Journey into Europe

Graduating in the 1960’s with a degree in Anthropology, Akbar Ahmed (b. 1943) entered the government of Pakistan civil service in 1966. His world perspective embraced the inheritance of the British-created Indian civil service, with faith observance as a thoroughly modern-minded Muslim combined with an admiration of Pakistan’s founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Like many of his British predecessors, Akbar Ahmed combined his role as the government’s political agent in a remote hill district with anthropological fieldwork, seeking to analyse and understand the unruly tribesmen whom his official day job required him to pacify and integrate into a national identity. The result was the publication of Religion and Politics in Muslim Society (1987), which focused upon the manners and customs of one particular Pukhtun tribe.