Tariq Ali Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

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Background

Tariq, welcome to Berkeley.

Very nice to be here.

Welcome back, I should say. Where were you born and raised?

I was born in Lahore, long years ago in 1943, when it was still part of British India. When I was four years old, it became part of a new country, Pakistan, which very few of us imagined at that point would ever come to existence.

In looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world?

My parents both came from a very old, crusty, feudal family. My father had broken with the dominant ideology in politics of that family when he was a student, and had become a nationalist, a communist, fighting against the British Empire in India. My mother, too, belonged to the same family, and they met up; my mother became radicalized. My mother's father, curiously enough, was Prime Minister of the Punjab. Even though my father was from the same family -- even, if you like, from a superior branch -- my grandfather said that his daughter would never be allowed to marry a communist. And so there were massive row going on in the family. This young couple was in love. Finally, my grandfather thought he would impose a condition on the marriage which would be completely unacceptable to my father. He said, "In order to marry my daughter, you have to join the army" (this was the British-Indian Army), imagining that my father never could; and he never would have. But then something else happened, which is that the Soviet Union was invaded by Hitler. Once the Soviet Union was invaded, all the communists all over the world decided to back the war effort. So the wedding photograph of my parents is my father looking very jaunty in a lieutenant's uniform.

So political opportunity made possible the marriage, in your father's willingness to join the army. Tell us a little about your education, first in Pakistan and then here.

The choices were limited in those days, when I was growing up. One choice was to go to a very elite school, where the children of the aristocracy and the rich went. All my uncles had been there, but my parents said, "It's a school which wrecks lives. You're not going there." So the other choice was a school run by Irish-Catholic missionaries. There was a whole network of these schools, which were far more democratic in the sense that lots of kids from different social classes went there. And that's where I was educated. So one got a flavor of Catholicism and a Catholic education, but living inside a Muslim country.

You wrote in The Clash of Fundamentalisms, "How often in our house had I heard talk of superstitious idiots, often relatives, who hated a Satan they never knew and worshipped a God they didn't have the brains to doubt?" Tell us a little about that. I know that your father, as a matter of form, permitted you to have some religious instruction, but you saw through it -- and he saw through it, I gather.

Yes, well, one was growing up in a Muslim country. You lived in an Islamic culture. All the noises of the Muslim city were present. So there were no problems on that front. But there were many of us growing up -- it wasn't just me -- who were not believers. My father at one point got worried -- he didn't really get worried, [but] aunts and uncles used to be heard whispering to [my parents] when they thought [the other parent] wasn't listening: "At least give these children a chance! Don't wreck their lives like you've wrecked your own!"

So my father, who was a very fair-minded man, said, "I think you should at least know the fundamentals of the religion so you know what you're arguing against when the time comes," and attempts were made to do this. But often I found that the people engaged to educate me were not that knowledgeable themselves. Even as a child, one could see through the hypocrisy, actually. Many of them were discussing the Koran when they didn't understand it themselves, or what it was trying to say. This was very common in non-Arabic parts of the Muslim world.

So the attempts failed, and there we are: I grew up an atheist. I make no secret of it. It was acceptable. In fact, when I think back, none of my friends were believers. None of them were religious; maybe a few were believers. But very few were religious in temperament.

How do you account for the cosmopolitanism that was so much a part of your life? It became, at some point, a way for you to think? I want to know how that interfaced with Pakistani nationalism and whether you felt a strong identification with Pakistan.

We grew up in a town in Lahore, which had been one of the most cosmopolitan towns in India. Then you had the partition of India, and you had massive killings. This is not much talked about these days, but nearly two million people died, as Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs slaughtered each other to create this state. So I remember when I was growing up, I would be sitting in the back of the car, and my parents were driving, and there was a sadness of it in the early days, a sort of semi-permanent sadness as we passed a certain street. They'd say, "Oh, God, remember 'X' used to live here." And "X" was always a Sikh or a Hindu name. These were the ghosts who were in that city as I was growing up. So when you realized what had happened, how much killing had gone on, you did ask yourself, "Was it worth it?"

And then you had another problem, which was that the Pakistani ruling elite was an elite with so many chips on its shoulders that I call it one of the few elites with a permanent inferiority complex. It never succeeded in developing a Pakistani nationalism, so that when Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt in 1956, Pakistan, more or less, supported that. They were allied to the West, and were seen as a bridgehead of, first, the British Empire, and later the United States in that region. So Pakistan could never actually develop. And because it didn't develop, we had no respect for them at all.

So there was a sense of alienation towards this state and its functioning, which in me was very strong from a very early age. I remember we used to say we wished our Prime Minister had been Nehru of India, because he believed in neutrality, trying to carve out a new politics, much more interesting ... or Nasser, in Egypt. We were constantly looking at other parts of the world for leadership, never in our own land.

So Pakistan had no a real nationalism, and that had to do with Pakistan's relations with the world.

Yes. It had to do with the fact that Pakistan, very early on, three years into its creation, decided that it was going to join the U.S. and British-sponsored security pacts, the first of which was the Baghdad Pact, which later became the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization. It put itself in this part of this world strategically. Whereas India, a much larger country, had the self-confidence to talk to Russia and America as equals. Nehru was a very distinguished politician, respected by both the White House and the Kremlin. We said, "Why can't we have leaders like that? Why do they have to hang on to the coattails of the West?" But that is the path they chose, and they stuck by it. The Pakistani army, still in power today, was a central conduit for the exercise of this power.

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