SOURCE: Hume, Mick. “Expect Blowback.” New Statesman 131, no. 4587 (13 May 2002): 50-1.

In the following review, Hume compares and contrasts The Clash of Fundamentalisms with Gilles Kepel's Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam.

Like some dreadful progressive rock album of the 1970s, Tariq Ali's new book [The Clash of Fundamentalisms] seems likely to become better known for its cover than its contents. The cover is intended to illustrate what the author calls “the clash of fundamentalisms” by depicting George W Bush as a mullah and Osama Bin Laden as a US president. It succeeds only in illustrating, unintentionally, this messy book's own identity crisis, caught as it is between Ali's original plan for a history of Islam and his post-11 September attempt to tack on a theory of everything.

Declaring that he wants to “explain why much of the world doesn't see the [US] Empire as ‘good’”, Ali outlines how...