Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity, Verso, £15.
This is an excellent book. It cuts through the fog, and explans the
real meaning and roots of the socalled 'war against terrorism'. Tariq Ali gives facts and arguments to all wanting to resist Bush and Blair's war-drive and the other disastrous consequences of the neo-liberal project. The books scale, breadth and scope are phenomenal, surveying the main countries in the Middle East and Indian sub-continent, their histories, politics and culture. Its style - full of cutting irony and autobiographical examples - makes it a pleasure to read.
The book's title is a reference to the best-seller, The Clash of Civilisations, by Samuel Huntington, former head of US under-cover terrorist operations Vietnam. Huntington argued that the main division in the world was now one between Western civilisation - with its virtues of democracy, human rights, liberalism etc - and other 'backward' civilisations with radically different value systems
Top of the list of the 'others', against which the West must be ready to intervene to defend its values, was of course Islam. Huntington's book became so popular because it gave a pseudo-intellectual justification to blatantly racist arguments.
Tariq shows there is nothing inherently backward in Islamic civilisation. Like any culture it has developed within a specific economic, social and political context. It undergoes evolution and intermal conflict. ised and financed by the British - a dress rehearsal for the US support of the Taliban 60 years later.
Tariq shows how Imperialism has backed all the most reactionary elements Book review The first major manifestation of Islamic revolution toppled the CIA-sponsored Shah's regime
within the Islamic world as a bulwark against communism and as hired agents to manage its own economic interests. It formed a bloc with the fundamentalists of Islam to defeat those fighting for progresin Iran sive, democratic and social ideas.
The USA is, in fact, the 'mother of all fundamentalisms'. Its only concern is that governments open themselves up to global penetration of the capitalist market. It has used Islam in its own interests and can be expected to do so again.
Taria poses two challenges. In the west, to build opposition to an "imperial fundamentalism determined to discipline the world. In the world of Islam, to fight for a Reformation that will sweep away the 'crazed conservatism and backwardness of the fundamentalists' and 'opens up the world to Islam to new ideas... more advanced than what is currently on offer from the West' (p.312-3). Raw nerve
The book has already touched a raw nerve with liberal' intellectuals, those courtiers of the Bush and Blair regimes who are too busy trying to prove their loyalty to think seriously of world politics.
One of them, a certain James R Holmes, writing in The Library Journal, recommends that libraries should not stock it. He calls it 'a work of truly monumental vacuity.... in short (not) a serious work".
Why? Well at least he's honest. Because the book argues that 'the conflicts now raging... have little to do with terrorism...but (are) yet another in a series of struggles between the dispossessed and their imperial masters'
What more proof of one of the book's arguments that the current balance of world forces has dramatically reduced the space for debate and dissent, and seeks to isolate all those who refuse to bend the knee to the 'Caesar in the White House"?
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