The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity

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Summary: bin Bush bin Laden, Is there a difference?
Review: Author, playwright, modern renaissance man of the Left, Tariq Ali has worn all of these hats and more in his career. "Clash of Fundamentalisms" is a collection of his essays on US foreign policy, particularly as it applies to the Middle East and the traditionalist Islamic countries.

The first thing to note about this collection is that it is indeed a collection and not intended to read as a cohesive work. It all hangs together thematically and most of the essays expand on their predecessors, but there are some moments where Ali begins to flog the same horse he has just beaten senseless in the previous chapter. That said, if you expect a collection of essays (as opposed to my erroneous belief on reading this for the first time), you will not be disappointed.

Ali is a highly intelligent man, of that we can all be certain. His explanations of early Islamic history, despite clearly not being the raison d'etre of this collection, are well worth a read. However, the reason to buy this book is to witness one of the leading polemicists of our generation tear into the edifices of the modern world.
The use of the plural in the above paragraph is deliberate. Ali does not fall into the traps so common in leftist discourse of the current moment of simply criticising the current system and failing to provide a valid alternative. Neither does he commit the worse sin of a bias in favour of the culture against whom the forces of the right are arrayed. Despite being Pakistan-born, his criticisms of Islam, Islamic fundamentalism and the regimes of the subcontinent are just as scathing as those of the White House (under, it should be pointed out, Chief Executives of both political persuasions).

Ali's carefully-explained potted histories of everything from the Kashmir region (the perennial flash-point between India and Pakistan) through to the rise, assimilation and fall of Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt are erudite in the extreme. While his essays are missing the extensive bibliography that perhaps they warrant, particularly on the more controversial topics, there are many gloriously digressive footnotes. Of particular delight to me was his story of the Bangladeshi village leader who spoke Arabic, the only man in his village to do so. Upon being visited by a visiting religious leader, he was questioned in Arabic as it was a common tongue for both men. The visiting man was puzzled by the villager's response and eventually exclaimed "Why does he only quote verses from the Koran?"

Another great advantage of this collection is the different intellectual tradition of its author. Where we in the West are used to making our points simply and straightforwardly, Ali's tradition is much more eloquent and (possibly) more round-about. Following an analysis of how many years particular groups have ruled Pakistan, Ali drily comments "They have shown no particular allegiance to any ideology at all - socialism, democracy, Islam, or even Pakistan". Rulers such as Ayub Khan are described as "wearing the mask of the devout", while the glee with which General Yahya Khan's first name is translated from Lahori Punjabi into something rather objectionable in English is palpable.
Ali is darkly comic throughout these essays. Somehow, one is forced to conclude, this is the only way in which his message can get across. That message being, in simplest terms, that the anti-Islamic fervour of recent years is just as much a dangerous fundamentalism as the Islamism it is against.

The one drawback to this collection is that every now and then it seems, to me at least, to venture into slightly unbelievable territory. The clearest example of this is the anecdote dealing with the request made of Ali to assassinate the then-Pakistani Prime Minister (Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto) - an anecdote referenced in the index as "Bhutto, Zulfiqar Ali - author invited to assassinate". While it seems rather difficult to believe, and the reader only has the person rememberance of the author to back it up, it is tempting to argue that "there are more things in Pakistani politics, Horatio". His claim that Jemaah Islamiyah is not linked to al-Qaeda is one with very few adherents inside the security studies discipline.

Overall, however, this collection is a highly entertaining and informative tour de force. Ali leaves very few stones unturned in his attacks. Instead, he prefers to throw them all at his chosen targets. A comparison could be made in this sense with America's Michael Moore, in that both attack venemously and both are especially critical of the American political tradition. Such a comparison would be a disservice to Ali, however, as his hits are much more erudite than Moore's.

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Summary: Does not live up to its cover...
Review: I would normally start a review by explaining what the book is about but for Ali's The Clash of Fundamentalisms I will have to start backwards: the book is not about fundamentalism, nor about the increasing religious overtones in the foreign policies of Washington, as the title -and the creative book cover- suggest. In the introduction Ali justifies the title by outlining his thesis: the most dangerous of all fundamentalisms is imperialism. What follows is a history of the muslim world from the birth of Islam to the defeat and political decay of Arab nationalism, as seen through the prism of a leftist secular nationalist muslim.

One may agree or disagree with Ali's point of view but his analysis is emotional and unconvincing. No thinking person believes that the first Iraq war was fought in the name of Freedom, but to argue this point by suggesting that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was no different from the Indonesian seizure of East Timor suggests a disappointingly naive, or perhaps hopelessly idealistic view of the world. Ali concludes: "The lesson is not that aggressive territorial expansion [i.e. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait] is a crime that cannot be allowed to pay, it is that to conduct it with success a state must act in the interests of the West too." One should not have to read a 400-page book to learn the obvious.

