism in pursuit of an Islamic revival.

Having studied in Pakistan, Malaysia, and Britain, Khurshid wrote prolifically, published journals, founded institutions (for one of which this writer wrote in 2015), and built international bridges: by the late twentieth century his range of contacts ranged from Tunisia to Malaysia, Saudi Arabia to Britain, and Turkiye to Sudan. Prominent foreign public figures with whom he shared a connection included Malaysian prime minister Anwar Ibrahim, former Turkish prime minister Necmettin Erbakan, and the former parliamentary speakers of Sudan and Tunisia respectively: Hassan Turabi and Rached Ghannouchi.

Anwar Ibrahim, one of many figures to publicly give condolences to Khurshid, had cut his teeth as an influential finance minister for Malaysia in the 1980s, when internationally public enthusiasm for and official links with such Islamic revivalists spread wide. Though Khurshid had also studied law and philosophy, his primary interest was economics: much of his life was spent urging an Islamic alternative to contemporary capitalism. He interacted with a large number of international writers including Nejatullah Siddiqui, Kamal Helbawy, Haitham Haddad, Khurram Murad, and Ismail Faruqi whose interests ranged from economics to activism to Islamic outreach.

Khurshid also attempted to realize Pakistan’s role as a forerunning Muslim state, an idea that has long had a mixed currency among different strands of its elite. In 1978 he was promoted to lead Pakistan’s planning commission by military dictator Mohammad Ziaul-Haq, an admirer of Maududi whose military regime professed a top-down Islamization. Like other Jamaat leaders, Khurshid’s relationship with the military was equivocal: he supported Ziaul-Haq’s promotion of jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, but increasingly criticized his attempts to prolong military rule in Pakistan. Though Khurshid was elected to the senate in 2002, it was as a member of the opposition leader to another military dictator, Pervez Musharraf. Khurshid criticized Musharraf’s cooperation with the American war in Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as his promotion of “enlightened moderation”, a hodgepodge intellectual exercise that many Pakistani Islamists suspected as a local version of autocratic Kemalism.

In addition to his political activities, Khurshid was active in Islamic outreach and politics, particularly in Britain where he and Murad founded a pioneering institution, the Muslim Foundation, in the late 1970s. This was based at Leicester, where Khurshid passed away, leaving a considerable legacy, in April 2025.

Innalillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’oun.

 – by Ibrahim Moiz

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