George W Bush - Writer Tariq Ali's Source Of Inspiration  Tariq Ali |
Tariq Ali, the Pakistani-born writer, political activist and filmmaker had considered that he had switched for good from non-fiction to fiction in 1990 after the Berlin Wall fall. But he had switched back again to non-fiction when the United States decided to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.
Ali had published the first three titles in his "Islam Quintet" that depicts the encounter between Islam and western Christendom over the centuries, when 9/11 happened and the US government led by then President George W Bush took the decision to invade both countries.
"George Bush was quite an inspiration to me to start writing non-fiction again," Ali told a news conference at the Semana Negra book festival in Gijon, northern Spain.
"My publishers would ask me, `When are you going to finish the Quintet?` and I would say, `Ask George Bush. Is he going to make a war on a third country?"
After 9/11, Ali penned "The Clash of Fundamentalisms," which belongs to non-fiction work. This details the history prior to the attacks on New York and Washington and explores the political history of Islam as background.
He has also recently written critically of the alliance between the United States and his native Pakistan in "The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power," which complements dozens of political works and polemics authored by Ali since he was a radical student activist in 1960s Britain.
"It isn`t a contradiction to write fiction, non-fiction," he said. "It`s the same person writing this, but in different ways. Different things come out of people as they are writing fiction and different things are important when writing history or biography."
