Author Archives: Kenan Malik

VIEWPOINT DIVERSITY AGAINST FREE SPEECH

April 23, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on viewpoint diversity, academic objectivity and free speech, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 20 April 2025, under the headline “Trump’s political bullying of Harvard will do nothing to foster diversity of thought”. Few people want to live in an echo chamber. Many have no problem being friends with those who vote differently to the way they do. And many would probably agree with John Stuart Mill that “he who knows only his own side of the case, […]

Categories: Academia, Free Speech, International • Tags: academic objectivity, affirmative action, anti-woke, donald trump, eric kaufmann, free speech, harvard university, heterodox academy, identity politics, jonathan haidt, michael roth, richard redding, richard shweder

MONOCHROME VIEWS OF, AND BY, MUSLIMS

April 16, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on British Muslims, identity politics, sectarianism and bigotry, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 13 April 2025, under the headline “The identity politics of many Muslims, and critics of Islam, are deeply corrosive”. A poll suggests that most British Muslims identify more with their faith than with their nation. The head of the Saudi-backed Muslim World League counsels British Muslims to talk less about Gaza and more about domestic issues. Labour MP Tahir Ali is criticised for […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Britain, Politics • Tags: biradari system, blasphemy laws, british muslims, clan system, integration, islam, jewish identity, labour party, machine politics, multiculturalism, muslims, parekh report, sectarianism, tahir ali

THE WHITE WORKING CLASS BEYOND THE MYTHS

April 9, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the realities of the white working class, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 6 April 2025, under the headline “The white working class is nothing like what politicians think – or claim – it is”. “Many of those who act as the champions of the white person against immigrants”, Labour MP David Winnick told the House of Commons in 1968, “have not in the past gone out of their way to defend the interests of the white […]

Categories: Britain, Class, Culture & Books • Tags: david winnick, joel budd, underdogs, white working class

FEAR AND SOCIAL ORDER

April 2, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on fear as a means of enforcing social order, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 30 March 2025, under the headline “Just like McCarthy, Trump spreads fear everywhere before picking off his targets”. “Gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that goes into the finding and getting of it.” It’s a line spoken by Walter Huston in the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a story about greed and moral corruption directed […]

Categories: Free Speech, International, Justice & Liberties, Politics • Tags: age of fear, columbia university, deportations, donald trump, fear, free speech, jd vance, joseph mccarthy, mass deportations, mccarthyism, michael roth, social conflict, thought control

ALL THE WORLD A STAGE TO DECOLONISE

March 26, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the debate over decolonising Shakespeare, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 23 March 2025, under the headline “Why decolonise Shakespeare when all the world’s a stage for his ideas on injustice?” “My quarrel with the English language,” James Baldwin wrote in his essay Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare, had been “that the language reflected none of my experience.” And so “I condemned him as one of the authors and architects of my oppression”. Then, he “began […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Justice & Liberties • Tags: akira kurosawa, belarus free theatre, decolonisation, decolonising shakespeare, enlightenment, eurocentric, frantz fanon, helen hopkins, james baldwin, ralph ellison, shakespeare, shakespeare birthplace trust, sulayman al-bassam, universalism, vishal bhardwaj, web dubois

THE MISSING CLASS

March 19, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on how class is a missing category in discussions of the justice system, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 16 March 2025, under the headline “Amid all the noise about the UK’s ‘two-tier’ justice system, there is silence on class”. As so often in such debates, the controversy over new guidelines for courts from the Sentencing Council for England and Wales has obscured as much as it has illuminated. Critics have condemned them as presaging a “two-tier” justice […]

Categories: Britain, Class • Tags: disparities in sentencing outcomes, inequality, justice system, lammy report, poverty, pre-sentence reports, racial disparities, robert jenrick, sentencing council, sentencing guidelines, shabana mahmood, two-tier justice

STATEMENT ON THE DOUGLAS MURRAY DEFAMATION CASE

March 14, 2025 by Kenan Malik

In the wake of the Douglas Murray defamation case against the Observer this week, which focused on a column I had written last August, there have been a large number of claims that I lied or sought to deliberately deceive. This short statement is to clarify what happened and to put the case in context. I accept I was wrong. But I did not deliberately lie or seek to deceive. The column of 11 August 2024, entitled “The roots of […]

Categories: Justice & Liberties, Kenan Malik • Tags: defamation, douglas murray

A VISION OF A SHARED LAND

March 12, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the significance of the Palestinian-Israeli film No Other Land, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 9 March 2025, under the headline “Ignore the row: Oscar-winning No Other Land offers a vision of a shared Palestine forged in solidarity”. In 2009, Tony Blair visited Masafer Yatta, a collection of hamlets in the Palestinian West Bank. He had come to see a school that had gained attention for having been rebuilt in defiance of Israeli attempts to tear […]

Categories: Culture & Books, International, Justice & Liberties • Tags: antisemitism, basel adra, berlin film festival, firing zone 918, hamdan ballal, israel, masafer yatta, no other land, oscars, palestine, rachel szor, tony blair, yuval abraham

