Author Archives: Kenan Malik

DOWN UNDER, AND TWICE OVER

June 29, 2017 by Kenan Malik

I will be giving a series of talks in Australia later this year – not once, but on two different trips, first in August, and then in October. In August, I am speaking at the Byron Writers Festival, before giving two talks in Sydney, and then at the Bendigo Writers Festival, In October I will be speaking at Integrity 20 in Brisbane. The details: . Byron Bay 4-6 August Byron Writers Festival Byron Bay New South Wales I am speaking […]

Categories: Kenan Malik • Tags: australia, talks

PLUCKED FROM THE WEB #20

June 25, 2017 by Kenan Malik

A bumper-edition of my regular collection of recent essays and stories from around the web worth plucking out to be re-read. . Getting in and out Zadie Smith, Harper’s, July 2017 We have been warned not to get under one another’s skin, to keep our distance. But Jordan Peele’s horror-fantasy – in which we are inside one another’s skin and intimately involved in one another’s suffering – is neither a horror nor a fantasy. It is a fact of our experience. […]

Categories: Pandaemonium

FOR COMMON VALUES, AGAINST PATRIOTISM

June 21, 2017 by Kenan Malik

The British think tank Demos published this week as a special issue of its journal a collection of essays on British identity called ‘Renewal Britannia’. This is my contribution to the collection, entitled ‘Proud to be British?‘ It was August 2012. I was sitting in the Olympic stadium in London with my daughter. She had red, white and blue braids in her hair and was enthusiastically waving a Union Jack. I thought about when I was her age. Then, I […]

Categories: Britain, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: britishness, edmund burke, identity politics, national identity, patriotism, racism

THE LUMINOUS ART OF KHADIJA SAYE

June 18, 2017 by Kenan Malik

The terrible fire that engulfed Grenfell Tower in West London last week, and may have taken up to a hundred lives, may prove to be a turning point in British politics. The raw anger that it has exposed of the voiceless having their voices denied; the deafness of so many politicians to that fury, including the unwillingness over many years to listen to the Grenfell Action Group, the tenants association that has long been warning of such a tragedy; the […]

Categories: Britain, Culture & Books, Philosophy & Ethics, Politics • Tags: austerity, british politics, grenfell tower, khadija saye, photography, working class

IN DEFENCE OF CULTURAL APPROPRIATION

June 15, 2017 by Kenan Malik

An excerpt from my latest column for the New York Times, on the debate about ‘cultural appropriation’: The accusation of cultural appropriation is a secular version of the charge of blasphemy. It is the insistence that certain beliefs and images are so important to particular cultures that they may not appropriated by others. This is most clearly seen in the debate about Ms Schutz’s painting, Open Casket. . In 1955, Emmett Till’s mother urged the publication of photographs of her son’s […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Justice & Liberties • Tags: anti-racism, blasphemy, cultural appropriation, dana schutz, emmett till, racism

THE MAKING OF THE MUSLIM WORLD

June 12, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is a review of Christopher de Bellaigue’s The Islamic Enlightenment: The Modern Struggle Between Faith and Reason (Bodley Head), Cemil Aydin’s The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Harvard University Press) and Tariq Ramadan’s Islam: The Essentials (Pelican). It was published in the New Statesman, 9 June 2017. ‘The Turkish nation,’ Mehmed Ziya Gokalp wrote, ‘belongs to the Ural-Altai [language] group of peoples, to the Islamic umma, and to Western internationalism.’ Gokalp was an early-20th-century sociologist, […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Culture & Books • Tags: enlightenment, europe, imperialism, islam, islamic enlightenment, islamism, modernity, tariq ramadan, west

POST-ELECTION, NEW QUESTIONS

June 9, 2017 by Kenan Malik

Some quick, initial thoughts on the result of the UK general election, more raising questions than providing answers. . 1 It is in keeping with the lack of self-awareness and political nous that characterized Theresa May’s election campaign that she has insisted on staying on as party leader and Prime Minister, apparently to provide ‘certainty’, ‘stability’ and ‘legitimacy’. It is difficult to imagine, after the humiliation heaped upon her by the electorate, that she could seriously believe that she possesses […]

Categories: Britain, Politics • Tags: british politics, conservatives, election, european union, jeremy corbyn, labour party, theresa may, ukip

ON THOSE ‘DIFFICULT CONVERSATIONS’

