“There are always two histories” may be a well-known saying, but how many of us actually take the time to look at an issue from both sides, to learn both stories? In each of the first three books of a planned quartet, English historian, screenwriter and activist Tariq Ali saves us the work involved in such an endeavor. Taking as his subject matter the intersection of Islamic and Western history, Ali presents three familiar episodes—the Reconquista, the Crusades and the final years of the Ottoman Empire—in a distinctly unfamiliar fashion: from the viewpoint of the Muslims.
Written over the last six years, the first three books of Ali’s “Islam quartet” provide not only great reading, but an extremely useful corrective …
‘Rereading: Works and Days by Hesiod’, by Tariq Ali for the Guardian, October 7 2011
I was in my mid-teens when someone gave me a copy of Pears Encyclopaedia of Myth and Legends as a birthday present. It sat on my shelves for many months before I looked at it. When I did, I couldn’t stop reading it. I became an obsessive. It was much more interesting than the boring old monotheistic religions with the single deity in the sky and his enforcers below. The Greek gods and goddesses, and their Egyptian and Indian equivalents (of which I knew very little at the time), were exciting characters, full of foibles and emotions far more closely associated with humans: love, sex, anger, jealousy. The main difference was that the gods were immortal. And yet even in ancient times there were sceptics who denied …