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.Becoming Amin MughalMughal 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 teachingMughal 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 Bengali headmaster, Chakravarti, who wore worn-out clothes but was exceptionally intelligent; he also remembered Master Srivastava, and Pathak Ji, a writer who taught him the lesson of humanity at the primary-school level – teachers who left a deep imprint on him.He went on to pass his matriculation, complete his FA at Murray College, and earn a BA and, in 1958, an MA in English Literature from Government College, Lahore. At Murray College he was drawn first to the Jamiat, then to Ghulam Ahmad Parwez’s rationalist Tolu-e-Islam, before his inclination moved decisively towards socialism.Mughal began teaching at Islamia College Lahore, then run by the conservative Anjuman-e-Himayat-e-Islam. In 1969, he was dismissed alongside professor Manzoor Ahmad, a psychology teacher, and Eric Cyprian, a Christian teacher and fellow left-wing intellectual, officially on charges of anti-Islamic activities. Their real offence was organising an association for lecturers’ rights at a time when private-college teachers were poorly paid. Also, because their campaign coincided with the street movement against Ayub Khan, the college treated it as political agitation and dismissed all three.With nowhere else to go, the three professors decided to start a college of their own. Shah Hussain College began inside Manzoor Ahmed’s house before moving to a rented building on Lytton Road, and Mughal taught there until 1976. The college became a hub of progressive education.(From left) Professor Amin Mughal, Iftikhar Arif, Mulk Raj Anand, Habib Jalib, and Ahmad Faraz. Photo: Saeed Ahmed.It established a Punjabi department under Najm Hosain Syed – whose name went unlisted, since he was a government employee – which taught computing and filmmaking at a time when both were novel in Pakistan, hosted internationally renowned teachers and speakers, and even carried the hammer and sickle as its emblem.When Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government moved to nationalise private colleges, its teachers would have automatically become government employees – a dilemma for Mughal, by then also secretary general of the National Awami Party in Punjab. He consulted the legal expert Mian Mahmud Ali Kasuri, who was amused by the idea that following the British tradition, a university teacher might also engage in practical politics, but warned there was no precedent for it in Pakistan and the odds of a favourable ruling were slim.Mughal resigned from Shah Hussain College rather than becoming a government employee. His decision showed, as it would throughout his life, that ideological principle mattered more to him than job security. The college lost its vitality soon after nationalisation and gradually disappeared.Our friend, the journalist Shahid Malik, called Mughal the embodiment of a role-model teacher, one whose sense of the public good pushed teaching far beyond the conventional classroom and into the collective struggles of life.From the classroom his activities extended naturally into politics. In 1962 he co-founded the West Pakistan College Teachers Association, and later worked at the weekly Viewpoint under the distinguished journalist Mazhar Ali Khan, mentoring young journalists.As Dr Naazir Mahmood writes, Mughal’s writings travelled even further. In Moscow through the 1980s, a circle of South Asian exiles and students – from Bhopal, Delhi, Calcutta and Lucknow – passed around copies of Viewpoint, discussing his columns on Pakistan, India and the Left late into the night. Masood Ali Khan, the Moscow correspondent for the Indian communist weekly New Age, occasionally sent Mughal’s pieces to Delhi for republication – so readers in India were encountering his arguments even as he was writing them in Lahore.The trials of lifeBecause of his convictions, Mughal was imprisoned several times through the 1960s and ’70s. Among the most painful stretches were three months in Lahore’s Shahi Qila, arrested on allegations of terrorism after being mistaken for another Dr Amin Mughal from Bahawalpur. Even once the mistake was clear, his release was delayed. His wrists, friends remembered, were so thin that handcuffs would barely fit.He liked to recall that during interrogation, when asked where he’d go after release, an interrogator said, “He will go to Moscow.” Mughal replied, “I would rather go to London. Why would I go to Moscow?” “You tell us,” said the interrogator.“I’ll go. Will you send me?” he shot back – and eventually added, simply, “I want to go to London.” He spent much of his time in the fort teaching the prison staff, who began treating him better as a result.His greatest trial came under General Zia-ul-Haq. After seven years of martial law, he faced a choice between quietly leaving the country or a public flogging on a fabricated charge. His brother, who was living in Britain and nearing the end of his life, gave Mughal reason to go; he wanted to see him one last time.The Bhutto government had already restricted his foreign travel, while General Zia barred journalists from travelling abroad without an NOC. With the help of Lahore activist Liaquat Ali Advocate and friends, he secured a passport and eventually managed to leave the country in 1984.ExileIn London he worked as a journalist and political commentator, edited the Urdu daily Awaaz, and translated for local councils. Even in exile, his heart stayed in the streets of Lahore – Krishan Nagar, Mozang, Lakshmi, Shah Jamal, Bhati Gate. He remained a voracious