Tariq Ali

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Tariq Ali
Tariq Ali

Tariq Ali (Urdu: طارق علی) (born October 21, 1943) is a British Pakistani writer and filmmaker. [1] He is a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review, and regularly contributes to The Guardian, Counterpunch and the London Review of Books.

He is the author of Pirates Of The Caribbean: Axis Of Hope (2006), Conversations with Edward Said (2005), Bush in Babylon (2003), and Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (2002).

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Ali was born and raised in Lahore, British India, now Pakistan. His parents were communists. While studying at the Punjab University, he organized demonstrations against Pakistan's military dictatorship. Fearing for his safety because of his links to radical movements, his parents sent him to England to study at the University of Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He was elected President of the Oxford Union debating club.

His public profile began to grow during the Vietnam War, when he engaged in debates against the war with such figures as Henry Kissinger and Michael Stewart. As time passed, Ali became increasingly critical of American and Israeli foreign policies, and emerged as a figurehead for critics of American foreign policy across the globe. He was also a vigorous opponent of American relations with Pakistan that tended to back military dictatorships over democracy.

Active in the New Left of the 1960s, he has long been associated with the New Left Review. He was drawn into involvement with revolutionary socialist politics through his involvement with The Black Dwarf newspaper and joined a Trotskyist party, the International Marxist Group (IMG) in 1968. He was recruited to the leadership of the IMG and became a member of the International Executive Committee of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.

During this period, he was an IMG candidate in Sheffield Attercliffe at the Feburary 1974 UK general election and was co-author of Trotsky for Beginners, a cartoon book. In 1981 the IMG dissolved when its members entered the Labour Party and was promptly proscribed. Ali then abandoned activism in the revolutionary left and supported Tony Benn in his bid to become deputy leader of the Labour Party that year.

In 1990, he published the satire Redemption, on the inability of the Trotskyists to handle the downfall of the Eastern bloc, which contains parodies of many well-known figures in the Trotskyist movement.

His book Bush in Babylon criticizes the 2003 invasion of Iraq by American president George W. Bush. The book has a unique style, using poetry and critical essays in portraying the war in Iraq as a failure. An atheist who grew up around Muslims, Ali believes that the new Iraqi government will fail.

His previous book, Clash of Fundamentalisms, puts the events of the September 11 attacks in historical perspective, covering the history of Islam from its foundations.

Ali has been a critic of modern neoliberal economics and was present at the 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil where he was one of nineteen to sign the Porto Alegre Manifesto.

He is often said to have been the inspiration for the Rolling Stones' song "Street Fighting Man", recorded in 1968.[citation needed] However, his autobiography, Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties never directly acknowledges this fact.

He currently lives in London with his partner Susan Watkins, Editor of the New Left Review. He has three children, Natasha, Chengiz, and Aisha.

  1. ^ Tariq Ali Biography, Contemporary Writers, accessed October 31 2006

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Persondata
NAME Ali, Tariq
ALTERNATIVE NAMES طارق علی (Urdu)
SHORT DESCRIPTION author, filmmaker, and historian
DATE OF BIRTH October 21, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Lahore, British India (now Pakistan)
DATE OF DEATH living
PLACE OF DEATH
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../t/a/r/Tariq_Ali_9b97.html"
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