Author Archives: Kenan Malik

IN TRISTRAM HUNT’S FUTURE FIEFDOM

January 15, 2017 by Kenan Malik

Tristram Hunt, historian and MP for Stoke on Trent, this week resigned his parliamentary seat to take up a new post as Director of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The V&A is one of the most infuriating museums in London – a stunning collection, some superb exhibitions, but too often imbued with a desire seemingly to be more indulgent than inspiring or insightful. If I was unkind I might suggest that that is a good description also of […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Photos • Tags: india, islamic art, mughal india, museums, photos, renaissance, tristram hunt, victoria and albert museum

FAKE NEWS AND WORSE SOLUTIONS

January 11, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of the article I wrote last month for the International New York Times on fake news. (I cannot publish my INYT articles on Pandaemonium until a month after it is published in the newspaper.) It was originally published under the headline ‘All the Fake News That Was Fit to Print’. In 1920, the Dearborn Independent, a newspaper owned by the industrialist Henry Ford, published a series of articles about a global Jewish conspiracy based on […]

Categories: Politics • Tags: donald trump, facebook, fake news, fbi, hillsborough disaster, iraq war, j edgar hoover, journalism, martin luther king, post-truth, protocols of the elders of zion, social media, zinoviev letter

PLUCKED FROM THE WEB #11

January 8, 2017 by Kenan Malik

My latest collection, and the first for 2017, of recent essays and stories from around the web that have caught my eye and are worth plucking out to be re-read. . What the alt-right is really about Angela Nagle, Irish Times, 6 January 2017 Spencer is in the strict dictionary definition of the term, a racist. He claims “race is something between a breed and an actual species” and believes non-white Americans should leave in a ‘peaceful ethnic cleansing’. He […]

Categories: Pandaemonium

A CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY OR OF LIBERALISM?

January 4, 2017 by Kenan Malik

I reworked my essay ‘From the End of History to 2016’ for Sunday’s Observer, developing the theme of the tension between liberalism and democracy, and of the distinction between the ‘politics of solidarity’ and of the ‘politics of identity’. It was published in the Observer under the headline ‘Liberalism is suffering but democracy is doing just fine’, and was slightly edited down from this original version. Welcome to 2017. It will be just like 2016. Only more so. This will be […]

Categories: Politics • Tags: brexit, democracy, donald trump, far right, front national, geert wilders, identity politics, left, liberalism, marine le pen, populism, solidarity, working class

A YEAR OF PANDAEMONIUM

January 1, 2017 by Kenan Malik

Happy New Year! It has been a tumultuous year, and the discussions on Pandaemonium have reflected that tumult, trying to get to grips with issues from Brexit to cultural appropriation, from anti-Semitism to the migrant crisis. Here are some of the highlights of a year of Pandaemonium in 2016. And best wishes to all for 2017. . Populism, Brexit and Trump It is the issue that has dominated much of the political debate this year. In my end of year […]

Categories: Pandaemonium • Tags: pandaemonium

FROM THE END OF HISTORY TO 2016

December 29, 2016 by Kenan Malik

© Art Projects International; Courtesy of artist and Art Projects International, New York . ‘What we may be witnessing is the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’ So wrote Francis Fukuyama in his seminal 1989 essay ‘The End of History?’. ‘With the fall of the Soviet Union’, Fukuyama continued, ‘The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide […]

Categories: Politics • Tags: 2016, end of history, francis fukuyama, identity politics, left, managerialism, populism, working class

BOOKS TO ARGUE WITH, BOOKS TO WONDER AT

December 22, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Some books are there to enjoy. Some to wonder at. And some to argue with. So, a handful of books from next year that are already on my wish list, some simply to curl up and read, and some definitely to argue with. But the book I’m most looking forward to in 2017 is not in the list… The new edition of From Fatwa to Jihad, with a new subtitle (‘How the World Changed from The Satanic Verses to Charlie […]

Categories: Culture & Books

THE PROBLEM IS MORE THAN INTEGRATION

December 18, 2016 by Kenan Malik

A shorter version of this article was published in Al Jazeera English. ‘Drawing on what we have seen and heard during the review, we suggest integration is the extent to which people from all backgrounds can get on.’ So suggests the Casey Review, the latest British government study of the problems of immigration and integration. Last year civil servant Louise Casey was asked by the then prime minister David Cameron ‘to consider what could be done to boost opportunity and integration in […]

