TARIQ ALI was born in Lahore (then British India) in 1943. He was educated in Pakistan and later at Oxford. His opposition to the military dictatorship in Pakistan prevented his return to his native country and forced him to become an unwilling exile in Britain. A leading figure of the European Left during the 60s and 70s, Ali debated Henry Kissinger and others in one of the first TV debates organized by CBS. He edited two seminal radical magazines of the period - The Black Dwarf and The Red Mole, which combined politics and culture and whose contributors included John Lennon and Mick Jagger. Tariq Ali has written over a dozen books on history and politics, including Can Pakistan Survive?, The Nehrus and the Ghandhis: An Indian Dynasty, and Streetfighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties. In 1990 he began to write fiction, working concurrently on two different sets of novels: The Fall-of-Communism Trilogy and the Islam Quintet.

Tariq Ali has also been active as a writer for stage, screen, and television. He collaborated with Derek Jarman on the film Wittgenstein and recently produced Big Women, a television series written by Fay Weldon for Channel Four in Britain.

His non-fiction work Clash of Fundamentalisms, critical of Bush and Bin Laden and hailed by Howard Zinn as “lucid, eloquent, literary and painfully honest,” was pub- lished by Verso in 2002 and has been translated into over a dozen languages. He is a longstanding editor of New Left Review and writes regularly for The Guardian and The London Review of Books.

MAHMOOD MAMDANI is from Kampala, Uganda. He received a PhD from Harvard University. He is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government in the Departments of Anthro- pology, Political Science and International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, where he was also Director of the Institute of African Studies from 1999 to 2004. He has taught at the University of Dar-es-Salaam (1973-79), Makerere University (1980-93), and University of Cape Town (1996-99) and was the founding director of Centre for Basic Research in Kampala, Uganda (1987-96). Mahmood Mamdani is the author of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Origins of Terror (Pantheon, 2004), When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, 2001), and Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, 1996), which won the prestigious Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association of the USA (1998), and several other books.  He is currently working a comparative study of state formation in settler societies. Mahmood Mamdani was President of CODESRIA (Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa) from 1999 to 2002. In 2001, he was invited to present one of nine papers at the Nobel Peace Prize Centennial Symposium in Oslo. In 2004, he presented one of nine papers at the African Union-organized Global Meeting of Intellectuals from Africa and the African Diaspora in Dakar.