Product Description

In this wide-ranging book Ali challenges assumptions on both sides, arguing that Islamic civilization has an important role in Western modernity, and that what we have experienced with the rise of fundamentalism is the return of history in an horrific form.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #280064 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 342 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
After the events of September 11, 2001, the veteran writer, filmmaker and political activist Tariq Ali has been in great demand to provide his own radical perspective on the significance of the attacks, and the result is The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity. Ali's book explores the history that preceded these events, and deals directly with the political history of Islam, its founding myths, its origins, its culture, its riches, its divisions. However, this is no dry history book, but a powerful and wide-ranging polemic that interrogates the hypocrisy of Islamist politics and religion, while also denouncing the double standards of US and UK foreign policy towards Islamic states over the last century.

The result is a remarkably broad if sometimes awkward and episodic book, that moves from Ali's idyllic childhood in Lahore, playing tennis and avoiding mullahs, via discussions of the origins of Islam, the rise of the Ottoman Empire, the status of women in Islam, to detailed critiques of the recent history of western involvement in Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kashmir. Ali is at his best in the later sections, attacking the Pakistani madrasas as indoctrination nurseries designed to produce fanatics, and condemning the Pakistani army as one of the Pentagon's spoilt brats in Asia. The Clash of Fundamentalisms argues that the rise of political and religious intolerance lies in the fact that all the other exit routes have been sealed off by the mother of all fundamentalisms: American imperialism. His call for "an Islamic Reformation that sweeps away the crazed conservatism and backwardness of the fundamentalists" and which "opens up the world of Islam to new ideas which are seen to be more advanced than what is currently on offer from the West" is a bold and provocative call; while some may disagree with Ali's politics or interpretation of history, there is little doubt that The Clash of Fundamentalisms is an angry but valuable response to the events that took place in the US on September 11, 2001. --Jerry Brotton

Review
"In this timely and important book, Tariq Ali puts the events of September 11 into sweeping historical perspective. As we have come to expect from him, he is lucid, eloquent, literary, and painfully honest, as he dissects both Islamic and Western fundamentalism." Howard Zinn "The book is an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the nightmare of history from which so many people are struggling to awake, and deserves serious engagement and consideration. Ali broadens our horizons, geographically, historically, intellectually and politically. His mode of history telling is lyrical and engaging, humane and passionate." -- Anthony Arnove, The Nation "Ali's style is vigorous, his narrative compelling, showing that the short-term, self-interested and oil-greedy policies of the British and Americans in such countries as Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iran must make our much-vaunted ideals of democracy and equity seem like a bad joke." -- Karen Armstrong, The Times "It will not open doors at the White House because it makes for uncomfortable reading ... a wide-ranging and powerfully argued critique, that gives pause for thought." - Financial Times "[Ali] finds little to distinguish between the organised violence of the United States and that of those who oppose it..." - Sydney Morning Herald "Urbane, highly intelligent and vividly written. One hopes this fine study will earn no fatwa." -- Richard Sennett, Times Literary Supplement

About the Author
Tariq Ali is a writer and filmmaker. He has written over a dozen books on world history and politics, five novels and scripts for both stage and screen. He is an editor of the New Left Review and lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Dissecting the World
For those who want to understand how such seemingly disparate issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Kashmir question, and the situation in Afghanistan fit together in the Post-Cold War world this latest book by Tariq Ali is almost mandatory reading.

This is surely a very personal account of world affairs, and in many instances the author is driven just as much by his own convictions as by a desire to explain. For this is not an unbiased analysis. But to be fair to the author, the iconoclastic Tariq Ali makes no attempt to hide this and would be the first to admit that he has his own political agenda.

Readers who do not share Ali's political ideology, and this reviewer is one of them, should nevertheless not be put off by this. For the very value of THE CLASH OF FUNDAMENTALISMS is that it captures a mood, a mood prevalent among scores of people in what we like to call the Third World. And as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz has explained in an entirely different context, moods are just as potent as driving forces for human behavior as the more focussed motivations.

Another quality that the author can not be denied is courage. The opening sentence of the first chapter is namely: I never really believed in God. Not many people of Muslim extraction would have dared to make such a confession, at least not since the Salman Rushdie Affair.

