Noted Critic of U.S. Foreign Policy and the War in Iraq
to Speak at Mount Holyoke

South Hadley, MA---Tariq Ali, author of Bush in Babylon & The Clash of Fundamentalisms will speak at Mount Holyoke College as part of a 12-city U.S. tour. He will speak Thursday, October 16 at 7:30 in Gamble Auditorium at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. The event is free, open to the public, and fully accessible.

Ali is a writer and filmmaker, long-time political activist and campaigner, and an influential---and controversial---commentator on the current situation in the Middle East and South Asia. He has written over a dozen books on world history and politics, including the bestseller The Clash of Fundamentalisms, five novels, and scripts for both stage and screen. The first novel in the Islam Quintet, Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, was awarded the Archbishop San Clemente del Instituto Rosalia de Castro Prize for Best Foreign Language Fiction published in Spain in 1994 and, Ali's novel The Book of Saladin, has been translated into several languages.

In November, Ali will publish Bush in Babylon: Recolonizing Iraq. According to Ali's publisher, Verso, the forthcoming book is "a devastating critique of America’s military occupation of Iraq, by one of the leaders of the global antiwar movement, Tariq Ali. Eschewing the liberal option of hand-wringing and the fashionable lurch to the right by some former leftists, Bush in Babylon will stand apart from the morass of sycophantic books now being presented as serious analysis by mainstream publishers."

"Detailing the longstanding imperial ambitions of key figures in the Bush administration and how war profiteers close to Bush are cashing in," a Verso press release continues, "Bush in Babylon is unique in moving beyond the corporate looting by the US military government to offer the reader an expert and in-depth analysis of the extent of resistance to the US occupation in Iraq. The sum is a characteristically revealing blend of politics, history, and culture proposing that the US war on Iraq marks a historical shift in imperial occupation and resistance that will mark the whole of the twenty-first century."