Indeed, to God do we belong,
and, indeed, to Him
are we returning.
—The Quran, 2:156
(Washington, D.C., 02/20/2021) – The US Council of Muslim Organizations, on behalf of our member institutions and American Muslims, mourns the loss of visionary Muslim American political activist and scholar, Agha Saeed, on Friday, 19 February, and offer our sincere prayers of condolences to his family, loved ones, and the voiceless and tyrannized Muslims, at home and abroad, who had an outspoken champion in him. May God magnify their reward with Him in this life and in the Hereafter.
God grant him the reward of his tireless efforts in life to uphold the political, civil, and human rights of millions of neglected in the world – in America, in Kashmir, in Palestine, in India, in Myanmar, in Yemen, and many other places – and multiply it in Agha Saeed’s Divine Balances into the Hereafter.
“Dr. Agha Saeed rose to the height of American Muslim statesmen on behalf of oppressed Muslims the world over,” said Oussama Jammal, USCMO Secretary General. “His substantial intellectual and activist inheritance will live on in our hearts and minds. As a scholar, he epitomized trenchant insight always balanced with justice and understanding, as an activist courage and the quest for mutual human equity, and as a man human dignity for all.”
Agha Saeed graduated from Pakistan’s University of Punjab’s Faculty of Political Science, earned his MA and Ph.D. in Rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley, and became an exchange scholar at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He authored two milestone scholarly works in political science: Pakistan in its Own Mirror: Elite Autobiographies and National Consciousness, and also Syncretic Self-Understanding of South Asian Muslims: Texts and Contexts.
He founded a number of vital political fairness activist organizations in the U.S. including the American Muslim Alliance (Chairman); the Pakistan American Democratic Forum, (inaugural President); the American Muslim Task Force on Civil Rights and Election; the California Civil Rights Alliance (Coordinator of both); and the American Muslim Political Coordination Council, (Founding Chairman). Among his most important legislative achievements, Agha Saeed planned and piloted, in 2000 and 2004, a coalition of activist groups and leaders to landmark California State Resolution SJR10, undoing the prejudicial harms and excesses of the USA PATRIOT Act.
He produced and hosted the popular Global Forum TV, bringing unabashed American Muslim commentary to urgent global issues.
Dr. Agha Saeed called attention to and fought against relentless programs of state profiling seeking to monitor and curtail American Muslim religious beliefs, political and social thought, and free expression of opinion.
Indeed, what Allah has taken belongs to Him, as does what He has given – and everything has a stated term with Him.
May God grant Agha Saeed forgiveness and raise his rank among the rightly guided. May He be with his family and the many loved ones whom he has left behind. May Allah grant grace to him and all those whom Agha Saeed spoke for, and may the Lord of the Worlds make spacious for him his grave and give him light in it.
O God, grant patience to his family and all of us in our loss, recompense his family in their calamity, and grant them the best of goodness.
