Amin Mughal taught Pakistan’s Left and media to disagree without falling apart

Amin Mughal, who died in London on August 12, 2026, spent a lifetime translating between Pakistan’s revolutionaries, dissidents and journalists so their fractured Left could at least understand itself.

In 1981, the state arrested three editors at once: Mazhar Ali Khan, I.A. Rehman and Amin Mughal, all picked up in the same sweep. The weekly they ran, Viewpoint, did not miss an issue. Zafar Iqbal Mirza, ZIM to everyone who knew him, held the paper together from the inside while the men who built it sat in cells. That is the kind of loyalty this story is about, and it says more about who Amin Mughal was than any list of his credentials could.

Much has already been written about the shape of his life since his death: the teaching, the imprisonment, the journalism, the years abroad. None of it explains what made him necessary.

The photograph

This is a photograph, taken years ago, of six men. In front: ZIM, Shafqat Tanvir Mirza, Dada Ameer Hyder and I.A. Rehman. Behind them: Major Ishaq Muhammad, remembered for the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case, and Amin Mughal.

None of them sought celebrity, which is presumably why the state never bothered to give them any. Together they made up a moral republic Pakistan has never formally admitted existed.

The photograph works not because these six men agreed on everything. They didn’t. It works because it captures how different a resistance can look from the inside: the organiser, the dissident soldier, the journalist, the editor, the human rights defender, the guardian of a language nobody in power wanted spoken.

Mughal stands in the second row, not the centre, though he belonged at the centre of the intellectual relationships represented in the photo. That was the pattern of his life. He showed up, he listened, he stayed connected to everyone, and he never once needed to be the main character.

What he actually did

Mughal’s contribution wasn’t a body of work. It was a set of connections that would not otherwise have existed. He linked the organised Left of Dada Ameer Hyder and Major Ishaq to the democratic journalism of ZIM and I.A. Rehman, to the cultural resistance of Shafqat Tanvir Mirza, and eventually to younger reporters like myself, who came up in journalism without fully grasping what had been handed to them.

I worked under him at Viewpoint between 1979 and 1984, in a cramped office at 4-Lawrence Road, Lahore, that functioned as my real education. Mazhar Ali Khan had assembled people who treated journalism as an ethical obligation rather than a career strategy, and Mughal fit that room completely. He never separated editing from teaching, or political analysis from literature, or disagreement from affection. Most people manage one of those. He ran all four at once.

The coal-boy who organised the world

Dada Ameer Hyder started as a coal-boy on a ship, which is not the kind of biographical detail you can invent. By the time most Pakistanis had learned the word “globalisation,” he had already lived it: labour, empire and racial hierarchy, encountered directly, on the ground, from Bombay and Moscow to New York, Shanghai and Buenos Aires. He organised workers across borders before international solidarity became a phrase people used at funded conferences.

The author met him at Viewpoint. He carried none of the theatre you’d expect from a man with that resume. His authority came from what he’d survived, not from what he claimed. Official histories mostly left him out, for a simple reason: independence movements can absorb elite leaders. A worker who kept asking what independence had actually delivered to other workers is a harder problem, and states tend to solve hard problems by ignoring them.

The soldier who wouldn’t let it go

Major Ishaq was a soldier who thought past the limits of the uniform, which got him implicated in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case and imprisoned more than once. After Hasan Nasir died in custody, Ishaq kept pushing on the question of how, at a moment when silence would have cost him far less.

Later, he organised peasants and workers, treating revolution as slow, unglamorous construction rather than slogan. Even paralysis didn’t stop him. His life refused the tidy categories people like to sort dissidents into: soldier or critic, patriot or traitor. He was, inconveniently, both halves of each pair.

The language they tried to bury

Shafqat Tanvir Mirza fought with a different weapon: language itself. As a journalist, trade unionist, historian and scholar, he understood that Punjabi’s marginalisation wasn’t an accident of literary fashion. It was a people being cut off from their own memory, by design.

His scholarship on Punjabi literature and the Sufi poets gave institutional weight back to a language spoken by millions and taken seriously by almost no one in power. It cost him imprisonment and professional setbacks. It never cost him his willingness to sit down and actually talk to people who disagreed with him.

The marathon

I.A. Rehman took those same commitments and built an institution around defending human rights. His life made an argument most people never manage to prove: that fighting injustice for decades doesn’t have to curdle into bitterness. He spoke softly, listened, and did not move. He went to prison twice for telling the truth and never once framed it as sacrifice, because for him it was simply the price of meaning what he said.

His own description of the work has outlasted him: the struggle for human rights, he said, is a marathon, not a sprint. In a country now addicted to instant outrage and equally instant despair, that line does more work than most policy papers.

The translator

So what set Mughal apart from four people this formidable? He was the one who could move between their worlds without flattening any of them. From Dada Ameer Hyder and Major Ishaq, he took the demand for structural change. From Shafqat Tanvir Mirza, the idea that culture and liberation are the same fight. From ZIM, professional integrity. From I.A. Rehman, the insistence on everyone’s dignity, no exceptions.

He absorbed all of it without turning any single strand into dogma, which is a harder trick than it sounds. He could dismantle a bad argument without touching the dignity of the person making it, and younger colleagues learned more from watching him do that than from anything he assigned them to read. Progressive politics without intellectual honesty curdles into just another orthodoxy. Journalism without moral purpose is merchandise. Scholarship without human sympathy is vanity. He never had to say this out loud. He just modelled it, repeatedly, until it stuck.

What’s left

The photograph is also a record of a sociology that doesn’t really exist anymore: people meeting in newspaper offices, union halls, study circles, cramped homes and cheap cafés, with no research grants and no communications department, running entirely on conversation, print and organising. They disagreed constantly. Disagreement never required excommunication, and friendship never required conformity.

Pakistan now has more universities, television channels, and policy shops than the country in that photograph could have imagined. It has fewer rooms where knowledge, courage and humility actually meet in the same place. Dissent has become something you measure in visibility. Causes are managed like careers. The six men in that photograph belonged to a harder tradition, one where ideas were tested by what you were willing to lose for them.

Mughal’s death stings in a specific way: he was one of the last living bridges to that tradition. He connected generations without asking for discipleship. He kept memory alive without becoming its warden. His politics were never against faith or culture. They were against every structure built to humiliate people.

The easy response to a photograph like this is nostalgia, which lets the living off the hook while it honours the dead. The harder question is what happened to the republic these six men were silently building, and whether anything is being built to replace it. Their Pakistan never fully arrived. It also wasn’t imaginary. It existed anywhere truth was spoken without hedging, language was rescued, workers got organised, prisoners were defended, censorship was resisted, and young people were treated like they mattered.

All six men in that photograph are gone now. History will not fill the space they left on its own.