Author Archives: Kenan Malik

IS THERE SOMETHING ABOUT ISLAM?

August 12, 2014 by Kenan Malik

I took part on Saturday in a panel discussion at the World Humanist Congress in Oxford on ‘Is there something about Islam?’ which debated whether ‘there is anything distinctive about Islam’ that leads to violence, bigotry and the suppression of freedom. Other panellists were Alom Shaha, Maajid Nawaz and Maryam Namazie. This is a transcript of my introductory comments. Every year I give a lecture to a group of theology students – would-be Anglican priests, as it happens – on […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: buddhism, danish cartoons, islam, islamism, jihadism, naser khader, racism, religion

THE PRICE OF BOOKS, THE VALUE OF CIVILIZATION

August 9, 2014 by Kenan Malik

Toby Mundy is one of Britain’s leading publishers and was, until June, CEO of Atlantic Books. He has a new blog; his first post is a superb essay that takes the current fraught struggle between Amazon and publishers as a starting point for a meditation on the significance of books to human life. I am delighted to repost that essay here. Toby Mundy Amazon knows the price of everything. But does it care about its value? In his recent piece about Amazon on […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: amazon, books, publishing

AS IF STILL BURNING

August 6, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This week marked the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War. Today marks the anniversary of an even more grotesque event – the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Three days later the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. These remain the only use of nuclear weapons in warfare. Some 12 km² of Hiroshima were destroyed, as were around 69% of the city’s buildings. The images above, which were taken […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History, International • Tags: haiku, hiroshima, nuclear warfare, poetry, war poetry, yasuhiko shigemoto

EBOLA AND PANIC

August 4, 2014 by Kenan Malik

Ebola is a vicious disease. And the latest outbreak in West Africa has wreaked a terrible toll. It has also created considerable panic and scaremongering, particularly in the West, about worldwide pandemic. In Britain, the government convened a meeting of COBRA, its emergency response committee, worried about the threat of the virus spreading to the UK. In America, Donald Trump even suggested that US health workers helping contain the spread of the virus in West Africa who contract the disease […]

Categories: Science & Technology • Tags: africa, ebola, panics

BEHIND THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR

August 2, 2014 by Kenan Malik

David Papineau is Professor of Philosophy of Science at King’s College, London. He also publishes More Important Than That, a blog about sport (and about ‘How philosophy can illuminate sport and vice versa’). I am delighted to republish on Pandaemonium his latest post, on the social function of amateur values in sport. My thanks to David for contributing here, and do check out his blog. David Papineau Give Me a Defender of Amateur Values, And I’ll Show You a Hypocrite […]

Categories: Sport • Tags: alf tupper, amateur, Class, cricket

THE DEATH OF GOD AND THE FALL OF MAN

July 30, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of a talk I gave last week to the Academy, a conference organised by the Institute of Ideas. ‘If God does not exist, everything is permitted’. Dostoevsky never actually wrote that line, though so often is it attributed to him that he may as well have. And yet, misattributed it may be, it is nevertheless a sentiment that runs through much of Dostoevsky’s work, including his greatest novel The Brothers Karamazov. And it does so because […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: alasdair macintyre, aristotle, christianity, death of god, elizabeth anscombe, emotivism, enlightenment, greek philosophy, harriet martineau, marx, nietzsche, religion, sam harris, sartre, telos

‘THE EMPTINESS WITHIN AND THE EMPTINESS WITHOUT’

July 27, 2014 by Kenan Malik

When I was first in Orford, it was forbidden to approach ‘the island’, but now there was no longer any obstacle to going there, since, some years before, the Ministry of Defence had abandoned secret research at that site. One of the men sitting idly on the harbour wall offered to take me over for a few pounds and fetch me later after I had had a look around. As we crossed the river in his blue-painted boat, he […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Photos • Tags: orford ness, photos, wg sebald

HOW I’VE COME TO PASS THE CRICKET TEST – BUT NOT TO BE A PATRIOT

July 25, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is my latest column for the New York Times, on ideas of Britishness, belonging and identity. (We had to cut the essay slightly because of the space available; I will publish the full version next month.) How times change. Last week, I was at the Lord’s cricket ground in London — the ‘home of cricket’, as England cricket administrators like to boast — to see England play India. I was born in India. Yet I was cheering on England. […]

Categories: Britain, Race & Immigration, Sport • Tags: britain, british asians, cricket, cricket test, identity politics, national identity, patriotism, racism, sport

MORALITY WITHOUT GOD

July 23, 2014 by Kenan Malik

Bread and Roses is a TV magazine show hosted by Maryam Namazie, Fariborz Pooya and Bahram Soroush and broadcast in Iran in both English and Persian. The latest episode is a discussion of ‘Morality without God’, part of which features a conversation between myself and Maryam (that part of the show begins around 7 minutes in).