Tariq Ali is indeed not your average representative of the Third World citizen. Born in a family of feudal landowners in the Punjab province of British India, which was divided after the partition between Pakistan and India, his relatives played a role in politics before and after independence: a grandfather was chief minister, and others held senior positions in the armed forces or served in parliament. Ali's parents, however, became staunch Marxists, while he himself is a self-confessed Trotskyist. Since his student-days he has been at the forefront of many political activities at the extreme left of the political spectrum.

His family background and his own political activism have made Tariq Ali a uniquely well-connected man, and this book has benefited from that. Throughout the years the author has had access to the military and political establishment in Pakistan, worked for the Russell Tribunal, traveled in worn-torn Northern Vietnam and visited Palestinian refugee camps. He shows himself not only very well read in Islamic history, but is also conversant with the writings of political radicals of both left and right. He augments his account with examples from literature: critical writers such as Abd al-Rahman Munif and Nizar Kabbani are or were personal acquaintances.

All this makes his book an important read for everybody who wants to at least attempt to view the world through the eyes of 'the Wretched of the Earth'.

In the first part Tariq Ali gives a genealogy of the heritage of Islamic civilization. Taking us from his personal introduction to Islamic learning, via the days of the Prophet Muhammad and early conquests to the crusades and the Ottoman Empire. This is followed by two more thematic chapters on the wide diversity of Islamic doctrines - meant to dispel the incorrect image of Islam as a monolithic bloc - and a very interesting discourse on gender issues in Islam.

In the second part of the book the author introduces us into the modern Middle East. Here Ali explains the way a puritanical strand of Islam ends up making common cause with the imperialistic designs of the West, and how the founding of Israel turned the Middle East into a political quagmire, both because of irreconcilable differences and outside manipulations. It is the author's accomplishment to give a readable account of how Zionism, the experiments with socialism in Arab countries such as Egypt and Syria, the trauma caused by the 1967 war, the rise and fall of Anwar Sadat and the Shah, have all been instrumental in creating a mood, which in 1987 exploded into the Intifadah. The result was that during the last decades of the twentieth century virtually the whole Middle East was submerged in an 'Ocean of Terror'.

In the next part, Ali shifts his attention back to his region of origin: South Asia. Because I am not as familiar with this part of the world as with the Middle East, I found this the most informative part of the book. The author explains how the tensions between India and Pakistan can be traced back to the undesired partition of former British India. During the run-up to independence the leaders of the Congress Party and Muslim League did not envisage the horror and atrocities to which they would expose the people they were suppose to represent. Later on it lead to a bloody war in Bangladesh, while Tariq Ali qualifies the Kashmir issue as the unfinished business of partition. Continued interference by the post-Word War II superpowers did nothing to improve the situation. Pakistani and Indian politics became already hopelessly corrupt, even before the situation got completely out of hand in Afghanistan.

While in the previous parts the author has tried to give an explanation for the rage that is holding large parts of the Islamic world in its grip, his final section starts with a chapter entitled 'A Short-Course History of US Imperialism'. In many instances Ali hits the nail on the head - the doctrine of Neo-Liberalism is just as fundamentalist in character as Islamic radicalism. His comparison between the theses presented by two high priests of post-Cold War doctrine, Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington, I found particularly insightful. But at the same time the author's personal political predilections come to the fore as he can not resist filling us in on the involvement of these two 'state intellectuals' in some of America's unsavory political actions. Kissinger, Brzezinski and Madeleine Albright are taken to task for this as well. A few quotations from Leon Trotsky, by contrast, serve to present him as a visionary, and there is unfortunately also little or no real analysis of what made Marxism-Leninism fail in the end.

But in short, THE CLASH OF FUNDAMENTALISMS is a very valuable book for those who want to look beyond the scare mongering of myopic politicians and sensationalist media. In addition to that, Tariq Ali is an entertaining writer as well.

Twilight of the Trotskyite
A fascinating and moving work, Tariq Ali's book combines the early history of Islam, the recent history of the Middle East, the current situation in South Asia, and an analysis of the world after September 11th to make an impassioned case against both religious fundamentalism and American imperialism.