June 5, 2017 by Kenan Malik

In her speech outside No 10 Downing Street on Sunday morning in response to the London Bridge attack the night before, Theresa May insisted that ‘enough is enough’. ‘We cannot’, she said, ‘pretend that things can continue as they are.’ There is ‘far too much tolerance of extremism in our country’. Rooting out extremism ‘will require some difficult, and often embarrassing, conversations’. It was a speech long on rhetoric, but short on sense. It is May herself, first as Home […]

Categories: Britain, War on terror • Tags: british politics, free speech, islamism, jihadism, saudi arabia, terrorism, theresa may, war on terror

PLUCKED FROM THE WEB #19

June 1, 2017 by Kenan Malik

The latest (somewhat random) collection of recent essays and stories from around the web that have caught my eye and are worth plucking out to be re-read. . How can we be? Time Crane, Times Literary Supplement, 24 May 2017 We need another starting point. Rather than ask the question, ‘one substance or two?’ we should ask ourselves what we actually know about our psychological or mental lives, and what we know about how they are related to our bodies. […]

Categories: Pandaemonium

FROM LEFT RADICALISM TO RADICAL ISLAMISM

May 28, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This essay was published in the Observer, 28 May 2017, under the headline ‘How did the left radicalism of my Manchester youth give way to Islamism?’ Were I 20 today, would I be attracted to Islamism or desire to become a soldier of Islamic State? It seems shocking, even insulting, especially to those who lost their lives in the Manchester Arena on Monday night, just to ask that question. It seems more shocking still not simply to give a resounding ‘No’ as an answer, […]

Categories: Britain, Justice & Liberties, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: asian youth movement, britain, british asians, british politics, france, grunwick, islamism, jihadism, left, muslims, working class

MANCHESTER AND THE JIHADI STATE OF MIND

May 24, 2017 by Kenan Malik

An excerpt from my latest column for the International New York Times, on the Manchester bomb attack: We need to think more deeply, too, about our immediate responses to acts of terror. Terrorism is a form of theater. Particularly for contemporary Islamist terror, what matters is the spectacle, nothing else. The more depraved that spectacle, the more it achieves its aim. . Murder someone on a Manchester street and it makes the local press. Slaughter two dozen people at a […]

Categories: Britain, War on terror • Tags: dylann roof, islamism, jihadism, manchester, media, terrorism

RIGGED LABOUR MARKET, SKEWED PUBLIC DEBATE

May 21, 2017 by Kenan Malik

In 2014, Keith Bollinger, a textile worker in North Carolina, did what many of us have done at some time in our lives – he moved job when he found better-paid employment in another factory. At which point TSG Finishing, the company whose employment he left, sued him. A three-year court battle ended with Bollinger without either job, and with his savings completely wiped out. Why? Because, he had, without realizing it, signed a ‘non compete’ agreement, designed to prevent […]

Categories: Justice & Liberties, Politics • Tags: capitalism, usa, working class

A WORLD WITH TOO LITTLE EMPATHY – OR TOO MUCH?

May 18, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This review of Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion was published in the Summer 2017 issue of New Humanist. The biggest problem we have in our society and in the world right now,’ Barack Obama suggested before he became US President, ‘is an empathy deficit.’ It is a view that has become almost unquestioned, indeed almost unquestionable. ‘Behind every progressive policy,’ the American academic George Lakoff suggests, ‘is a single moral value: empathy.’ For the psychologist Simon Baron […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: alan kurdi, charity, effective altruism, emapthy, morality, paul bloom, peter singer, reason

PLUCKED FROM THE WEB #18

May 14, 2017 by Kenan Malik

The latest (somewhat random) collection of recent essays and stories from around the web that have caught my eye and are worth plucking out to be re-read. . Academe’s poisonous call out culture Suzanna Danute Walters, Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 May 2017 As a feminist journal editor, I am not only shocked by the policing move of the signatories and their weak, vague, and easily refutable argument. I am astonished by the immediate and hyperbolic apology by the associate […]

Categories: Pandaemonium

THE CHALLENGE OF THE JIHADI STATE OF MIND

May 11, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of a talk I gave at the Kreisky Forum in Vienna on 11 May 2017. It pulls together many of the themes from previous talks and essays. Last week a 20-year-old Briton called Damon Smith was found guilty of planting a homemade bomb filled with ball bearings on a London Underground train. Police discovered in his flat shredded pages of an article titled ‘Make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom’ from Inspire, a magazine published by an al-Qaida affiliate. […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, War on terror • Tags: assimilationism, france, identity politics, islam, islamic state, islamism, jihadism, multiculturalism, racism, radicalization, terrorism