The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity

I have owned this book for several years and find myself continuing to go back to it. I think it is imperative that any US citizen who is interested in geo-politics should include in their readings authors who are not of US origin. The perspective gained by such a study is invaluable. I have several Tariq Ali books and would recommend any of his works highly.

One can't tell a book from it's cover, but in this case, at least one can get an idea that the author has a sense of humor! Perhaps it may be well that such a serious topic as terrorism and religious fundamentalism be approached with a some humor. At the same time, it is a serious book, one of the few books on terrorism that actually delve into the roots of it all to discern a solution. The book is quite voluminous, nearly 330 pages, packed with information and deep analysis, with many notes. The author's brilliant writing style makes it an incredibly difficult book to put down. I ended up finishing the whole book over the Christmas / New Year holiday, with many sleepless nights, that is. The book is divided into 4 major parts: one on the early history of Islam; one on the last 100 years of relations with the West, marked by colonialism and upheavals; a special part focusing on South Asia (India and Pakistan) the region about which the author is most familiar; and the last part on the United States and it's relations with the Islamic world. The book is fascinating not only because it draws upon the author's deep knowledge of the history of Islam, but also because he punctuates it with poetry and quotations from diverse literary works over the ages. The book exhibits a deep understanding of the subject, and posits a thesis directly confronting the much-touted "clash of civilizations" model. A major strength of this book, however, is that the author is daring enough not to stand with the crowd. While many intellectuals from the Muslim world do little to explain current events beyond laying the blame on the West, Tariq Ali is not afraid to look squarely at his own culture with the same critical eye he uses to examine Western imperialism.In this day and age, I would say this is a must-read!

An unashamed secular proponent of Enlightenment ideas, Tariq Ali provides a voice of refreshing realism, intelligence, and wit that sharply contrasts the expanding chorus of religious zealots who have staked out both sides of the 9/11 issue. Ali grew up in a leftist family in Pakistan during the volatile period of Partition and its immediate aftermath. Having witnessed the grim results of religious strife in his native Lahore, Ali rejected the notion of cultural superiority and the study of Islam at an early age. In "Clash of Fundamentalisms" Ali places the events of 9/11 in sharp historical perspective. While his views may not be as comforting as the official U.S. government explanation of why 9/11 took place, they are more realistic and provide a better framework for understanding and preventing further acts of terror. The first three quarters of this book provide a brief and lucid history of the Western occupation and manipulation of the Middle East in the past two hundred years, most notably by Britain and then by its successor, the United States. In his chapter on Saudi Arabia, Ali demonstrates how the West reinstalled the Faud family that continues to rule Saudi Arabia today. The Faud family are practitioners of Wahhabism, an extreme fundamentalist sect of Islam whose repressive nature is comparable to the brand of Christian fundamentalism practiced by Jerry Falwell. By reinstalling the house of Faud in Saudi Arabia Britain, and then the United States ensured that it would experience brutal repression and no possibility for development.Ali characterizes Pakistan as a failed state that has passed from one military dictatorship to another and that is rife with Islamic fundamentalism largely as the result of American sponsorship during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Pakistan also has nuclear weapons and fundamentalist penetration of the military (and its resulting access to those weapons) is a matter of time.In fact, Ali's perspective on other Middle Eastern nations could easily merit a book for each. Afghanistan was on the path to modernization and self-determination before being utterly destroyed by the United States and the Soviet Union. Far from providing Israel with enhanced security, the victory in the 1967 war committed Israel to a path of occupation, aggression, and brutality that ultimately left it more vulnerable and more hated. And, in the case of Iran, Ali warns the United States that it is squandering an opportunity and courting disaster. Most young Iranians have little or no recollection of life under the Shah but possess powerful hatred and resentment of the ruling Islamic clergy. To link these people to an imagined "access of evil" is to turn a reservoir of potential support into one of guaranteed hostility.Ali brings his arguments home in the book's final chapter that is also titled "Clash of Fundamentalism". Here Ali correctly points out that there is nothing new about 9/11, since the modern West has systematically murde

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 I

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.