JOHN MILTON AND THE EXPERIENCE OF DEFEAT

March 5, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the lessons of Milton for the politics of today, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 2 March 2025, under the headline “For a stagnating left mired in pessimism, Milton’s radical vision is poetry in motion”. “Is this pessimism?”, TJ Clark asks in his 2012 essay For a Left with No Future. “Well, yes.” How else, he wonders, “are we meant to understand the arrival of real ruin in the order of global finance… and the almost complete […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History, Politics • Tags: christopher hill, john milton, leszek kolakowski, ozymandias, pessimism, radical universalism, shelley, tj clark

BROWN HINDUS AND WHITE ENGLISH

February 26, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on Englishness, race and ethnicity, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 23 February 2025, under the headline “Can a brown Hindu be English? Most Britons say yes. Why do so many on the right say no?” “They think they’re English because they’re born here. That means if a dog’s born in a stable it’s a horse.” That was a staple of the comedian Bernard Manning’s routine back in the 1970s. Enoch Powell had, a decade earlier, expressed […]

Categories: Britain, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: alain de benoist, arthur balfour, bernard manning, english ethnicity, english identity, englishness, enoch powell, ethnic group, ethnicity, fraser nelson, jewishness, julian huxley, konstantin kisin, nationality, race, racism, rishi sunak, unesco statement on race, white english, whiteness

BLASPHEMY, RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR

February 19, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on Salman Rushdie and blasphemy, both religious and secular, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 16 February 2025, under the headline “When it’s illegal to cause distress to believers, call it for what it is: a secular version of blasphemy”. “Whatever the attack was about, it wasn’t about The Satanic Verses.” So insists Salman Rushdie in Knife, his “Meditations After an Attempted Murder”, written after he almost lost his life in a ferocious assault in Chautauqua, a small town in […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Culture & Books, Free Speech • Tags: blasphemy, bookburning, burning poppies, emile durkheim, hadi matar, knife, lord scarman, martin frost, matthew hale, qur'an, sacred, salaman rushdie, syed shahabuddin, the satanic verses

SOVEREIGNTY AND HYPOCRISY

February 12, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the hypocrisy over issues of sovereignty from Gaza to the Chagos Islands, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 9 February 2025 under the headline “Global leaders have a selective view of sovereignty. It matters, as long as it’s in their interests”. Sovereignty matters. Except when it doesn’t. And it doesn’t when another people’s sovereignty gets in the way of your nation’s needs. Then sovereignty (for any other country or people, at least) becomes so much […]

Categories: Britain, International, Justice & Liberties • Tags: benjamin netanyahu, british empire, british politics, chagos islands, diego garcia, donald trump, ethnic cleansing, itamar ben-gvir, jewish state, mauritius, national interests, national sovereignty, palestine, palestinian nationhood, rashid khalidi, sovereignty

DEEPSEEK AND THE NOT-SO-SPUTNIK MOMENT

February 5, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on what really worries Silicon Valley about DeepSeek, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 2 February 2025, under the headline “DeepSeek has ripped away AI’s veil of mystique. That’s the real reason the tech bros fear it”. No, it was not a “Sputnik moment”. The launch last month of DeepSeek R1, the Chinese generative AI or chatbot, created mayhem in the tech world, with stocks plummeting and much chatter about the US losing its supremacy in AI […]

Categories: Science & Technology • Tags: agi, ai, ai hallucinations, ai hype, artificial general intelligence, artificial intelligence, china, deepseek, elon musk, gary marcus, geoff hinton, sam altman, sputnik, sputnik moment

THE DEGENERATION OF A DEGENERATE IDEOLOGY

January 29, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the changing character of terrorism, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 26 January 2025, under the headline “Until we tackle the nihilistic rage behind terrorism, it will stay the menace of our age”. “Britain faces a new threat”, Keir Starmer claimed last week after Axel Rudakubana pleaded guilty to the murders of three young girls in a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport; terror not just from “highly organised groups with clear political intent” but also “acts […]

Categories: Britain, War on terror • Tags: axel rudakubana, damon smith, islamism, jack merritt, jihadism, khalid masood, low-tech terrorism, manchester arena bombing, rik coolsaet, salman abedi, saskia jones, southport killings, state failure, terrorism, usman khan, zakaria bulhan

THE END OF AN ORDER THAT NEVER WAS

January 22, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the past and future of liberal international order, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 19 January 2025, under the headline “Despite the eulogies, the postwar order did little for peace – and fuelled the rise of populism”. The historian Steven Shapin opened his account of The Scientific Revolution with the line: “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” It is tempting to say much the same about the “liberal international […]

Categories: International, Politics • Tags: america, anthony blinken, donald trump, end of globalisation, end of history, end of neoliberalism, francis fukuyama, globalisation, john lewis gaddis, liberal international order, lio, military intervention project, neoliberalism, populism, postwar order, quinn slobodian, stven shapin, us military interventions, us wars, usa