Unfortunately he fails. His anti-fundamentalism leads him to provide excessively negative portrayals of Islamic Iran and of the Gulf States. He virtually ignores the considerable economic progress and the maintenance of social order in the latter, and does not credit the former for maintaining its sovereignty in the face of considerable US pressure, calling it instead 'the anti-imperialism of fools'. This reduces the credibility of his writing, and leads one to wonder whether he is pandering to Western stereotypes.

Similarly, his anti-fundamentalist zeal leads him to condemn Zia-ul-Haq and to suggest that he may have been killed by his own people. In fact, most Pakistanis suspect the Americans took him out. Likewise, Tariq Ali's condemnation of Nawaz Sharif, and his claim that Musharraf's coup was done against American wishes, border on the absurd. It is all too clear now that Sharif was punished for defying America - first by testing nuclear weapons and then by improving ties with India. His replacement on the other hand, opened the gates for the American occupation of Central Asia.

Mr. Ali also shows a considerable anti-Indian bias, with his chapter on Kashmir echoing Pakistani state propaganda. His remarkable insensitivity to the sufferings of the Hindus - from the Turkish invasions of India to the partition of the fatherland to the ethnic cleansing in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kashmir, are telling. Similarly, his claim that Hindus converted to Islam to escape the caste system rings hollow - both Buddhism and Jainism had rejected the caste system long before Islam entered the subcontinent. Nonetheless, despite all that India has suffered at the hands of Pakistan and its ancestors, Ali still calls on India to take the lead in seeking peace with Pakistan. Such naivete is expected from an adolescent, but not from a man in his fifties.

The fundamental problem in Ali's work, that comes out clearly at the end, is his acceptance of an ancient-medieval-modern scheme of history. This prevents him from seeing the close parallels between the English Puritans and the early Muslims, the Glorious Revolution and the Shia-Sunni split, the age of the Umayyads and the European Enlightenment, the rise of the populist Abbasids and the French Revolution, Ibn Rawandi and Nietzsche, the Crusaders and the Bolsheviks, and ultimately, the Turkish and American empires. Hence his call for an Islamic Reformation completely misses the point - like the Puritans, Islam came after the Reformation in its respective civilization. Likewise, his arguments for separating state and mosque are untenable. In the Middle East, religion and politics have always been united - be it in Israel, (a Jewish State for a Jewish People,) Saudi Arabia, or Iran, (a state for all Shias.) Indeed, it was true of the Byzantines as well. The separation of church and state is a feature of Western civilization - and a product of the continuous conflict between the priesthood and aristocracy in that culture. Other cultures have different relations between religion and politics.

Tariq Ali's book is ultimately the swansong of an idealistic, revolutionary epoch that reached its climax with the Russian, Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions, and died with the collapse of the USSR. As such, it is a masterpiece - but not a guide to the future. Indeed, for a generation like Ali's, that shared the values of the 1960s, the coming decade will be a nightmare. But for the rest of us, it is history in the making.

Surprised me - fluent and pleasurable writing
For migrants who live in the West and whose education, especially history, has been focused only on the west, this book is a revelation.

Yes, I had vaguely heard of Ali as a communist (and I never believed in communism as workable) but I gave this book a chance.

To learn that there is a history that doesnt focus on the West, a magnificent history over 1300 years old, a tragic history made pitiful by the events of the last 100 years, but a history also full of human achievements, is a revelation.

Yes, there are other writers out there, western and arab, but none seem to me to make it so accessible.

What Tariq Ali reveals about Islam is that once upon a time, it flourished in a culture that was open and tolerant. It was influenced heavily by non-Arab cultures, and the centre of gravity moved rapidly out of Arabia towards Baghdad, Spain, Persia and India. Only after 1300 years, because the US wanted cheap oil, and did a " Oil-for-protection" deal, did the centre of gravity return to Arabia under the brutal tyranny of Ibn Saud and the Wahabi sect. Ergo, the USA and Saudi Arabia directly supported and grew islamic fundamentalism.

I never knew this, but I do now. Excellent.