Essential Political Reading: Tariq Ali's Clash of Fundamentalisms

[BurtWorm]

Among the best political books I've ever read. Ali is a filmmaker, novelist, and editor at New Left Review. A member of the Pakistani middle class who was Oxbridge educated, Ali entered politics some 40 years ago as a young Trotskyist and lost his Islam even before that. So his perspective on Islamic fundamentalism is refreshingly critical, but not idiotically so. In fact the most compelling argument of this book is that the clash we are witnessing now is the ungodly offspring of the incestuous relationship between Islamic and imperialist fundamentalisms during the cold war. Think of Afghanistan ca. 1980 for an example: the CIA and Pakistan intelligence set up the madrassas that bred the Taliban to give hopeless young South Asian Muslims a fanaticism to counter communism. Of course they weren't looking out for the poor Pashtuns' souls. They were looking for a cheap recruitment method for anti-communists.

The Clash of Fundamentalisms is an excellent history of modern Islam, nation by nation. You'll learn a lot by reading it.

[Djinn]

1. Also highly recomend it

very good potted history of the development of the Islamic world.

and also of the "bantustan-isation" of the west bank and gaza and how a two state solution would almost definetly spell disaster for the Palestinians and why a bi-national secular state would be a better goal to work towards - well worth reading

[BurtWorm]

2. Exactly.

The appendix, an interview with a Jewish-British critic of Israel (Isaac Deutscher?) conducted by Alexander Cockburn and others, is worth the price of the book alone!

I was just looking at the Amazon.com page for the name of this mentor of Ali's, and the review section leads off with a pan by a Tufts professor from Library Journal that calls it a work of "monumental vacuity" and then proceeds to miss several important points. :grr: Most irritating, it recommends skipping the book if you've read Bernard Lewis. In fact, this book is an antidote to Lewis's zionist apologetics. I bought What Went Wrong? about the same time, but I started reading Ali first. After being blown away by his chapter on Israel/Palestine, I checked Lewis's index for references to Israel or zionism. There were maybe three in the whole book. One was a paragraph-long chiding of Arab intellectuals for blaming Israel and the United States for the problems in the middle east! As if focusing on Israel/US's role in updating colonialism were mere scapegoating!