Ali, however, is not a boring writer and if you are not allergic to the word "imperialism," the book is interesting to read. Even after dismissing his analysis, what is left is an engaging narrative, the product of his intimate knowledge of the worlds he describes. His accounts are enlightening, especially those of his native Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and India. This is quite refreshing given that the knowledge of political history for most westerners evaporates somewhere in the shores of the middle east, to resurface in the far east. Accounts of personal encounters between the author and the powerful of this region add value to the book, though this sometimes borders the surreal, as for example when the Pakistani ambassador to France approaches young Ali in the sixties, then a student at Oxford, with a plot to assassinate Pakistan's ruler, Ayub Khan (Ali declined).

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Left of the sixties, of which Ali is a product, has for all practical purposes ceased to exist. Nowhere is its demise more loudly pronounced than in the introduction of the book (paperback edition). Written in the post 9/11 era and in the eve of the military build up that would soon become the second Iraq war, it is an angry, resigned and depressed lamentation of all that could have been but is now irreversibly gone, crashed in the wake of an unstoppable american imperium. With no vision for the future, Ali would have us believe that we have reached the end of History.

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Summary: The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity
Review: Powerful empires in previous centuries have never understood the wrath of their subjects, says Ali, and the American Empire is no exception. The historian, novelist, playwright, screen writer, filmmaker, and editor of the , explains why much of the world does not see the Empire as Good. His backdrop is a clash between a religious fundamentalism begat by modernity, and an imperial fundamentalism determined to discipline the world. It is necessary, he insists, to oppose both, and to create a space in both Islam and the West where freedom of thought and imagination can be defended.

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Summary: Real history of fundamentalism
Review: Tariq Ali puts forth a history of Islamic fundamentalism, from Muhammad onward, through the emergence of Wahhabism (Saudi Arabia's state religion, once Afghanistan's) from its inspirer Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab in the 18th century under Ottoman rule, through the present. In between, Ali sandwiches a discussion of Islamic heresy, including the Islamic world's most prominent medieval intellectuals. What's more, he also takes on American imperialism as another form of religious fundamentalism, with its history of domination, manipulation, and extermination, and uses the resulting paradigm of a "clash of fundamentalisms" to explain the current situation in the Middle East and in South Asia. Ali takes on a discussion of the Iranian Revolution, of the Iran-Iraq war, of the history of Pakistan, and of Palestine, amongst other things. The result is detailed, informative, stimulating, and honest. Ali ends with a "Letter to a Young Muslim," where he confronts the viewpoints of desperate Muslims living under US proxy regimes throughout the world.

I can hardly wait to read the next hundred denunciations of this book, for all that it is chock-full of blood-boiling heresies from beginning to end. A must-read.

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Summary: A refreshing riposte to conventional thinking on 9-11
Review: Tariq Ali's book, The Clash of Fundamentalisms, is necessary reading for everyone. For radicals it provides an excellent history of U.S. imperial exploits and of ideological and political conflict in the Middle East and Central and South Asia. For those of other political stripes, centrists and rightists, it provides a refreshing and unrestrained response to the predominating views about the meaning and response to the events of September 11, 2001.

Ali notes how Francis Fukuyama's thesis on the "End of History," while claiming the moral and economic superiority of liberal capitalism and its triumph over bureaucratic "socialism," didn't provide much in the way of direction for U.S. hegemony following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations filled that gap. Huntington's book, partly a response to Fukuyama, argued not for a golden age ahead, but continuing conflict derived from apparently irreducible cultural differences. Thus Western, and particularly U.S., intervention would still be very much needed to defend American values such as "individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets" (quoted in Ali, p. 273). Huntington's book therefore provided a rationalization for a continued and predominant role of the U.S. in world affairs. September 11 was "proof" for that thesis.

Ali's book subjects this thesis to a withering critique, and this is the main reason for his choice of title, something that others seem not to have grasped. Ali carries out his critique by making two points while presenting a broad political and religious history of the Middle East and Central and South Asia. First, he shows us that Islam and the cultures with which is Islam is associated are anything but monolithic or homogeneous. Islam has had its Luthers as well as its Savonarolas. It has not always been hostile to Western (Aristotle) or even rational and scientific thinking. Its politics have been more varied than most Anglo-American countries, comprising the most radical communists as well as producing leftist and far-rightist nationalisms.

