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.

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.

From The Blog
24 May 2019

That Narendra Modi would win again was never really in dispute. The only question was whether the Bharatiya Janata Party would be forced to seek coalition partners in the Lok Sabha, or repeat its astonishing success of 2014 and govern alone. The main opposition, the Congress, turned the campaign into a referendum on Modi. Could the tea-seller’s son, they asked, an untutored, uncouth, bigoted, small-town petit-bourgeois (who can’t even speak English) be trusted again? India’s electorate has now provided the answer. They love their Modi.

From The Blog
26 February 2019

Adil Ahmad Dar, the 20-year-old Kashmiri suicide terrorist who killed himself along with forty Indian soldiers at Pulwama on 14 February, will be regarded as a hero and martyr by many Kashmiris of his generation, alienated, desperate and angered by the atrocities that have been rained down on them by the Indian military on the orders of successive governments (the Congress record is appalling) for many decades. Blinding young men in Kashmir with pellet guns is an Indian innovation. Had Dar acted alone, a few might even have dared call him a hero in public. Instead an oppressive silence reigns throughout Kashmir.

From The Blog
13 August 2018

V.S. Naipaul never saw himself as just another face in the mural of 20th-century literature. The mural was, in any case, not his favourite art form. He loved and possessed a very fine collection of Persian and Indian miniatures. But this wasn’t a frame in which he saw himself either. Long before the knighthood and the Nobel Prize, it was the mirror that excited him. Destiny stared him in the face every morning. He believed in himself. The Trinidadian was to become a very fine writer of English prose.

From The Blog
29 November 2017

Yet another manufactured crisis in Pakistan with a hard-line religious group at its core; the country’s political capital, Islamabad, cut off for over a fortnight from its twin military capital, Rawalpindi. The people laying siege are not too far from military GHQ. A whiff of grapeshot and they would have dispersed like rabbits. But the demonstrators were confident. The leaders were actually hoping for a few martyrs. The government did not oblige. Yesterday it capitulated in toto to the demands of the TLY, the Tehreek-i-Labaik Ya Rasool Allah (Movement to Obey the Prophet), a group set up two years ago in Karachi.

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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