Biography
Tariq Ali was born in Lahore where he completed his early education before studying at Oxford University. He is the author of several plays and film scripts as well as nearly 50 books on world history and politics and seven novels, including The Islam Quintet—a series of historical novels about Islam: Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (1992), The Book of Saladin (1998), The Stone Woman (2000), A Sultan in Palermo (2005) and Night of the Golden Butterfly (2010). He is a longstanding editor of New Left Review and has written frequently for magazines and newspapers, including The Guardian and London Review of Books.