Second, Ali shows that, tragically, and in far too many cases, U.S. foreign intervention in these regions has abetted and financed the rise of the most reactionary elements "against communism or progressive/secular nationalism. Often these were hardline religious fundamentalists: the Muslim Brotherhood against Nasser in Egypt; the Sarekat-i-Islam against Sukarno in Indonesia, the Jamat-e-Islam against Bhutto in Pakistan and, later, Osama bin Laden and friends against the secular communist Najibullah [in Afghanistan]" (p. 275). With the exception of Indonesia, Ali's book is, among other things, a historical presentation of these interventions. Thus, U.S. imperialism, far form necessarily defending itself from an alien and hostile Islamic culture, is at the very least partly responsible for the ascendancy of fundamentalist Islam. Moreover, not only has the U.S. failed to promote democracy, liberty, equality, etc. in these regions, it has actually stifled it.

There are many, including at least one reviewer below, who will disagree with Ali's conclusions, particularly his charges of U.S. imperialism. What these persons want to believe is that U.S. foreign policy really is about those lofty principles that Huntington lists. Ali provides his own response to these critics: "The historic compromise with integrity that this form of Americophilia entails transmutes the friendly critic into a slave of power, always wanting to please. S/he becomes an apologist, expecting the Empire to actually deliver on its rhetoric. Alas, the Empire, whose fundamental motivation today is economic self-interest, may sometimes disappoint the most recent converts to its cause. They feel betrayed, refusing to accept that what has been betrayed is their illusions. What they dislike most is to be reminded of the sour smell of history" (p. 257). Hence, the furious and often ad hominem attacks volleyed against Ali.

What is the meaning of September 11? It is, in the prescient words of Chalmers Johnson, "blowback." "'Blowback' is shorthand for saying that a nation reaps what it sows, even if it does not fully know or understand what it has sown. Given its wealth and power, the United States will be a prime recipient in the foreseeable future of all of the more expectable forms of blowback, particularly terrorit attacks against Americans in and out of the armed forces anywhere on earth, including within the United States" (quoted in Ali, p. 292). Read this book for a case study of this phenomenon.

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Summary: Fascinating
Review: Tariq Ali's writing is powerfully persuasive. This book contains fascinating insights and interpretations of the Western-Middle East relations of the last century. No political opinion is ever unbiased, and the reader should take Ali's decidedly leftist views into account when perusing this book, but the author's judgments are very fair and his criticism equally distributed. Ali attributes warfare and imperialism to economic self-interest, and I find his arguments very convincing. A great read and a fascinating perspective, but be sure to pick up other views as well.

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Summary: An entertaining critique that spares neither East nor West
Review: The gist of the story that Tariq Ali tells in this book will be familiar to most people who have taken the time to learn the history behind today's global events. What Ali brings to the table, however, is the personal insight, humor, and unabashed opinionatedness of a gifted storyteller. The overarching theme of the book is the history of tumultuous relations between Islam and the West. The scope of this epic tale extends from the time of Mohammed to the US invasion of Afghanistan. Although it's apparent that Ali has extensive knowledge of Islamic history, some of the book's best moments are embedded in the personal anecdotes detailing his childhood in Pakistan. Ali witnessed the bloodshed that accompanied the India-Pakistan partition, and was an active student agitator during many of the corrupt, violent, and almost comically buffoonish regimes that followed. Consequently, this book provides an excellent overview of Pakistani history, in addition to dealing with the influential, often iconoclastic figures who shaped the history of Islam. The ironic thing, which Ali points out, is that many of these men and, yes, women are just as obscure in the Islamic world as they are elsewhere. The diversity of radical challenges to fundamentalist orthodoxy that pepper Islam's history give lie to the Wahhabite call for a return to a "pure" Islam. It's all very similar to the way that Christian fundamentalists have projected their own prejudices and fears into the pages of the Bible: both groups put the letter of the law ahead of its spirit.

A lifelong atheist, Ali's lacerating criticism is just as hard on Islamic fundamentalisn as it is on Western imperialism. In a discursive climate that often seems divided between shrill, dangerous neoconservative attacks on Islam as a whole, and a woefully disorganized left, prone to awkward apologetics for a virulent strain of religious conservatism, he has the guts to effectively say "It's ALL a bunch of nonsense!"

[I docked one star for poor editing: Ali repeats himself, almost verbatim, several times. Presumably, this book was written in several large chunks, which were then hastily pasted together. While this doesn't detract from the substance of his arguments, it does give the book a somewhat disjointed quality, inviting hair-splitting critics to avoid the powerful punch of the book's content, while harping on the minor flaws in its form.]

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Summary: Nice bibliography
Review: There were a number of very good historical pieces of information along with a very good bibliography. The book helps fill gaps in education that we do not always get through our current media.