Pakistani-born British Trotskyist activist and writer, a leader of the 1968 British movement against the Vietnam War
He joined the International Marxist Group in April 1968, edited The Black Dwarf, and was widely publicised as a leader of the protests against the Vietnam War.
A Pakistani-British activist, writer and filmmaker, born in Lahore in British India to a journalist father and a Communist activist mother. Active as a teenager against Pakistan's military dictatorship, he was sent to England, read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Exeter College, Oxford, and was elected President of the Oxford Union in 1965. A key figure in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, he helped lead the British anti-war movement of 1968; that year he joined the Trotskyist International Marxist Group, serving in its leadership and on the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International, and edited The Black Dwarf and Red Mole. After leaving the IMG in the early 1980s he worked on the editorial committee of New Left Review and wrote political books such as The Clash of Fundamentalisms (2002) and The Extreme Centre (2015) as well as the novels of the Islam Quintet.
Activities and affiliations
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1968–1981
Social movements and organizing
From Lahore to London in 1968
He was born on 21 October 1943 in Lahore, Punjab, in British India. His father, Mazhar Ali Khan, had been organising peasants before joining the Pakistan Times and became sympathetic to communism without joining the party; his mother Tahira, daughter of the Punjab premier Sikandar Hyat Khan, joined the Communist Party and gave it her entire trousseau, family jewels included.
Ali became politically active in his teens against Pakistan's military dictatorship. When an uncle in military intelligence warned that he could not be protected, his parents sent him to England, where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Exeter College, Oxford. He met Malcolm X at the Oxford Union in December 1964 and was elected its president in 1965; from that year undercover officers of Special Branch began watching him, at least fourteen of them over decades, until at least 2003.
He became known during the Vietnam War debating figures such as Henry Kissinger, and testified at the Russell Tribunal on US involvement in Vietnam. In 1967 he was in Camiri, Bolivia, near where Che Guevara was captured, to observe the trial of Régis Debray, and was accused of being a Cuban revolutionary. He played a key role in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, founded with the support of Bertrand Russell, and marched on the American embassy in London in 1968; a VSC demonstration in October 1968 brought an estimated 100,000 people to Trafalgar Square. He has been described as the alleged inspiration for the Rolling Stones' "Street Fighting Man".
The International Marxist Group and The Black Dwarf
He joined the Trotskyist International Marxist Group in April 1968, and the group gained public prominence when the media presented him as a leader of the protests against the Vietnam War. The Black Dwarf, launched that year, was a political and cultural newspaper named after a radical paper of 1817–1824; Ali edited it, with Sheila Rowbotham and Fred Halliday among its editorial group. When the board split between Leninist and non-Leninist currents in 1970, Ali and the other IMG members founded Red Mole in March 1970.
After the IMG became the British section of the Fourth International in May 1969, Ali was recruited to its leadership and became a member of the International Executive Committee of the reunified Fourth International. He befriended John Lennon and Yoko Ono and Stokely Carmichael, and Lennon's "Power to the People" was inspired by an interview he gave Ali. He stood as the IMG candidate in Sheffield Attercliffe at the February 1974 general election and co-wrote the cartoon book Trotsky for Beginners. Around 1980–1981 he left the IMG and turned to the Labour Party to support Tony Benn's bid for the deputy leadership; the sources disagree over whether Labour accepted his membership. His satirical novel Redemption (1990) mocked the Trotskyist movement's inability to cope with the fall of the Eastern bloc.
From The Clash of Fundamentalisms to The Extreme Centre
In The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (2002), written after the September 11 attacks, Ali rejected the pundits' talk of a new world-historical turning point and the White House's choice of standing shoulder-to-shoulder against terrorism or being damned. September 11, he argued, was the return of History in a horrific form, with religious symbols on both sides; its visible violence was a response to the invisible violence inflicted on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Palestine and Chechnya. He saw two fundamentalisms confronting each other, the religious and the imperialist, and sought to explain both the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and new forms of Western colonialism, while holding that many Enlightenment values remain relevant and that portrayals of the American Empire as a new emancipatory project are misguided.
Bush in Babylon (2003) attacked the invasion of Iraq, which he opposed on the national committee of the Stop the War Coalition. At the 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre he signed the Porto Alegre Manifesto, and he supports the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. His 1999 writings against NATO's Balkan intervention drew criticism for minimising the crimes of Serbian forces in Bosnia and Kosovo. The Extreme Centre: A Warning (2015) criticised the "indistinguishable political elite" of the United Kingdom and its devotion to capitalism, analysing the failure of the European Union and NATO, corruption in Westminster and the dominance of the American Empire. He sits on the editorial committee of New Left Review and lives in Camden, north London, with its editor Susan Watkins.