Bush in Babylon:
Recolonizing Iraq - By Tariq Ali
TARIQ
ALI PROFILE
If 1967 saw the Summer of Love, the following year could not have been
more different. As riots swept the streets of Paris, President de Gaulle
fled to Germany, seemingly impotent in the face of radical student leaders
like Daniel Cohn-Bendit - Dany le Rouge. Across the Channel 25,000 students
marched on the American Embassy in London in a violent outburst against
the Vietnam War. At their head, Tariq Ali urged the masses on to revolution.
AN ATHIEST
AT CATHOLIC SCHOOL
Tariq was born in Lahore, now in Pakistan, then part of British-ruled
India, in 1944. A Catholic school education did nothing to shake his life-long
atheism, which he shared with his communist parents. Later, while studying
at Government College, part of Punjab University, Tariq Ali was elected
President of the Young Students' Union. He organized public demonstrations
against Pakistan's military dictatorship and was banned from participating
in student politics. After
graduating, his uncle, then head of Pakistani Military Intelligence, told
Tariq's parents to send him abroad: his radicalism was becoming dangerous
and he risked imprisonment. He came to Britain and studied Politics, Philosophy
and Economics at Exeter College, Oxford.
DINNER
WITH MARLON BRANDO
Joining the University Labour Club, he was a committed member of its Socialist
Group before becoming President of the Oxford Union in 1965. With the
Vietnam War at its height, Tariq Ali earned a national reputation through
debates with figures like Henry Kissinger and the then British Foreign
Secretary, Michael Stewart. After one of these was televised in the United
States, the actor Marlon Brando invited Tariq to dinner.
"It
was the Vietcong guerrilla fighters who really set the example,"
he wrote later. "When they showed they could inflict major defeats
on the Americans, people all over the world said, 'if they can do it to
the Americans, we can too'". The rampant anti-Americanism, which
fuelled his student campaigns had begun, by the late 1960s, to evolve
into a sophisticated credo. Tariq came to believe that a more systematic
political approach was required to further his revolutionary aims.
MARXISM
AND MOVIES
Ditching the Labour Party he embraced Leninism, becoming a leader of the
International Marxist Group (IMG). "One can see," he said then,
"that we shall once again see (workers') Soviets in Europe in the
70s". But it was not to be. Tariq Ali quit the IMG as the burgeoning
consumer society swallowed 60s radicalism and the highly factionalized
radical left imploded under the weight of a host of trivial internecine
arguments. Since then he has devoted himself to writing books, newspaper
articles and polemical commentary on social and political matters. Still
a radical, he has remained at the forefront of Anti-War campaigns. Conflicts
in Iraq, Afghanistan and Serbia have all led Tariq to speak out.
He is also
a noted broadcaster, reassessing the developing world on Channel Four's
Bandung File and collaborating on stage plays with Howard Brenton and
on a film about the philosopher Wittgenstein with the late Derek Jarman.
Tariq Ali
has always been, and will certainly remain, a dissenter. "The way
capitalist politics is functioning," he says today, "is increasingly
authoritarian, designed not to wipe out, perhaps, but completely to marginalize
dissenting voices." In his late 50s, the firebrand may not be shining
as brightly as before but it is, without doubt, still aflame.
AUTHOR'S
BOOKS:
THE STONE
WOMAN, - By Tariq Ali
The third novel in Tariq Ali's Islamic Quartet, is about a family reunion
at the palatial summer home of Iskender Pasha, the aging patriarch of
an aristocratic Ottoman family.
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The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity - By Tariq
Ali
In this timely and important book, new in paperback, Tariq Ali is lucid,
eloquent, literary and painfully honest as he dissects both Islamic and
Western fundamentalism.
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Masters of the Universe: NATO's Balkan Crusade - By Tariq Ali (Editor)
Harold Pinter, Edward Said, Oskar Lafontaine, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and
other distinguished dissidents explain their opposition to NATO's war
in the Balkans.
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An Indian Dynasty: The Story of the Nehru-Gandhi Family - By Tariq
Ali & Salman Rushdie
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Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree - By Tariq Ali
The first novel in Ali's Islamic Quartet is a family saga that takes place
in the Muslim world of the Middle Ages after the fall of Granada.
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The Book of Saladin - By Tariq Ali
The second novel in Ali's Islamic Quartet, THE BOOK OF SALADIN tells the
story of Saladin in 12th-century Cairo, Jerusalem, and Damascus.
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The Stone Woman - By Tariq Ali
The third novel in Tariq Ali's Islamic Quartet, is about a family reunion
at the palatial summer home of Iskender Pasha, the aging patriarch of
an aristocratic Ottoman family.
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Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties - By Tariq Ali
Tariq Ali, one of the most famous radical leaders of his time, re-creates
and evokes through personal experience a story that runs through the great
focal points of the '60s mood: Vietnam, Che Guevara's murder in Bolivia,
and 1968 Paris. Major players in this memoir include Malcolm X, Henry
Kissinger, John Lennon and Bertrand Russell.