reader and sharp observer of politics to the end, and, even in old age, took a genuine interest in new gadgets and technology.A disillusioned pakistaniAhmad Nawaz Wattoo, his lawyer, wrote Mughal’s will, and says he was, as always, exceptionally clear. He owned no property and had no savings – only a modest pension, a few hundred pounds accumulated over a lifetime of intellectual labour in exile. He insisted it be divided into three equal parts after his death.One-third was to go to any sincere organisation working to improve relations between India and Pakistan; he believed peace-building was a moral obligation, not a diplomatic luxury. Another third was to go to the local housing association where he lived – he always said shelter was the most fundamental material right, and that a Marxist’s first duty was to protect his neighbour’s shelter.The final third was to go to Barrister Ishaq Khan’s school in Pakistan-administered Kashmir – he believed education was the only real weapon against the feudal, military mentality that had devastated the subcontinent, and had already donated his books to the same school.And here is the contradiction that Wattoo, Nadir Cheema, Tariq Suleman and I could never quite resolve. Amin Mughal never renounced his Pakistani nationality – he kept that green passport almost like a sacred relic – and yet he never wanted to return. Suleman had once made all the arrangements for him to go back, but at the last moment Mughal “chickened out.”At the same time, though fully entitled to it after decades of residence and paying taxes, he refused British nationality, saying it would amount to surrender – an admission that his relationship with his homeland had ended. It had not.He remained Pakistani because Pakistan was his unfinished argument, his unresolved paradox – a contradiction he wanted to settle but never could. He refused to return because the Pakistan he believed in did not yet exist, and refused to become British because that would have meant admitting it never would. Perhaps that was his despair.As Wattoo puts it: “I have never known a more loyal Pakistani, or a more stubborn man, or a man with a more broken heart.”He never wrote a formal book, but his essays on Benazir Bhutto’s assassination and on the life of Bhagat Singh left a deep impression, and there has long been a feeling that the Bhagat Singh piece deserves an Urdu translation. Pakistani author Harris Khalique has asked why literary figures like Aijaz Ahmed, Fahmida Riaz and Ali Sardar Jafri, politicians as different as L.K. Advani and Khan Abdul Wali Khan, and journalists like I.A. Rehman and David Page all sought him out in London – without a single book to his name.The answer, Khalique suggests, was an encyclopaedic memory, a willingness to revise his own views rather than defend them, and an unmatched ability to argue sharply on the spot. Perhaps, a scholar will one day gather his scattered essays, speeches and editorials into the book he never assembled himself. In London he was a fixture of an eclectic Finchley circle of Pakistanis and Indians, and a regular at the café and bar of the Institute of Education in Central London. With Ali Abbas of Oxford, his friend Nadir Cheema also established a scholarship in his name.Atheistic thought and worldviewsMughal was an atheist who took religion seriously as a social force, arguing that human development and inherited tradition move together – “there is no atheist communist in the world,” he liked to say, since even secular ideas are seen through some cultural lens. For him this meant not communalism but genuine pluralism. He believed Pakistan remained a prisoner of the global economy, subordinate first to the United States and now to China, and that Partition had left many forced by Cold War politics to pick a side before they knew what they believed.Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) Golden Jubilee celebrations, London, 1985. Professor Amin Mughal addresses the gathering. Seated on the presidium, from right to left: Ali Sardar Jafri, Mulk Raj Anand, Dr Mohammad Hasan, Safdar Mir, Dr Anis Qamar, Farigh Bukhari, and Ashoor Kazmi. Photo: Saeed AhmedBoth old-style capitalism and Soviet-style communism had reached their limits, he argued; the future lay with a modern Left, not any party label but a commitment to ending feudalism and injustice. He compared the mystery of creativity to quantum mechanics, since both defy any single explanation, and read Iqbal’s idealism as the very point from which dialectical materialism began. His originality led the poet Ustad Daman to call him Pakistan’s only true intellectual and dedicate his first book to him.The conscience of a nationMughal’s life bears witness to a man who remained faithful to his principles until his last breath – a gentle rebel, a teacher of teachers, the conscience of the nation to everyone who knew him. As Harris Khalique wrote, “Amin Sahib and people like him are the embodied conscience of a nation.”We take pride in the extraordinary integrity of his life, yet perhaps none of us would wish to live as he did. His life demanded sacrifices and ours is a generation eager to touch the heights without making them. Call it the professionalisation paradox of social change, when struggle itself becomes a career, it works against the very cause it serves.Professor Amin Mughal will always be remembered. He left millions mourning him, but no one quite like himself. And he was content with that too.Saqlain Imam is a London-based Pakistani journalist and former BBC correspondent with over three decades of experience.Translated from Urdu by Amir Hussaini. This version has been edited for length.