Tag Archives: Literature
‘The heretic and the holy: Tariq Ali’s histories of Islam’
- Friday, 07 May 2010 11:08
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The Islam Quintet reviewed by Robyn Creswell for The National, May 7, 2010
“I’ve let my pen run away with me and preached my heresies for too long,” Tariq Ali once wrote, in an essay called Letter to a Young Muslim. “I doubt that I will change, but I hope you will.” Ali is indeed a kind of professional, or inveterate heretic, a writer who has made a career of dissenting from every kind of orthodoxy. But to call it a career suggests a rather solemn enterprise, whereas Ali’s writings are chiefly characterised by their wit—note the impish paradox of “preaching” heresies—and their swaggering combativeness. For Ali, dissent is an essentially heroic activity and he never seems so happy as when he has an opponent, be he neoliberal, Islamist, or ex-Leftist, to pummel into submission.
Born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1943, Ali began organising street protests as a teenager. He soon became a university firebrand and caused enough trouble for the military regime of Ayub Khan that Ali’s family encouraged him to continue his studies elsewhere. In Britain, Ali joined the Oxford University Humanist Group (whose slogan was “Down with God!” and which held debates on motions such as “Jesus Christ Should Have Been Crucified”) and played an active part in student politics.
Over the next decade, he edited and wrote for a number of memorably-named magazines (The Black Dwarf, The Red Mole) and became a Leftist celebrity, debating Vietnam with Henry Kissinger and interviewing John Lennon. The Rolling Stones’ Street Fighting Man (“my name is called Disturbance / I’ll shout and scream, I’ll kill the King”) was supposedly written in his honour. read more
‘Poet of the Punjab’ - Fatima Bhutto reviews Night of the Golden Butterfly
- Friday, 23 April 2010 11:55
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Night of the Golden Butterfly reviewed by Fatima Bhutto for the New Statesman, April 23, 2010
If Pakistan is a land of untold stories, whispered conspiracy theories and closed-door mutinies, then thank heavens for Tariq Ali, whose access to its innermost secret chambers has made him the country’s finest historian and critic.
Night of the Golden Butterfly is the fifth and final volume of Ali’s Islam quintet. His intricate historical novels have spanned the Moors in Spain, the Ottoman empire, medieval car-tographers in Palermo and the battle for Jerusalem, before finally bringing us to modern-day Lahore, the cultural heart of the “Fatherland” (the name Pakistan is never mentioned), where four college students begin a friendship based on shared Marxist fantasies, a love of Punjabi poetry, irreverence and the hormonal palpitations of young love.
The narrator, the writer Dara—named, one assumes, after Dara Shikoh, the imprisoned Mughal poet and prince—brings the four friends back together decades later, drawing them from London, Paris, Lahore and Beijing. In order to weave their tales together, Ali uses the mystery of Mohammed Aflatun, known as Plato, one of the Fatherland’s most renowned and reclusive painters, who calls in a favour in the form of a biography to be written by his old chum, Dara.
The quest for Plato’s story brings to light the “four cancers of the Fatherland”: America, the military, mullahs and the corruption of politicians. Politics saturates every page, whether Ali is writing about the Muslim rebellion in Yunnan or the current war in Swat, the parties to which he compares to a “hydra-headed beast”. There is the violence of the Fatherland’s rich and powerful—from the Sindhi feudal lords who marry the beautiful and brave Zaynab to the Quran and the authorities’ inept reliance on “Detectives Without Borders” to solve its most notorious murders, through the trigger-happy politicos who knock off a general who has got in their way, to the revenge visited on women who collaborate with foreign enemies.
Ali’s polemics are leavened with subversive wit and mimicry of ludicrous public figures. Look out in particular for a hilarious caricature of Bernard-Henri Lévy and a surreptitious mention of the world’s best-known Muslim apostate, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. read more
Night of the Golden Butterfly
- Monday, 19 April 2010 19:34
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Published by Verso, 2010
The final volume in Tariq Ali’s acclaimed cycle of historical novels, The Islam Quintet
Night of the Golden Butterfly concludes the Islam Quintet—Tariq Ali’s much lauded series of historical novels, translated into more than a dozen languages, that has been twenty years in the writing. Completing an epic panorama that began in fifteenth-century Moorish Spain, the latest novel moves between the cities of the twenty-first century, from Lahore to London, from Paris to Beijing. The narrator is rung one morning and reminded that he owes a debt of honour. The creditor is Mohammed Aflatun—known as Plato—an irascible but gifted painter living in a Pakistan where “human dignity has become a wreckage.” Plato, who once specialized in stepping back into the limelight, now wants his life story written.
As the tale unravels we meet Plato’s London friend Alice Stepford, now a leading music critic in New York; Mrs. “Naughty” Latif, the Islamabad housewife whose fondness for generals leads to her flight to the salons of intellectually fashionable Paris, where she is hailed as the Diderot of the Islamic world; and there’s Jindie, the Golden Butterfly of the title, the narrator’s first love. Interwoven with this chronicle of contemporary life is the turbulent history of Jindie’s family. Her great forebear, Dù Wénxiù, led a Muslim rebellion in Yunnan in the nineteenth century and ruled the region from his capital Dali for almost a decade, as Sultan Suleiman. Night of the Golden Butterfly reveals Ali in full flight, at once imaginative and intelligent, satirical and stimulating.
Buy from Amazon.com / Amazon.co.uk
Reviews: The National, New Statesman, The Independent, Scotsman, Daily Mail, Guardian, Portland Oregonian, Georgia Straight, Herald (Karachi), Gulf News
An evening of discussion in NY with Tariq Ali
- Friday, 12 March 2010 11:25
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Join Tariq Ali for an evening of discussion to launch
Thursday April 15th, 7.30pm
Idlewild Books, 12 West 19th Street (near 5th Ave), New York, NY 10011
Tel. 212-414-8888
RSVP: [email protected]
Interview: Tariq Ali on Writing Novels
- Monday, 01 February 2010 17:54
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An interview with Tariq Ali on writing novels, by Maniza Naqvi for 3 Quarks Daily, February 1, 2010
Maniza Naqvi: You have spent a lifetime leading political, anti war and socialist activism through demonstrations, protest marches; political articles, books, lectures, interviews, and speeches . You have spoken out in all sorts of forums ranging from university settings to the streets during anti war demonstrations. You are noted as the leader of the Left in Europe. You’ve been a hero and example for many of us. So, in all of this, where does writing novels fit in? You have now written five novels, two of which I absolutely loved reading: The Book of Saladin and Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree.
Tariq Ali: I started writing fiction in 1990. Why? I don’t know. I felt like it but recently on a trip to Pakistan I came across a letter I’d written my mother in 1966 or ’67, soon after leaving Oxford. I was quite surprised because I’d written that I was thinking about writing a novel. I have no memory of what I might have been thinking of…then 1968 happened and swept our generation away into the utopian wilds. It was the end of that period that started me thinking of fiction again. I had written plays and film scripts in the 80′s and early 90s. So a full-scale novel was not such a huge leap forward.
Maniza Naqvi: What draws you to fiction? Can you place the role of fiction writing in your life?
Tariq Ali: Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree was begun in 1991 after the first Gulf War. I wanted to excavate the history of European Islam and went, naturally, to Spain. Here I saw the Great Mosque in Cordoba, went to Granada, wandered round Seville and imagined the ruins whispering to me…stories of their past and those who had built them. So I imbibed the atmosphere and wrote the first novel of the Quintet. read more