Ali, Tariq (1943- ) political writer, historian, novelist

Tariq Ali was born on October 21, 1943, in Lahore, Pakistan (then part of India), to Mazhar Ali Khan and Tahira Hyat, both of whom were active in the Communist Party. In 1963 he graduated from Lahore University, where he had organized student protests against the authoritarian General Ayub Khan, prompting an uncle who worked in military intelligence to advise him to leave the country. He enrolled in Exeter College, Oxford, studied politics, philosophy, and economics, and became active in left-wing student politics, participating in protests against the Vietnam War. He was elected president of the Oxford Union debating society and became famous through televised debates with the likes of Henry Kissinger.

Ali started writing articles in support of socialist and antiwar causes during his student years. After he left Oxford in 1966, he began to study law, but soon became the reviews editor of Town, a British magazine. A year later he devoted himself to full-time activism, leading the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. He became a leader of the International Marxist Group (a political organization that was absorbed into the Labour Party in 1981) and was a leading figure in the New Left movement that swelled throughout the l960s and early 1970s.

Ali’s literary reputation rests on three interrelated groups of works. One of these is a series of histories, autobiographies, and political works that include 1968 and After: Inside the Revolution (1978), which assessed the turbulence of the preceding decade; Who’s Afraid of Margaret Thatcher?: In Praise of Socialism (1984); Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties (1987); and 1968: Marching in the Streets (1998). These works established Ali as a formidable commentator who tirelessly and energetically interrogated the dominant culture from a radical leftist perspective.

Several historical novels focusing on Islamic figures and locales constitute the second group of Ali’s most significant work. His first novel, Redemption (1990), is set in contemporary Europe and America, but beginning with Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (1992), set in Moorish Spain on the brink of Christian reconquest, he began to explore the complicated relationship between Christian and Islamic cultures. The Book of Sala- din (1998) is a multivoiced fictional biography of the 12th-century Muslim military hero, while The Stone Woman (2000) takes place in the declining Ottoman Empire of the late 19th century.

The third group of Ali’s works consists of articles, reviews, plays, and editorial work. Ali has written on a broad number of subjects, including the Iraq War, South American socialist movements, and India and Pakistan. He is an editor of the New Left Review, with which he has long been associated, as well as the editorial director of Verso, a London-based publisher. Ali’s plays, most of them collaborations, have not attracted major critical attention.

Other Works by Tariq Ali:
- Bush in Babylon. New York: Verso, 2003.
- Can Pakistan Survive?: The Death of a State. New York: Penguin, 1983.
- The Nehrus and the Gandhis: An Indian Dynasty. London: Chatto & Windus, 1985.
- Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope. New York: Verso, 2006.

- Speaking of Empire and Resistance. With David Barsamian. London: The New Press, 2005.
- A Sultan in Palermo. New York: Verso, 2005.
- Trotsky for Beginners. London: Icon Books, 1998.

A Work about Tariq Ali:
- Ali, Tariq. Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties. New York: Verso, 2005.