Author Archives: Kenan Malik

TO SCULPT MEANING FROM AN ANCIENT ROCK

November 20, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Standing stones have a strange, evocative power, perhaps because they offer a tangible, material connection to peoples like us, yet so different from us; peoples whose thoughts and actions we can appreciate, and yet which also leave us baffled; constructions that express the extraordinary lengths to which humans will go to find meaning in the cosmos, and yet meanings that we cannot comprehend. When non-believers visit Chartres Cathedral or the Blue Mosque or St Petersburg’s Grand Choral Synagogue or the […]

Categories: Photos • Tags: calanais, lewis, standing stones

JYLLANDS-POSTEN AND THE AYATOLLAH WITHIN

November 17, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Flemming Rose is the former culture editor of Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten who, in 2005, published the Muhammed cartoons and launched a global controversy. In a new book, De Besatte (The Possessed), Rose claims that far from defending freedom of expression, Jyllands-Posten attempted to gag him and to prevent him from saying or writing anything controversial. The Danish paper Information interviewed me about the case. This is a (rough) translation of the article. ‘Jyllands-Posten viste sin indre ayatollah’ Hans Henrik Rasmussen, […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: censorship, danish cartoons, denmark, diversity, flemming rose, free speech, geert wilders, index on censorship, jytte klausen, rushdie affair, self-censorship, the satanic verses

THE FAULTLINES OF THE IMAGINATION

November 14, 2016 by Kenan Malik

‘I hope you’re surviving in these dark times. I don’t seem to understand the world any more. I don’t seem to understand its rationality. I feel all I can do is hunker down.’ So emailed a friend a few days ago. I can understand why she feels that way. After all, America now has as President-elect a truth-shredding, conspiracy-mongering authoritarian demagogue who has promised mass deportations, a wall to keep out Mexicans, a ban on all Muslim immigration, and a […]

Categories: International, Politics • Tags: barack obama, donald trump, elite, hillary clinton, immigration, left, liberalism, racism, us elections, usa, working class

HOW AMERICA GOT TRUMPED

November 10, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Even before Donald Trump’s extraordinary victory in the US Presidential election, two narratives had already been established about his political rise. His supporters saw it as an insurgent movement of the little people against the elite. Liberal opponents viewed it rather as the revolt of what Hilary Clinton infamously dubbed ‘the deplorables’: the rage of racists and bigots fuelled by hate. Neither narrative is true. But both possess a pinch of truth. The predominant view of the difference between Trump and Clinton supporters […]

Categories: International, Politics • Tags: african americans, barack obama, democratic party, donald trump, elite, hillary clinton, identity politics, left, racism, us elections, usa, working class

PLUCKED FROM THE WEB #8

November 6, 2016 by Kenan Malik

The latest (and 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 the education gap is tearing politics apart David Runciman, Guardian, 5 October 2016 The contest between the educated and the less educated is different. Many of the safeguards that have been put in place to bypass popular politics – above all, the authority that now resides in central banks – […]

Categories: Pandaemonium

THAT PROUD HISTORY OF WELCOMING REFUGEES

November 3, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Every time there is a debate about Western attitudes to refugees, many point to the West’s proud history of helping refugees, especially Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. In fact Western European nations and the USA were anything but welcoming to fleeing Jews. Britain even set up internment camps in Canada to detain German Jews as ‘enemy aliens’, often together with Nazis. Far from today’s failure to welcome refugees being a betrayal of that proud history, it is […]

Categories: History, Race & Immigration • Tags: anti-semitism, evian conference, franklin d roosevelt, jewish refugees, jews, nazis, refugees

SICILIAN BAROQUE

October 30, 2016 by Kenan Malik

In 1693 Sicily was devastated by a great earthquake. The cities of the south-east – Ragusa, Modica, Noto among them – were destroyed completely. In the wake of the disaster came an extraordinary period of reconstruction. Not for the poor, of course, who continued to live in primitive hovels at the edge of cities. But for the nobility, and for the Church, rebuilding the cities became an occasion for the flaunting of wealth. The result was a series of dazzling […]

Categories: Photos • Tags: architecture, baroque, modica, noto, photography, ragusa, sicily

‘I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK’

