The
Pakistani intellectual and activist Tariq Ali gave two lectures at the Oriental
Hall at the American University in Cairo (AUC) last week. The first lecture was
entitled "Literature and Market Realism" and the second was
"Empires and Resistance". In both lectures Ali was like a firebrand
brightly shining. He satirically attacked the American Hegemony, analyzed the
current situation, and defined and criticized the potential threats according to
the American administrative and what he described as "State Department
Intellectuals". Ali focused on the resistance in Iraq, describing it as
very sophisticated.
Tariq
Ali was born in Lahore in 1943 and rose to prominence with the student movement
of the 1960s. After graduating from Oxford University he headed the Vietnam
solidarity campaign. He is on the board of the" New Left Review". In
the 1980s he regularly produced programs for channel 4 in the UK through his
independent production company "Bandung".
He
has written over a dozen books on world history and politics and five novels
like "The Stone Woman”, “The Book of Saladin”, “Fear
of Mirrors” and “Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree”.
His
most famous books are "Bush in Babylon” and “The Clash of
Fundamentalisms”.
Here,
you can listen to Ali's lecture entitled "Empires and Resistance" [1]
[2]
* Fairoz Mustafa, is a journalist based in Cairo, Egypt.
