Tariq Ali

The subject of numerous biographies and history books, Winston Churchill has been repeatedly voted as one of the greatest of Englishmen. Even today, Boris Johnson, in his failing attempts to be magisterial, has adopted many of his hero's mannerisms! And, as Tariq Ali agrees, Churchill was undoubtedly right in 1940-41 to refuse to capitulate to fascism. However, he was also...

Tariq Ali revisits his formative years as a young radical. Reissued for the 1968 anniversary, Street-Fighting Years captures the mood and energy of an era filled with hope and passion as Ali tracks the growing significance of the nascent protest movement. Through his own story, he recounts a counter-history of the 60s, a decade rocked by the effects of the...

In this fully updated edition of his coruscating polemic, Tariq Ali shows how, since 1989, politics has become a contest to see who can best serve the needs of the market. In this urgent and wide-ranging case for the prosecution, Ali looks at the people and the events that have informed this moment across the world. This reaches its logical...

The NATO occupation of Afghanistan is over, and a balance-sheet can be drawn. These essays on war and peace in the region reveal Tariq Ali at his sharpest and most prescient. Rarely has there been such an enthusiastic display of international unity as that which greeted the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Compared to Iraq, Afghanistan became the ‘good war’....

This volume covers four decades: the Eighties and Nineties when the author, Tariq Ali, was no longer engaged in active politics as a party member of any sort but had moved sideways to politico-cultural interventions. During this time, he set up Bandung Productions with Darcus Howe and launched the Bandung File, a unique current affairs show on Channel Four. Subsequently,...

Tariq Ali tells us the story of the aftermath of the fall of Granada by narrating a family sage of those who tried to survive after the collapse of their world. Ali is particularly deft at evoking what life must have been like for those doomed inhabitants, besieged on all sides by intolerant Christendom. "This is a novel that have...

The fourth novel in Tariq Ali's 'Islam Quintet' charts the life and loves of the medieval cartographer Muhammed al-Idrisi. Torn between his close friendship with the sultan and his friends who are leaving the island or plotting a resistance to Norman rule, Idrisi finds temporary solace in the harem; but his conscience is troubled... A Sultan in Palermo is a...

Night of the Golden Butterfly concludes the Islam Quintet—Tariq Ali’s much lauded series of historical novels, over twenty years in the writing, which has been translated into a dozen languages. Completing an epic panorama that began in fifteenth-century Moorish Spain, the concluding novel moves between the cities of the twenty-first century, from Lahore to London, from Paris to Beijing. The...

The Book of Saladin is the fictional memoir of Saladin, the Kurdish liberator of Jerusalem, as dictated to a Jewish scribe, Ibn Yakub. Saladin grants Ibn Yakub permission to talk to his wife and retainers so that he might present a full portrait in the Sultan's memoirs. A series of interconnected stories follows, tales brimming over with warmth, earthy humour,...

Istanbul, 1899. The last great Islamic empire is in serious trouble. The family of Iskender Pasha, an Ottoman notable, has retired to its summer palace. Then a former tutor poses a question which the family has been refusing to confront for almost a century: "Your Ottoman Empire is like a drunken prostitute, neither knowing nor caring who will take her...

Commissioned by Oliver Stone in 2015 for the centenary of the Russian Revolution, Tariq Ali's captivating screenplay of the life and times of Vladimir Lenin brings one of the most exciting moments in history to life. From the author of The Dilemmas of Lenin, Ali's drama recasts the historic figures anew. From young firebrand to global revolutionary leader, Lenin remains...

Kashmir is one of the most protracted and bloody occupations in the world—and one of the most ignored. Under an Indian military rule that, at half a million strong, exceeds the total number of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, freedom of speech is non-existent, and human rights abuses and atrocities are routinely visited on its Muslim-majority population. In the...

Amusing, well-researched, and surprisingly sophisticated, Leon Trotsky: An Illustrated Introduction is the perfect primer on the life and thought of the great leader and chronicler of the Russian Revolution. With sympathy and humour, Tariq Ali and Phil Evans trace Trotsky's political career, from prison to the pinnacle of revolutionary power, and finally to his eventual exile and murder by Joseph...

The fourth novel in Tariq Ali's 'Islam Quintet' charts the life and loves of the medieval cartographer Muhammed al-Idrisi. Torn between his close friendship with the sultan and his friends who are leaving the island or plotting a resistance to Norman rule, Idrisi finds temporary solace in the harem; but his conscience is troubled... A Sultan in Palermo is a...