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This seminar engages with the life and works of Tariq Ali, the British-Pakistani intellectual, journalist, novelist, filmmaker and political activist. Focusing on the relationship of religion, multiculturalism and secularism, and thus on some of the most urgent, and also most contested issues of our time, we will read, watch and discuss excerpts from Ali’s critical output, including Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (2002), Conversations with Edward Said (2005) and the recent documentary When Tariq Ali Met Malcolm X (2019). We will also read and analyse Ali’s novel Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (1992), which is set in 15th-century Spain in the time of the reconquista of the Muslim Kingdom of Granada. It is the first novel in Tariq Ali’s “Islam Quintet“, his critically acclaimed series of historical novels addressing the long history of Islam across the centuries and in different cultural and geographical settings, from Moorish Spain to twentieth-century metropolitan settings in Lahore, London, Paris and Beijing.
Texts:
- Tariq Ali, Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (any pbk edition will do)
- A selection of further texts and videos, including critical texts by and interviews with Tariq Ali, will be made available via a Moodle course.
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