Although Tariq Ali has no formal training as a historian and rejects the "objective perspective of formal history" he is still widely consulted on the subject of the crusades. This was most recently demonstrated in the much anticipated November 2005 crusades special by the History Channel, Crusades: Crescent & The Cross. Among the scholarly community of crusades historians, Tariq Ali is little known and his contributions to scholarly understandings of the crusades are nil. Yet his relatively significant influence on popular understandings of the crusading movement is certain as a result of his fictional novels, newspaper commentaries, radio and television appearances. Dr. James Proctor has summarized Tariq Ali's career as follows,
Writer, journalist and film-maker Tariq Ali was born in Lahore in 1943. He was educated at
Oxford University, where he became involved in student politics, in particular with the
movement against the war in Vietnam. On graduating he led the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign.
He owned his own independent television production company, Bandung, which produced
programmes for Channel 4 in the UK during the 1980s. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC
Radio and contributes articles and journalism to magazines and newspapers including The
Guardian and the London Review of Books. He is editorial director of London publishers Verso
and is on the board of the New Left Review, for whom he is also an editor. (2)
Tariq Ali is first and foremost a political activist. Raised by Communist parents he is a lifelong atheist. After becoming a leader of the International Marxist Group in the 1970s, he declared, "One can see, that we shall once again see (workers') Soviets in Europe in the 70s." With the decline of world communism, Ali has increasingly devoted himself to his books and social criticism of capitalism. Concerning Tariq Ali, the BBC Four notes, "In his 60s, the firebrand may not be shining as brightly as before but it is, without doubt, still aflame." (3)
Crusades historian Dr. Thomas Madden has voiced the concerns of some crusades specialists when he examines Ali's blending of his leftist views with a historical analysis unconcerned with objectivity [so much as is possible]. Concerning Ali's most recent work dealing with the crusades, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads, and Modernity (Verso, 2002), Dr. Madden describes it as, "A pitiful attempt to equate the Crusades with the centuries of jihads that caused them and the 'cultural imperialism' of the United States." (4)
Dr. James Proctor, Contemporary Authors-Tariq Ali, British Council
BBC Four Documentaries: Tariq Ali November 10, 2005
Dr. Thomas Madden Crusades of History and Politics Hudson Institute Spring 2002 Issue
1. Dr. James Proctor,Contemporary Authors Tariq Ali, British Council -Arts,
2. Ibid.
3. BBC Four Documentaries: Tariq Ali November 10, 2005
4. Dr. Thomas Madden Crusades of History and Politics Hudson Institute Spring 2002 Issue
(C) Andrew Holt, November 2005- Permission is granted for electionic copying or distribution in print for educational or personal use. No permission is granted for commercial use.