Author Archives: Kenan Malik

COMING SOON…

September 28, 2016 by Kenan Malik

My 2009 book From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and its Legacy will be published in a new edition next February. It will have an extended (12,000 word) Afterword to bring it up to date. It will also have a new subtitle – How the World Changed From The Satanic Verses to Charlie Hebdo. I will provide more details closer to the time. In the meantime, here is an extract from the Preface to the new edition: From the […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Kenan Malik • Tags: assimilationism, charlie hebdo, france, free speech, From Fatwa to Jihad, islamic state, jihadism, kenan malik's books, multiculturalism, rushdie affair, the satanic verses

THIS MOURNFUL GLOOM FOR THAT CELESTIAL LIGHT

September 25, 2016 by Kenan Malik

. …the shattered side Of thund’ring Etna, whose combustible And fueled entrails thence conceiving fire, Sublimed with mineral fury, aid the winds And leave a singèd bottom all involved With stench and smoke… John Milton, Paradise Lost Now let hot Aetna cool in Sicily And be my heart an ever-burning hell! William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus Some say its name derives from aitho, the Greek for ‘I burn’, others that it is a corruption of attuna, the Phoenician word for ‘furnace’. For poets, […]

Categories: Photos • Tags: etna, hell, italy, milton, volcano

AGAINST THE CULTURAL TURN

September 22, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This is the talk I gave on Saturday in a debate on ‘Interculturalism’ at the Lector in Fabula festival in Conversano in Italy. The starting point of this debate is the failure of multiculturalism. It has become fashionable today to criticise multiculturalism. The trouble is, many of the criticisms are as problematic as multiculturalism itself. And I say that as someone who’s been a critic of multiculturalism for more than 20 years, from well before it was fashionable to be […]

Categories: Multiculturalism • Tags: culture, herder, identity politics, immigration, interculturalism, left, multiculturalism, romanticism, universalism

PLUCKED FROM THE WEB

September 18, 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. . A Different Kind of Safe Space Ted Gup, Chronicle of Higher Education, 30 August 2016 In my class, if students say something offensive, even remotely or overtly racist (the ‘overtly’ has yet to occur), then they must take ownership of their words, be prepared to defend them, and be willing […]

Categories: Pandaemonium

WHO IS APPROPRIATING WHAT?

September 14, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Last week the novelist Lionel Shriver gave the keynote address at the Brisbane Writers Festival. It did not go well. She addressed the question of ‘Fiction and identity politics’ (apparently the organizers had originally asked her to talk about ‘community and belonging’, but she had submitted to them a different topic), providing a robust critique of identity politics and of the idea of ‘cultural appropriation’. Beginning with a story about colleges attempting to ban the wearing of sombreros as an […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Free Speech • Tags: cultural appropriation, cultural ownership, free speech, herder, identity politics, immigration, lionel shriver, racism, romanticism

BUSTER, HE SOLD THE HEAT WITH A ROCKSTEADY BEAT

September 11, 2016 by Kenan Malik

So long, sorry we had to go so soon. Since music is the food of love, I’ll forever sing on. Prince Buster, Ghost Dance I grew up with Two Tone – The Specials, Madness, The Selecter, The Beat. And so I grew up with Prince Buster, the singer and producer who inspired all these bands (Madness, originally called Morris and the Minors, renamed themselves in 1978 after a Prince Buster track). His death last week was losing another of the […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: jamaica, music, prince buster, ska, two tone

BETWEEN RAGE AND TERROR

September 7, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of the article I wrote last month for the International New York Times on the nature of comteporary terror. (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 These Days of Rage. On July 14, Bastille Day, in Nice, France, 85 people died after being mowed down on the promenade by a man driving a truck. Four days later, […]

Categories: War on terror • Tags: angela merkel, france, germany, islamism, jihadism, terrorism, war on terror

ON SCOTLAND’S ANSWER TO ROUTE 66 (OR PERHAPS NOT)

September 4, 2016 by Kenan Malik

The North Coast 500. Scotland’s answer to Route 66. Or perhaps not. ‘Get your kicks on NC 500’ does not quite have the ring of Nat King Cole’s original. The North Highland Initiative’s branding of a 500-mile circular route that begins and ends in Inverness as Scotland’s answer to the iconic US highway may make sense in terms of marketing, but not much else. But however one brands the route, what is unquestionable is that this is one of the […]

