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Before Margaret Thatcher reintroduced the work ethic, deified Mammon and made a virtue of ordinary decencies, London was a great place to be political and cool. An environment of menacing trade unionism, sexual liberation and post-imperial decay-sustained by a profligate welfare state-made London an agreeable habitat of lost causes. Every fringe, from anti-apartheid activists and Iranian dissidents to Israeli anti-Zionists and Malaysian Maoists, found a tiny corner of England that was forever radical.

THE CLASH OF FUNDAMENT-ALISMS By Tariq Ali Verso Price: Rs 735 Pages: 342

It was a good time to believe in world revolution and all that. US imperialism had been humbled in Vietnam, Maoism was still the flavour of the season in China, Che Guevara's posters stared you in the liberated "squats" of Brixton and Fitzrovia and there was armed struggle in Rhodesia, South Africa and Angola. It was an uncluttered world, a world split between the good and the bad.

Leading the charge against the big bad world were a handful of revolutionary evangelists, each more quirky than the other. There was Gerry Healey, a dimunitive sectarian Trotskyist, half sinister, half comic; there was Tony Cliff, a Jewish exile from Palestine known for scintillating interventions like "If the workers say rubbish, I say rubbish"; and there was Tariq Ali.

Tariq was different. He was the upper-class, Oxford-educated, cosmopolitan blessed with wit and articulation so unlike the pathetic newly arrived immigrant cowering under the assault of white prejudice. He was legendary-he had marched with Daniel Cohen-Bendit in Paris 1968, rubbed shoulders with Isaac Deutscher and invoked the wrath of The Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail. He was at the cutting edge of ideas and taste; a man familiar with both Ernst Laclau and Chateau Latour. He was the personification of London's radical enlightenment.

It wasn't Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and the decimation of communism alone that destroyed this exhilarating counter-culture. By 1979, the opposition to Yankee imperialism was no longer the sole prerogative of one Fidel Castro and another Pol Pot. The man who set Teheran on fire and had the Shah of Iran scurrying into exile was no radical nationalist in the Nasser mould. He was Ayatollah Khomeini and his anti-imperialism stemmed from Islam.

The rise of Islamism made life hideously complicated. It invoked the spectre of a cataclysmic clash of civilisations, polarised the world into those who preferred the mullahs and those who viewed Pax Americana as the least offensive alternative. The Third Way, a tepid social-democratic and technocratic course, was squeezed into the margins. As for the rarefied Marxism preferred by yesterday's flower children, it virtually sank from view, surviving with dilution in angst-ridden media enclaves of the West and East. Radical activism was replaced by World Bank-funded ngos and revolution was subsumed by environmentalism and anti-globalisation.

It is in his capacity as an endangered species that Tariq has re-entered the debate. His study of Islam, Islamism and its hunting ground is calculated to please and displease the polarised world. For those desperately seeking to rescue the world's fastest-growing religion from the clutches of dogmatic certitude, there are glimpses of alternative visions that never made the grade. For those still anxious to legitimise the jehadi suicide bomber as a product of American crassness and iniquity, there are reams of conspiracy theories. Like how the aborted ouster of General Pervez Musharraf had the blessings of the US administration. And for those in need of ammunition to reassure themselves that all is not lost, there is the biting verse of Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, the anti-Zionism of Israeli intellectual Baruch Kimmerling and the unalloyed Marxism of Deutscher.

The book is, however, a compelling read not because it is a profound insight into the clash of fundamentalisms but because Tariq excels in the art of narrative. He tells the story with passion, bias and a great sense of humour. The description of haadiths as "Arabian whispers"; the five-prayers-a-day rule as something "no modern political movement-not even the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks-could have got away with"; the leftists who went ga-ga at the Iranian revolution as "useful idiots"; and Benazir Bhutto's sanction of husband Asif Zardari's corruption as "lust is truly blind" are memorable. He even has the ability to laugh at himself-Trotskyists are described as Wahabis of the Left.

Equally gripping are the anecdotes that pepper the book. Like the time an emissary of Zulfiqar Bhutto wined and dined him in Paris at the Pakistan government's expense to plot Ayub Khan's assassination; the story of Lawrence of Arabia's marriage with Akbar Jehan, later to be Sheikh Abdullah's wife; and the narration of Maharaja Hari Singh's inadequacies.

Ali doesn't answer profound questions like why Islam hasn't witnessed a reformation and why the imperialists are plotting India's Balkanisation. He merely provides a glimpse into the selective indignation of an aesthetic and internationalist Left that, sadly, now belongs to the ages.