The Accidental Linguist

The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity is a personal story of one man’s lifelong philosophical journey, and a philosophical and political commentary on the current conflict between American foreign policy and Middle Eastern resistance movements– aka the “war on terror”. The cover photo of US President George W. Bush in Afghani tribal garb, and the back jacket photo depicting Osama bin Laden dressed like George W. Bush, convey a sense of irony and “pithiness” which is weaved throughout the book, though the overall tone is dead serious.

Tariq Ali is a Pakistani, born to a wealthy family, who grew up during the years following independence from Britain and partition from India. He graduated from university in the UK and has lived most of his adult life there, and has also traveled around the world as leftist thinker and writer and a member of worldwide left-leaning organizations. The fact that he is indeed a dedicated communist becomes more and more evident throughout the course of the book. The very terminology which he uses to describe most of the social and political trends which he explains throughout the book is in fact derived from Marxism.

Tariq Ali is a socialist who detests the shortcomings of Soviet communism yet bemoans the collapse of the socialist alternative model after the demise of the Soviet Union. It is evident that his ideal is a socialism which will bring true justice and prosperity to the world’s people. He is opposed to what he deems US imperialism because of its aggressive efforts to open the world field for capitalistic expansion– which have included wars and peace-time interference in weaker nations’ internal politics. He rejects the supposed benefit of this expansion to the world at large and is unimpressed by the supposed threat of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, so in his view these aggressive efforts are completely unjustified.

Tariq is opposed to the Islamist trend primarily because he sees it as rejecting the rationalist world view which he believes is responsible for modern progress and the key to human prosperity in the future. He devotes a considerable portion of the book to an unorthodox review and analysis of the history of Islam, emphasizing certain times when rationalism was prominent in the thinking of its scholars. The most interesting of the episodes was the ascendancy in the late Abbasid Caliphate of the Muatazilites, who asserted that the Qur’aan was a constructed rather than a revealed text and that rational thought alone dictated submission to God.

The history of Arab nationalism and its collisions with Zionism and Western foreign policy are reviewed, and Tariq also gives a very insightful and personal recounting of political events which have affected his native Pakistan. The purpose of this portion of the book is to demonstrate the destructive effects of both US imperialism and Islamist extremism and build a case against them. One chapter titled “An Ocean of Terror” is dedicated mainly to detailing and denouncing the ongoing (at time of publication) embargo and aerial bombardment of Sadaamist Iraq, its documented catastrophic effect on the Iraqi economy and its theoretically constructed responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.

Tariq sums up his objections to US imperialism in a chapter titled “A Short Course on US Imperialism”, and follows with a short chapter in which he seeks to explain the initial positive reactions in many parts of the world to the September 11 attacks on the US mainland. The final chapter in the book is titled “Letter to a Young Muslim”, directed to a young Islamist-minded activist he recently encountered at a rally, and summing up his objections to Islamism as a world view and a movement and his hopes for the future of Islam and the Muslim world.

Tariq Ali’s book is valuable as a window into the world view of those who detest US foreign policy, and he provides a generally rational and well-researched justification of these views. His review of Islam’s early history is also valuable and includes facts and observations absent from conventional treatments of the topic. The biggest weakness of Tariq’s treatise overall is his general confinement to a Marxist world view and his failure to incorporate bigger concepts into his analysis of trends and events. He provides an eloquent elaboration of what Marx might have to say about it, but to non-Marxists some elements his arguments will be more compelling than others. The most reduced form of his core thesis could be expressed thus: that US foreign policy has generated justifiable resentment around the world and is partly responsible for the violent reaction against it. Taken in this reduced form, it must be conceded that Tariq makes his point.

Matt