Author Archives: Kenan Malik

COMING SOON (WELL, NEXT YEAR…)

February 26, 2016 by Kenan Malik

It is seven years since From Fatwa to Jihad was first published. The themes at the heart of the book – Islam, multiculturalism, free speech – are even more relevant now than they were in 2009. And in those seven years much has happened – from the emergence of IS to the ‘no platform’ debates, from the Charlie Hebdo killings to the migration crisis – that has pushed the debate on. So, next year there will be a new edition […]

Categories: Kenan Malik • Tags: free speech, islam, kenan malik's books, multiculturalism, racism, rushdie affair

LESSONS IN NOT TALKING TO ONESELF

February 22, 2016 by Kenan Malik

An excerpt from my latest column for the International New York Times on what attitudes to identity and free speech among Sri Lankan audiences can teach those in the West. It was published under the headline ‘A Sri Lankan Lesson in Free Speech’. The festival provided a space for engagement with a wide variety of ideas in a way that does not often happen in a place like Jaffna. It opened with a discussion of Tamil literature, which has a […]

Categories: Free Speech, International • Tags: free speech, identity politics, sri lanka

WHY THE LAHORE LITERARY FESTIVAL?

February 18, 2016 by Kenan Malik

The Lahore Literary Festival opens on Friday. Or perhaps it doesn’t. There has been over the past twenty four hours considerable confusion as to whether the authorities will allow it to go ahead, or for how long. Local papers have been reporting that the Lahore District Coordination Officer had apparently revoked permission for the Festival to be staged. Other reports suggest that it will be a two-day not a three day event. The Festival organizers have tweeted that it may indeed […]

Categories: Free Speech, International • Tags: free speech, freedom struggles, lahore literary festival, pakistan

FROM THE ARCHIVES: MY FIRST ARTICLE FOR THE INDEPENDENT

February 14, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This week the Independent announced that it would cease its print edition next month and will be appear purely in digital form. Dozens of redundancies are expected. The Independent was born in an era of great transformation, political, social, and technological. It came to life just as the postwar order was unraveling; three years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and at a time when the old ideological politics were being unpicked, and the meaning of ‘right’ and ‘left’ […]

Categories: International, Race & Immigration • Tags: britain, germany, immigration, migration crisis, nazism, racism, refugees

‘I KNEW I WAS WITNESSING A TERRIBLE EVIL’

February 11, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Today marks 50 years since the South African apartheid government declared District Six, in the heart of Cape Town, a ‘whites only’ area from which all non-whites would be forcibly removed. District Six was one of the most mixed areas in Cape Town, home to freed slaves and immigrants, labourers and artisans. It was a rundown area, overcrowded, many houses without running water or sewage. But District Six was also Cape Town’s cosmopolitan heart, an area in which blacks and […]

Categories: International, Justice & Liberties • Tags: apartheid, cape town, district six, noor ebrahim, racism, south africa

THE BUDDHAS OF DAMBULLA

February 7, 2016 by Kenan Malik

It is not often that I enter a room and gasp out loud ‘Wow’. But entering the caves of Dambulla, with with their magnificent statues of the Buddha, and their stunning frescos, was definitely one occasion. The second cave in particular, is one of the most spectacular, yet moving, works of art I have seen. The cave temples, near the town of Dambulla in central Sri Lanka, date back to the first century BCE. King Valagamba (also known as Vattagamini Abhaya) […]

Categories: Photos • Tags: buddhism, dambulla, photography, sri lanka

FREE SPEECH AND DOUBLE STANDARDS

February 4, 2016 by Kenan Malik

The Canadian journalist Duncan Pike interviewed me recently for an article he was writing for the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression on the question of free speech and double standards. It centred around the upcoming trial of Anjem Choudary for ‘inviting support’ for the Islamic State. The article is a very good exploration of the problems and dilemmas of free speech double standards. My thanks to Duncan Pike both for interviewing me and for allowing me to republish his article on Pandaemonium. […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: anjem choudary, charlie hebdo, douglas murray, free speech, free speech double standards, islamism, liberal hypocrisy, terrorism

