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.

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.

Front row, from left: Zafar Iqbal Mirza (ZIM), Shafqat Tanvir Mirza, Dada Ameer Hyder and I.A. Rehman. Second row: Major Ishaq Muhammad and Professor Amin Mughal. Photo: Dr Ikram Ul Haq

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.

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........

© Dawn Prism