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: ethics, religion

SACRED COWS AND A TROJAN HORSE

July 20, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of my essay on the so-called ‘ Trojan Horse’ controversy, first published in the New York Times last month under the headline ‘Education should be beyond belief’. Last year, the council in Birmingham, Britain’s second largest city, received an anonymous document that supposedly advised militant Muslims on how to take over the governing bodies of state schools and impose upon them Islamist values. Since the so-called ‘Trojan Horse’ plot was reported in March, it has […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Britain • Tags: britain, education, faith schools, islam, islamism, religion

THE MONSTER THAT ISRAEL HELPED CREATE

July 17, 2014 by Kenan Malik

There is a terrible irony in Israel’s current assault on Gaza. More than 200 Palestinians have died in an onslaught supposedly aimed at weakening Hamas and degrading its capacity to fire rockets into Israel. It was Israel itself, however, that helped Hamas to power in Gaza. For more than thirty years,from the 1960s to the 1990s, successive Israeli governments viewed radical Islamism as a useful tool with which to counter the influence of the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (of which […]

Categories: International, War on terror • Tags: afghanistan, hamas, israel, muslim brotherhood, palestine, plo, war on terror, western policy

WORLD CUP, MYTH AND SENTIMENT

July 14, 2014 by Kenan Malik

So, another World Cup, another German victory, another England humiliation. And at the end of it all some (not quite) random thoughts about the tournament. . 1 A fine World Cup, some truly great games, but no truly great team – not even Germany, outstanding though they were, and worthy winners though they are. . 2 Part of what made this tournament so riveting was the way it upset so many received wisdoms and footballing myths. Most of the ‘big’ […]

Categories: Sport • Tags: brazil, england, football, germany, sport, world cup

THERE BE MONSTERS

July 11, 2014 by Kenan Malik

The philosopher John Gray, in his review of my book The Quest for a Moral Compass, claimed that I ‘airbrush, Soviet-style’ all ‘repugnant and troubling elements of rationalism’ that I ‘prefer not to know’ about ‘sleazy side of rationalism’, such as racial science or the history of slavery. It is a strange claim given that the thread that runs through virtually all my work has been the paradoxes of modernity, and the contradictions within rationalism and liberalism. Hence two books of […]

Categories: History, Human, Race & Immigration, Science & Technology • Tags: apes, blumenbach, buffon, edward tyson, great chain of being, kenan malik's books, linnaeus, racial science, scientific classification

INVISIBILITY MADE VISIBLE

July 8, 2014 by Kenan Malik

I took part last week in a discussion on BBC World Service’s The Forum on the scientific, philosophical and cultural meanings of ‘invisibility’ with Philip Ball and Susan Blackmore. You can listen to the broadcast (for a year) on the BBC website; it is also downloadable as a podcast. . The image is from Anthony Gormley’s 2007 show ‘Blind Light’ at London’s Hayward Gallery.

Categories: Kenan Malik, Philosophy & Ethics, Science & Technology • Tags: invisibility, philip ball, susan blackmore

IN PRAISE OF YORKSHIRE (WELL, SORT OF)

July 6, 2014 by Kenan Malik

It may be blasphemous for a Lancastrian to say so, but I love the landscape of Yorkshire, of bleak fells and pastoral valleys, of limestone and millstone grit, of viaducts and ruined abbeys. So, on the weekend that the Tour de France winds its way up hill and down Yorkshire dale, a portrait of the Yorkshire fells. The landscapes are mainly around Littondale and Malham, the sheep shearing is near Kettlewell, the viaduct is Ribbleshead, on a sunny day and a […]

Categories: Photos • Tags: yorkshire