Categories: Britain, Multiculturalism, Race & Immigration • Tags: british politics, casey report, casey review, immigration, integration, islam, multiculturalism, muslims, social cohesion, working class

PLUCKED FROM THE WEB #10

December 15, 2016 by Kenan Malik

My latest collection of recent essays and stories from around the web that have caught my eye and are worth plucking out to be re-read. . Stop calling everything ‘fake news’ Will Oremus, Slate, 6 December 2016 As the term has entered the national discourse, it has turned out to be a handy cudgel for people who want to criticize the media for a wide range of failings. First, some in the liberal and mainstream media began to carelessly blur […]

Categories: Pandaemonium

LISTENING TO DYLAN IN THE AGE OF TRUMP

December 11, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked. Perhaps my favourite of all Dylan lines. Though another from the same song, It’s alright Ma, (I’m only bleeding), runs it close: And if my thought dreams could be seen they’d probably put my head in a guillotine And both seem as relevant today as they were when Bob Dylan first penned them in 1965. In fact, so many of Dylan’s songs seem as insightful about today’s […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: bob dylan, donald trump, music

ALL THE NEWS THAT WAS FIT TO PRINT

December 6, 2016 by Kenan Malik

An excerpt from my latest column for the International New York Times on the panic about fake news: In the past, governments, mainstream institutions and newspapers manipulated news and information. Today, anyone with a Facebook account can do it. Instead of the carefully organized fake news of old, there is now an anarchic outflow of lies. What has changed is not that news is faked, but that the old gatekeepers of news have lost their power. Just as elite institutions […]

Categories: Free Speech, History, Politics • Tags: fake news, free press, news, post-truth

A PROFOUNDLY POETIC ANOMALY

December 4, 2016 by Kenan Malik

What is modernism? And what is modernist art? The images here look strikingly like 20th century modernism – Malevich, Miro, Kandinsky, Klee, El Lissitzky, or more recent artists such as Agnes Martin. In fact they come from seventeenth century Rajasthan, in India, and were created within the Hindu Tantric tradition. The images draw upon key symbols of Tantric cosmogony, such as the bindu, a dot symbolizing the undifferentiated absolute, to the negative space of the shunya, the absolute void of […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: abstract art, art, franck andre jamme, india, indian art, modernism, tantric art

BEFORE FACEBOOK WAS THE COFFEE HOUSE

December 1, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Today it’s Facebook. 350 years ago it was the coffee house. In the late seventeenth century, as Markman Ellis tells in his book on the cultural history of the coffee house, there was panic in British royal circles that these newly-established drinking salons had become forums for political dissent, rebellious attitudes and the spreading of untruths. In June 1672, Charles II issued a proclamation ‘to restrain the Spreading of False News, and Licentious Talking of Matters of State and Government.’ […]

Categories: Free Speech, History • Tags: censorship, facebook, fake news, free press, free speech

PLUCKED FROM THE WEB #9

November 27, 2016 by Kenan Malik

My latest collection of recent essays and stories from around the web that have caught my eye and are worth plucking out to be re-read. Since so much of the discussion over the past month has been dominated by that electoral victory, I have divided the collection into two: articles that are about issues related to Donald Trump and his Presidential success and the ones that are Trump-free. . Trumpish 2016 was the apathy election Carl Beijer, 12 November The […]

Categories: Pandaemonium

EDITORIAL INTELLIGENCE COMMENT AWARD 2016

November 24, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Yay, I won an award. The Editorial Intelligence 2016 ‘Society and diversity’ comment award. (No, I am not quite sure, either, what ‘Society and diversity comment’ amounts to, but I am immensely pleased to have won it.) The Editorial Intelligence awards have grown over the past decade to become perhaps the most important journalistic comment awards in the UK. Other winners this year included Jonathan Freedland as ‘Commentariat of the Year’, Gary Younge for ‘Comment Piece of the Year’, Sam […]

Categories: Kenan Malik • Tags: assimilationism, awards, editorial intelligence, evil, identity politics, immigration, islam, islamism, jihadism, multiculturalism, ukip