Listen to this article:

Professor Amin Mughal, a Pakistani academic, labour leader, journalist and Marxist intellectual, passed away in London on the evening of August 12, 2026. He was 91. With his departure, Pakistan’s great intellectual tradition – marked by integrity, subtle wit, and a selfless commitment to social justice – has lost its last standard-bearer.

There was hardly a South Asian Left-wing intellectual in London, or across Asia, Europe and the Americas, who did not wish to meet him. He was an extraordinary kind of dervish who had chosen not to renounce the world, because he was, in every sense, a conscious and active participant in it. We would often go to sit in his company as if to dust off our own consciences, and he would invariably become the life of the gathering with his resonant voice, the depth of his knowledge, and his remarkable gift for dialogue.

During my past twenty-three years in London, I would often meet Mughal in a Central London pub or at some intellectual gathering, and occasionally at his residence. In later years, as physical frailty limited his movements, Ahmad Nawaz Wattoo, other friends, and I would visit him instead, where his confident, argumentative and scholarly voice would set the course of the conversation.

I first met him at the Shakespeare’s Head through Nadir Cheema. Conversations with him usually moved effortlessly from ordinary matters of daily life to peeling back the layers of modern philosophies and political questions. During one such gathering, in his small, one-bedroom flat in North London, surrounded by books, I began asking him about his life and taking notes on my phone. He happily began telling stories – then suddenly stopped, turned to Wattoo, and said, “Look at him, he’s writing my obituary!”

I was slightly embarrassed. But the conversation continued, and I am certain many other friends and admirers took away a great deal from their own conversations with him.

Mughal was born in 1935 in the village of Kotli Loharan East, Sialkot. His birth name was Muhammad Amin, but the journey of his intellectual and political life was reflected even in the names he adopted. During his student years, when he was associated with Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba, the student wing of Jamaat-e-Islami, he adopted the name Amin Hijazi – a name that reflected the religious-nationalist sentiment of that period, when the Muslim League was regarded as an ideal party and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan was one of his heroes.

But his search for truth never ceased. As a schoolboy he read Ghulam Muhammad Butt’s articles in Shorish Kashmiri’s journal Chattan, his first exposure to different ideological currents. His encounter with Marx proved to be the turning point. He abandoned his religious-nationalist identity and adopted the name Amin Mughal, which he kept until his last breath. In later years he would say that Marxism should be understood as “Marx-awareness” rather than “Marx-worship” – embraced not as a rigid dogma but as a form of consciousness. Marxism, he believed, was not a god or a religion but a body of thought, not a creed. The idea became one of the foundations of his entire intellectual and political life.

I once asked him who among his contemporaries could best describe his personality. I expected him to name a fellow leftist. Instead, he named the Pakistani poet Iftikhar Arif, who later told me in his powerful voice: “Amin Mughal sahib is the last leftist intellectual of this age. After him, there is nothing.”

Early life and teaching

Mughal was educated at Ayodhya Prasad Narmada High School in Jabalpur, where his father, Muhammad Din, was posted with IEME, an engineering branch of the British Army. Among his teachers there was a........

© The Wire