Tariq Ali

Tariq Ali is the author of many books, including Street-Fighting Years, Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity, The Dilemmas of Lenin and Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes. He is on the editorial committee of New Left Review. He has written more than fifty pieces for the LRB, on cricket, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Corbyn, the Bhuttos, Victor Serge and the conflicts of recent decades. He also discussed his political formation in an interview with David Edgar.

Despite​ the efforts of Pakistan’s army, chiefs of police and civil servants to rig the results in favour of the Pakistan Muslim League and the Pakistan People’s Party, the vehicles of the country’s two political dynasties, the Sharifs and the Bhuttos (whose sordid history I’ve discussed in this paper on many occasions), Imran Khan triumphed in the general election of...

Before the War

Tariq Ali, 24 March 2022

No one​ knows how this will end. Putin’s reckless adventurism has backfired: an attempt to mimic the US on a GDP of $1.5 trillion, smaller even than Italy and minuscule compared to China ($14.7 trillion), was always going to be foolhardy. If he imagined a quick sortie, akin to a colonial-style ‘police operation’, he must now realise that installing Yanukovych or another...

From The Blog
19 November 2021

Who would have imagined that the sordid saga of ingrained racism in English cricket and its consequences would be laid bare before a select committee of the House of Commons in 2021? Very few non-white British women and men engaged in professional sport on any level would be surprised by the goings-on in Yorkshire. Much of what Azeem Rafiq revealed has been known in the cricketing world and its fringes for a long, long time. There’s no point pretending otherwise. The dressing room at the Yorkshire Cricket Club may have been particularly nasty, but let’s avoid the ‘bad apple’ theories so loved in this country and always used to justify corruption, sleaze, racist atrocities etc. Few other county clubs have a clean record. And the rot starts at the head.

Winged Words: On Muhammad

Tariq Ali, 17 June 2021

The​ most stimulating, balanced and sympathetic secular biography of the Prophet of Islam was written by a left-wing French Jewish intellectual in 1961. Maxime Rodinson’s Life of Muhammad was a formative influence on my generation. It seemed to be the first real attempt to come to terms with a culture that could not be understood through sacred texts or works of exegesis alone....

MexicoCity, 6 July 1946. Victor Serge had a year to live. He had spent the morning, as he sometimes did, with Trotsky’s widow, Natalia Sedova. They had been writing a joint memoir of Trotsky; in it Natalia recalls her husband pacing up and down in his study at Coyoacán, engaged in heated imaginary conversation with old dead Bolsheviks, arguing about Stalin, and how and why they...

Baseball’s Loss: The Unstoppable Hugo Chávez

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 1 November 2007

In Venezuela at the end of June, Evo Morales, Hugo Chávez and Diego Maradona, three heroes of the people in Latin America, kicked off the Copa América. Morales, pleased with his...

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I prefer to be an Ottoman: Tariq Ali

Justin Huggler, 30 November 2000

No country in the Islamic world has embraced the West as eagerly as Turkey has, which makes it an intriguing setting for the third novel in Tariq Ali’s Islamic Quartet: a series of...

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I was just beginning to write about 1968 when I learned of the death in New Orleans of Ron Ridenhour, the GI who exposed the massacre at My Lai. He was only 52, which means that he was in his...

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Here is a little family

Amit Chaudhuri, 9 July 1992

The narrator of After Silence is Max Fischer, the famous cartoonist. At the Los Angeles County Museum, where his work is on display, his life collides with that of Lily Aaron, a divorcee with a...

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When students ruled the earth

D.A.N. Jones, 17 March 1988

Twenty years is a long time in politics. To me, the flavour of the year 1968 is still ‘anti-Fascism’. The meanings of ‘Fascism’ and ‘National Socialism’ are...

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