Tariq Ali lecture
‘Empire, Religion and Democracy’: A Lecture by Tariq Ali
Wu Centre, Mount Allison University, March 17, 2006 at 7:30 pm
Leadership Mount Allison is pleased to present noted author, historian, and political campaigner Tariq Ali, who will deliver a public lecture on Friday, March 17 at 7:30 p.m. in the Wu Centre, Mount Allison University campus. The lecture is entitled Empire, Religion and Democracy and everyone is welcome.
Tariq Ali was born in Lahore (then in British India) in 1943. He was educated in Pakistan and later at Oxford University. His opposition to the military dictatorship in Pakistan prevented his return to his own country and he became an unwilling exile in Britain. He was a leading figure in Europe during and after 1968.
He has written over a dozen books on history, politics, and biographies, many of which have been translated. These include: Can Pakistan Survive? The Nehrus and the Gandhis: An Indian Dynasty, StreetfightingYears: An Autobiography of the Sixties. In 1990 he began to write fiction, working concurrently on two different sets of novels: the Fall-of-Communism trilogy and the Islam Quintet. The first includes Redemption and Fear of Mirrors. The second consists of Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, an account of the decline of Muslim civilization in Spain which was awarded the Archbishop San Clemente del Instituto Rosalia de Castro Prize for the Best Foreign Language Fiction published in Spain in 1994. It was followed by The Book of Saladin, The Stone Woman, and A Sultan in Palermo. All of his novels have been translated into several languages.
Tariq Ali has also written screenplays as well as plays for stage and television. He collaborated with Derek Jarman in the film Wittgenstein and has recently produced Big Women, a four-part drama series by Fay Weldon for Channel Four Television in Britain. His television company, Bandung Productions, was well established as a producer of quality documentaries and drama till he closed it down in 1998 because British television had become what he described as ‘a brothel.’ His theatrical interventions have usually been in collaboration with Howard Brenton: Iranian Nights (on the Rushdie Affair), Moscow Gold (an epic on Gorbachev and the fall of Communism), Ugly Rumours (a satire of New Labour), Collateral Damage (The Balkan War) and Snogging Ken (another broadside against New Labour). A rare theatrical solo by Ali was Necklaces, a plea against violence in South Africa.
Clash of Fundamentalisms, his first full-length non-fiction book for 14 years, was published in April 2002 and has already been translated into all the major European languages. Arabic, Korean, Malayalam, and Russian editions are currently in preparation. A companion volume, Bush in Babylon: The Re-colonisation of Iraq, was published in 2003. He is a longstanding editor of the New Left Review. For more information please contact Dr. Nauman Farooqi, Director of Leadership Mount Allison, tel: 364 2281 (nfarooqi@mta.ca) or visit the web site www.tariqali.org.
A selection of his books will be for sale at the event.