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.
In Cairo and Abu Dhabi, the two Arab capitals I have visited this year, street and palace are for once in harmony. A pre-emptive strike against Saddam Hussein on the grounds that he might, at some point in the future, authorise the production of nuclear weapons, would be, for the people of the region, a classic display of imperial double-standards. They know that the only country which...
May and June are the worst months to visit Pakistan: temperatures in Lahore can go up to 120°F, and I still remember the melting tar on the road, which virtually doubled the time it took to bike home from school. I had been invited, however, to give the Eqbal Ahmed Memorial Lectures in Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi. Ahmed – whose dream of setting up a serious postgraduate university...
Most of those killed during the first two years of the ‘war on terror’ have already been forgotten. An exception is Daniel Pearl, the South Asia bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, who, early in 2002, was lured to a fashionable restaurant in Karachi, kidnapped and then executed by his captors. A video showing Pearl’s throat being slit was distributed to the Western...
The pundits say that the Indian electorate does not cast votes, but votes castes. This is generally true but at key moments in its postcolonial history, the citizens of the world’s largest democracy – India’s population is just over a billion – have acted to punish the ruling elites. It is the subaltern’s revenge, unpredictable and unpredicted. Almost every...
‘We’ve been trying to get you to come and talk here for the last three years,’ my host complained as we shook hands at the airport. ‘Here’ was Tripoli, capital of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, bathed in mild February sunshine; my host a functionary from the World Centre for the Studies and Researches of the Green Book – the Green Book...
Tariq Ali talks to Thomas Jones about a newly reissued biography of the Prophet by Maxime Rodinson, and the historic prevalence of Arabic culture in the West, from Don Quixote to Trafalgar Square.
Tariq Ali reads extracts from his diary about visiting Pyongyang.
Tariq Ali delivers his 2015 LRB Winter Lecture, in which he argues that we are living in the twilight period of democracy
Alexander Zevin talks to Tariq Ali about his new book, Liberalism at Large, a critical biography of the Economist magazine and an examination of liberalism.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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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