![]() ![]() Very direct and lots of hair," he told me. "Sort of a cross between Marx and Ocalan. The night before this lunch appointment I had asked a British friend of Pakistani origin what to expect. ![]() Tariq Ali was born in Lahore in 1944, "when the city was still part of British India and before it became that new country called Pakistan." He was picking at his fish over lunch in London tall, he was stooping over the plate. ![]() It was a personal experience that immediately struck a chord: many people from the Arab world have faced the same interrogations as they dared to travel to Western airports. No surprise, then, that despite the fact I came across his work years ago I only thought of making contact with him after reading an article in The Independent last October in which he recounted how he had been "profiled" in a German airport. And it is within the framework of this rediscovery that the time is ripe to take stock of Tariq Ali. Along with everything else, 11 September and its aftermath reminded many people in the Arab and Islamic worlds of the existence, within the West, of anti-war, anti-globalisation and other progressive activists and writers, people who might be looked to for solidarity and the espousing of a common cause. ![]()
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