13/08/2026
Amin Mughal’s life reminds us that exile is not merely physical displacement. It is also the condition imposed upon ideas that a state refuses to accommodate. Pakistan expelled or marginalised many of its finest minds and then wondered why intolerance, intellectual poverty and historical amnesia prevailed. Professor Mughal remained physically in London, but intellectually he never ceased to inhabit the Pakistan for which he had struggled.
One by one, the great teachers of my Viewpoint years have departed. Their passing makes the country feel lonelier and its moral landscape immeasurably poorer.
Professor Mughal leaves no office, fortune or monument carrying his name. *His true legacy survives in the minds he liberated, the writers he encouraged, the causes he defended and the generations he taught to question received wisdom."
Farewell, dear mentor and friend. You lived in exile, but your ideas never left us. They will remain at home wherever people struggle for a democratic, pluralistic, just and humane Pakistan.
The passing of Professor Amin Mughal in London on August 12, 2026, at the age of 91, has left me with an overwhelming sense of personal bereavement. I have lost a mentor, friend and former colleague; Pakistan has lost one of the last representatives of a generation for whom progressive politics was....