October 27, 2016 by Kenan Malik

‘I don’t recognize my country’. ‘I want my country back’. These have for many years been the sentiments of those opposed to immigration into Britain. Immigrants, so the critics claim, have taken over ‘our’ country, turning cities into mini-Kingstons or little Lahores, creating, in the words of David Goodhart, former director of the centre-left think tank Demos, ‘an England that is increasingly full of mysterious and unfamiliar worlds’. Or, as the Oxford University demographer David Coleman, a vocal opponent of mass migration, put […]

Categories: Britain, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: brexit, david runciman, eu referendum, european union, immigration, populism, racism, working class

IN DEFENCE OF FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

October 24, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This is an extended version of the talk I gave at a debate on freedom of movement at the Battle of Ideas conference in London on Saturday. The default position, in discussions such as this, is that immigration controls are the norm and that those advocating free movement have to justify what is seen as an outlandish position. I want to turn this claim on its head. In any public space, humans have, or should have, the right to move as they […]

Categories: Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: democracy, european union, freedom of movement, immigration, immigration controls, open borders, refugees, sovereignty

ON THE GRAMMAR SCHOOLS DEBATE

October 20, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of the article I wrote last month for the International New York Times on the grammar schools debate in Britain. (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 ‘Why Britain Fails in Class’. Few people could have predicted the first policy on which Britain’s new prime minister would take a stand. It is none of the issues that have […]

Categories: Britain, Politics • Tags: britain, british politics, conservatives, education, equality, grammar schools, inequality, left, social mobility, theresa may, ukip, working class

PLUCKED FROM THE WEB #7

October 16, 2016 by Kenan Malik

The latest monthly (and 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. . What are we allowed to say? David Bromwich, London Review of Books, 22 September 2016 Two contradictory thoughts now dominate the Anglo-American approach to feelings in the context of public debate. For the speaker, feelings must be restrained – a neutral style of rational euphemism is recommended. On the other […]

Categories: Pandaemonium

TALKING SATANIC VERSES

October 13, 2016 by Kenan Malik

The copyediting of the Afterword for the new edition of From Fatwa to Jihad is complete. It’s inching towards publication… In the meantime I am reposting here two videos about the original edition that I made for Faculti, a website that publishes videos of authors and academics talking about their work. The first film is a reading from the final section of From Fatwa to Jihad, the second an exploration of the themes and arguments of the book.

Categories: Culture & Books, Kenan Malik • Tags: censorship, free speech, islam, islamism, left, multiculturalism, rushdie affair, salman rushdie, the satanic verses

A CATHEDRAL OF MANY CULTURES

October 9, 2016 by Kenan Malik

In the recent wonderful British Museum exhibition on the historical cultures of Sicily, the curators described 12th century Norman rule as a ‘Golden Age’ , an ‘Enlightened Kingdom’ in which the ‘coexistence of Western, Islamic and Byzantine cultures created what was probably the most progressive court in Europe.’ From the perspective of the time, the relationship between different peoples in Norman Sicily, as in Moorish Iberia, was remarkably tolerant. There was, of course, nothing equal in the relationship between different peoples; […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Photos • Tags: architecture, byzantine, christianity, indigenous culture, islam, monreale, religious art, sicily

THE BATTLE OF CABLE STREET

October 5, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Eighty years ago this week, anti-fascists in East London confronted Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts as they tried to march though what was then a largely Jewish area. Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was notorious for using marches and rallies as cover for vicious attacks on Jews. The confrontation has gone down in folklore as ‘The Battle of Cable Street’. Many myths have grown around the confrontation, including about the role of the Communist Party, which has often claimed for itself the […]

Categories: Britain, History, Justice & Liberties • Tags: anti-fascism, battle of cable street, communist party, fascism, joe jacobs, oswal mosley

WHY BRITAIN FAILS IN CLASS

October 1, 2016 by Kenan Malik

An excerpt from my latest column for the International New York Times on the grammar schools debate in Britain: The fact that neither selective nor nonselective school systems have improved social mobility in Britain might suggest that the problem lies in the very idea of using schools to engineer a more equal society. A decent education system can help a few individuals progress beyond the circumstances of their birth, but it is unlikely to change fundamentally the social and economic […]

Categories: Britain • Tags: british politics, Class, education, grammar schools, social mobility