Categories: Photos • Tags: assynt, dunnet head, forsinard flows, landscape, nc 500, north coast 500, photography, route 66, sandwood bay, scotland

ECHOES FROM THE PAST: DEMOCRACY AND PLATO’S REPUBLIC

August 31, 2016 by Kenan Malik

I am publishing through August on Pandaemonium a series of extracts from my books on the theme of historical fears of the masses and of democracy. The granddaddy of all philosophical arguments against democracy originates in Plato. This is an extract from The Quest for a Moral Compass exploring Plato’s dialogue The Republic, which discusses Plato’s views on the problems of democracy. . Plato’s Republic From The Quest for a Moral Compass, pp25-30 All humans divide naturally, in Plato’s eyes, into […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: democracy, greek philosophy, plato

PLUCKED FROM THE WEB

August 28, 2016 by Kenan Malik

My 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. . The Anti-Democratic Urge Astra Taylor, The New Republic, 18 August 2016 In reality, our political system is far less democratic than it was a generation ago. Over the past 40 years, we’ve seen unions crushed, welfare gutted, higher education defunded, prisons packed to overflowing, voting rights curbed, and the rich […]

Categories: Pandaemonium

ECHOES FROM THE PAST: CREATING THE UNDERCLASS

August 25, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Continuing the series of extracts from my books on the theme of historical fears of the masses and of democracy, this third extract from The Meaning of Race explores the late twentieth century ‘underclass’ debate, and what it tells us about the changing character of the perceptions of race and class. The Meaning of Race was published in 1996 and, to a degree, shows its age. It discusses issues specifically of that time; in the 20 years since, much of […]

Categories: Class, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: charles murray, conservatism, dangerous classes, elitism, liberalism, michael katz, poverty, race, racial science, the bell curve, underclass, working class

GOD-FEARING AND QUITE MAGICAL

August 21, 2016 by Kenan Malik

It may be the most God-fearing place in Britain. So strongly Presbytarian is the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides that it is said to be to be the last place in Britain where the fourth commandment – Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy – is observed in letter as in spirit. It is not just that virtually every shop and cafe and museum and sports hall and workplace closes its door. It is also that barely […]

Categories: Photos • Tags: isle of lewis, photography, scotland

ECHOES FROM THE PAST: THE RACIAL VIEW OF CLASS

August 18, 2016 by Kenan Malik

I am publishing through August on Pandaemonium a series of extracts from my books on the theme of historical fears of the masses and of democracy. This second extract (the first is here), from The Meaning of Race, is not about democracy as such but about how the Victorian elite saw class in racial terms (I have not included full references here, but they are in the book). When I wrote The Meaning of Race, I wanted to challenge conventional ways […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: harriet beecher stowe, henry mayhew, kenan malik's books, liberalism, race, racial science, slavery, working class

ECHOES FROM THE PAST: FEAR OF THE MASSES

August 14, 2016 by Kenan Malik

A system in which ‘confidence tricksters, rich men, quacks may be given power by the votes of an electorate composed in great part of mental Peter Pans, whose childishness renders them peculiarly susceptible to the blandishments of demagogues and the tirelessly repeated suggestions of the rich men’s papers’. That could have been any number of contemporary commentators, from Richard Dawkins to Andrew Sullivan, expressing their fears about democracy after the Brexit vote in Britain or the rise of Donald Trump […]

Categories: Britain, History, Politics • Tags: aldous huxley, beatrice webb, crowd psychology, democracy, elitism, emile zola, fabians, freud, gustav lebon, liberalism, racial science, vilfred pareto, working class

THESE DAYS OF RAGE

August 10, 2016 by Kenan Malik

An excerpt from my latest column for the International New York Times, on the nature of contemporary terrorism. In the past, the distinction between political violence and sociopathic rage was relatively clear. No longer. There seems today almost a continuum between ideological violence, disjointed fury and some degree of sociopathy or mental illness. What constitutes ideological violence has decayed; instead, amorphous rage has become a persistent feature of public life. Read the full article in the International New York Times. […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, War on terror • Tags: islamism, jihadism, terrorism