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Trotsky for Beginner's - By Tariq Ali
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1968: Marching in the Streets - By Tariq Ali and Susan Watkins
It was arguably the most significant year in recent history, changing
our political landscape, our view of the world, and our emotional lives
forever. This unique commemoration of 1968 brings to life this turbulent
time. With more than 150 photos and illustrations, 1968 is the commemorative
for anyone who was there and for a new generation born of its influence.
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Introducing Trotsky and Marxism - By Tariq Ali
Together with Lenin, Leon Trotsky was one of the architects of the Russian
Revolution. A great orator, a skilful military tactician, a gifted historian
and an unpredictable cultural theorist, Trotsky was brought clown by inner-party
factionalism, exiled and then executed by Stalin. Introducing Trotsky
and Marxism shows how Trotsky's prophetic insights foresaw the rise of
Hitler and the price humanity would have to pay. Even before the Second
World War he predicted the Holocaust. He also foresaw the events in Eastern
Europe following the collapse of the Communist bloc, predicting in 1936
that the Stalinist system in Russia was merely a transitional stage which
would either move toward socialism or revert to capitalism. Tariq Ali
and Phil Evans give us an irreverent but sympathetic look at the enigma
of Trotsky, in a fascinating and timely reminder of a major figure, and
a hugely important body of theory, of 20th century politics.
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The new revolutionaries; a handbook of the international radical left
- By Tariq Ali
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Pakistan; military rule or people's power - By Tariq Ali
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Landscapes of War from Sarajevo to Chechnya
By Juan Goytisolo, and (Translated by Peter Bush), and (Introduction by
Tariq Ali)
Politics. Cultural Writing. These essays, by one of Spain's greatest novelists,
originate in Goytisolo's travels in the 1990s and were almost all published
in the Spanish newspaper El Pais during that period. Here, in Peter Bush's
English translation, they provide rich historical analysis and moving
first-person reportage of life in four explosive war zones: Sarajevo,
Algeria, the West Bank and Gaza, and Chechnya.
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The Stalinist legacy : its impact on twentieth century world politics
- By Tariq Ali
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The Beginning of the End: France, May 1968 - By Quattrocchi, Angelo,
and (Preface By Tariq Ali)
A collection of essays on the student riots that convulsed Paris in 1968
and brought down de Gaulle's government. Contributors include Hannah Arendt,
Leo Strauss, and Raymond Aron.
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Fear of Mirrors - By Tariq Ali
Tariq Ali, author of two previous novels and the recently published 1968:
Marching in the Streets, tells the dramatic story of the fall of Communism
from behind the Iron Curtain. Set in Berlin and Moscow and spanning eight
decades, Fear of Mirrors is the story of betrayed illusions and destroyed
hopes. It is also the story of people who believed they were fighting
for certain ideals, only to be crushed by their own people. Lovers want
to know the truth, but they do not always want to tell it. For some East
Germans, the fall of Communism was like the end of a long and painful
love affair: free to tell the truth at last, they found they no longer
wanted to hear it. Vlady, a former dissident who loses his job when he
refuses to renounce his socialist beliefs in the new, unified Germany,
wants to tell his alienated son, Karl, what his family's long and passionate
involvement with Communism really meant. It is the story of Ludwik, the
Polish secret agent who recruited Philby, and of Gertrude, Vlady's mother,
whose desire for Ludwik is matched only by her devotion to the Communist
ideal. Ali carries us along as the political upheavals of the twentieth
century unfold, as Vlady describes the hopes aroused by the Bolshevik
revolution and discovers the almost unbearable truth about their betrayal.
Written with deep political insight and sensitivity, Fear of Mirrors tells
one of the great stories of the twentieth century -- the extraordinary
history of Central Europe and the fall of Communism.
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Tariq
Ali's favorite books and latest novels.
The Clash
of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity, is published in hardcover
by Verso.
1. Nights
and Horses of the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arab Literature by
Robert Irwin
Satire, erotic poetry by Arab women writers and many other joys await
the reader in this brilliantly recreated forgotten medieval world.
2. The
Road to Terror by J Arch Getty and Oleg V Naumov
The first account of the top-secret Soviet documents revealing how Stalin
carried out his purges.
3. Machiavelli
and Us by Louis Althusser, transl Gregory Elliot
A brilliant introduction to Machiavelli by one of France's leading twentieth-century
philosophers.
4. The
Rites of Men: Manhood, Politics and the Culture of Sport by Varda
A thoughtful, devastating feminist critique of contemporary sport.
5. For
And Against Method by Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend
A stimulating exchange of letters on philosophy by two philosophical entertainers.
6. The
Global Gamble: Washington's Faustian Bid for World Dominance by Peter
Gowan
This book coincided with the Balkan war and has deservedly acquired a
cult following.
7. King
Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa
by Adam Hochschild.
This book tells the story of an African holocaust that marked the Congo
for a century.
8. The
Man In Flames by Serge Filippini
An engaging historical novel based on the life of Giordano Bruno, the
heretic philosopher burned in Rome 400 years ago.
9. Out
of Place: A Memoir by Edward Said
A trenchant self-analysis by the leading Palestinian critic which reads
like a novel.
10. Farewell
To An Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism by TJ Clark
My favourite book of the year, with incredible illustrations and a brilliant
analysis of twentieth-century art.
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