Pakistani sociologist and activist. Hamza Alavi was a political activist in Britain in the early 1960s who co-founded, with David (later Lord) Pitt, a key pressure group of that era, the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination. Hamza studied at Aligarh University, and did his PhD at the London School of Economics. He started his career, in 1945, with Bank of India and after the partition and independence moved back to Karachi where he played a leading role in setting up the Bank of Pakistan, becoming one of its five principal officers in 1952. Hamza wrote extensively on questions of nationality, gender and fundamentalism - his widely acknowledged essay Peasant And Revolution (1965). Hamza went to Tanzania to join his wife's family. Moving on, he took his first academic job in 1966, at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University, in 1972 joined Leeds University, and then to Manchester University in 1977. After retiring in 1988, Hamza lectured at universities in the USA, Africa and Asia. Hamza co-edited the Introduction To The Sociology Of The Developing Societies (1982) and South Asia: The Sociology Of Developing Societies (1989). Hamza Alavi was born into Bohra community in Karachi. He developed his socialist views at school, as he first came into contact with poor students.