DEMOCRACY, MORALITY AND THE MIGRANT CRISIS

February 1, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This essay was published in the Observer (in a slightly shorter version) under the headline ‘Europe’s immigration bind: how to act morally while heeding the will of its people’. Europe faces a migrant crisis, but not the one we imagine. The dilemma it faces is this: on the one hand, any moral and workable immigration policy will not, at least for the moment, possess a democratic mandate; on the other, any policy that has popular support is likely to be […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics, Race & Immigration • Tags: angela merkel, europe, european union, fortress europe, germany, immigration, migration, morality, refugees, schengen, spain

IN THE HAUNTING LIGHT OF JAFFNA

January 29, 2016 by Kenan Malik

The ghosts of war still haunt Jaffna. It is almost seven years since Sri Lanka’s brutal 30-year civil war was brought to a particularly brutal and bloody conclusion. Somewhere between 40,000 and 70,000 people are estimated to have been killed in the last months of the conflict, as the Sri Lankan army penned the remnants of the LTTE (the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), the Tamil insurgent army, together with tens of thousands of civilians into a tiny pocket of […]

Categories: International, Philosophy & Ethics, Photos • Tags: jafffna, photography, sri lanka, sri lankan civil war, tamils

ON THE QUEST FOR A MORAL COMPASS

January 25, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This is the text of my talk at the Galle Literary Festival Last week. What can the history of morality tell us about the nature of morality? And about ourselves as human beings? These are the questions at the heart of what I want to explore today. For some, the questions themselves might seem absurd. There is a widespread perception of morality as occupying a sphere of its own. We imagine that morality can, and should, be understood in its […]

Categories: History of moral thought, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: anti-imperialism, chinese philosophy, christianity, enlightenment, ethics, europe, greek philosophy, history of moral thought, human agency, human nature, imperialism, modernity, monotheism, nietzsche, plato, radical enlightenment, thrasymachus, viktor frankl

TALKING OF FREE SPEECH…

January 21, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Last year I gave a talk at the Oslo Freedom Forum on free speech and self-censorship. I also gave an interview to Google Ideas. It has now been published as part of a series of Google Ideas interviews from the Oslo Freedom Forum called Censored. Here is the original speech I gave, followed by the Google Ideas interview. . .

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: censorship, free speech, google ideas, islam, liberties, oslo freedom forum, racism, self-censorship

BIGOTRY, DEBATE, CENSORSHIP AND THE LEFT

January 17, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of my last column for the International New York Times on Maryam Namazie, Donald Trump and censorship, originally published on 21 December 2015. Donald J Trump and Maryam Namazie are divided by more than the width of the Atlantic. One is a reactionary, with bigoted ideas seemingly about everyone from Mexicans to Muslims. He is also currently a leading candidate to be the next president of the United States. The other is an Iranian feminist, […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: censorship, donald trump, free speech, islamism, islamophobia, left, maryam namazie, populism, racism

RECOLONIZED BY THE PAST

January 13, 2016 by Kenan Malik

My latest column for Al Jazeera English is about the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ in Oxford. It began as a campaign at the University of Cape Town to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes that stood on the campus. For the protestors, the statue represented everything that Rhodes himself stood for: racism, colonialism, plunder, white supremacy, and the oppression of black people. Last April, a month after the protests began, the university authorities removed the statue. By then, the protests had moved […]

Categories: Britain, Justice & Liberties • Tags: anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, cecil rhodes, imperialism, racism

TALKING SRI LANKA

January 10, 2016 by Kenan Malik

I am giving a number of talks in Sri Lanka over next couple of weeks, mainly at the Galle Literary Festival, and largely about my book, The Quest for a Moral Compass: . 16 January, Galle Literary Festival I will be talking about the history of moral thought. From the programme: Kenan Malik explores the history of moral thought as it has developed over three millennia, from Homer’s Greece to Mao’s China, from ancient India to modern America. He tells […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics

CHARLIE HEBDO, ONE YEAR ON

January 7, 2016 by Kenan Malik

It is a year today since Islamist gunmen burst into the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people, including eight of the magazine’s staff. A few days after the attack I was interviewed by the BBC. ‘Don’t you think’, the interviewer asked, ‘ that the degree of solidarity expressed towards Charlie Hebdo represents a turning in attitudes to free speech?’ ‘I doubt it’, I replied. ‘There may be expressions of solidarity now. But fundamentally little will change. If anything, […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: censorship, charlie hebdo, france, free speech, garry trudeau, hate speech, islam, islamism, laicite, left, racism, secularism