Author Archives: Kenan Malik

RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE, BUDDHISM AND ISLAM

May 20, 2014 by Kenan Malik

My latest column in the International New York Times. There is perhaps no religion that Western liberals find more appealing than Buddhism. Politicians fawn over the Dalai Lama, celebrities seek out Buddhist meditation, and scientists and philosophers insist that Buddhism has much to teach us about human nature and psychology. Even some of the so-called New Atheists have fallen for Buddhism’s allure. For most of its Western sympathizers, Buddhism is a deeply humanist outlook, less a religion than a philosophy, […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, International, Justice & Liberties • Tags: buddhism, islam, myanmar, religion, religious violence, rohingya

EUROPE’S NEW FAULTLINE

May 18, 2014 by Kenan Malik

The Front National is expected to win next week’s European election in France; UKIP may well do so in Britain. Both parties combine a visceral hostility to immigration with an acerbic loathing of the EU, a virulent nationalism and deeply conservative views on social issues such as gay marriage and women’s rights. The problems that such parties pose for mainstream politics goes, however, far beyond the odiousness of their policies. What their success expresses is the redrawing of the political […]

Categories: Britain, International, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: britain, british politics, european union, france, front national, identity politics, immigration, matthew goodwin, racism, robert ford, ukip, working

THE FORGOTTEN ROOTS OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR

May 15, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This essay is published in the summer issue of New Humanist. The nations of the world, claimed Lord Salisbury in a speech to the Primrose League at the Albert Hall in 1898, were divided into the ‘living’ and the ‘dying’. The ‘living’ were the ‘white’ nations – the European powers, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The ‘dying’ comprised the rest of the world. ‘The living nations’, Salisbury claimed, ‘will gradually encroach on the territory of the dying’ and from […]

Categories: Britain, History • Tags: britain, first world war, germany, imperialism, opium wars, racial science, racism

WITHOUT A MORAL SAFETY NET

May 12, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is the text of a talk about my book The Quest for a Moral Compass that I gave at the Glasgow Aye Write festival last month. You can buy the book from my Pandaemonium bookshop. For other talks that I am giving see the Events page. What can the history of morality tell us about the nature of morality? And about ourselves as human beings? Those are the questions at the heart of my book. And those are the questions […]

Categories: History of moral thought, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: alasdair macintyre, christianity, ethics, euthyphro dilemma, greek philosophy, greek tragedy, history of moral thought, holocaust, human agency, human nature, modernity, religion, sam harris, viktor frankl

JIMMY’S BLUES

May 10, 2014 by Kenan Malik

James Baldwin was one of America’s finest essayists. Perhaps the finest. He was a wonderful novelist, too. As a poet, though, he is far less known. Yet, as Nikky Finney writes in the introduction to Jimmy’s Blues, a new collection of Baldwin’s poems, he felt close to this particular way of saying. Poetry helped thread his ideas from the essays, to the novels, to the love letters, to the book reviews, stitching images and feeling into music, back to his […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: james baldwin, poetry

THE SCIENTIFIC INSTRUMENT AND ITS SOUL

May 7, 2014 by Kenan Malik

The science writer Philip Ball recently published a post on his blog Homunculus in which he wondered why modern scientific instruments seem to lack the beauty and soul of those of centuries past. Stephen Curry, professor of structural biology at Imperial College, wrote in response, on Occam’s Corner, the Guardian-hosted science blog, a wonderful little essay, in which he questioned some of Philip’s assumptions but made also a case for scientists to have more than an instrumental relationship to their instruments. Philip […]

Categories: Science & Technology • Tags: craft, museo galileo, philip ball, scientific instruments, stephen curry

LONDON IN DARKNESS AND LIGHT

May 4, 2014 by Kenan Malik

The London skyline at dusk. The first three are taken from Shooters Hill in southeast London, the last four from Primrose Hill in north London. For full-size versions see Light Infusion, 500px and Flickr.

Categories: Photos • Tags: london

OUT NOW!

May 1, 2014 by Kenan Malik

. My book The Quest for a Moral Compass is published today! Here is the opening section to the book, and an extract that discusses the meaning of morality in the modern world. You can buy The Quest for a Moral Compass from most bookshops, from Amazon or via my Pandaemonium bookstore. The US version of the book comes out in September. . ‘An absolute tour de force. I can imagine it replacing Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy on many a bookshelf […]

Categories: History of moral thought, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: history of moral thought, kenan malik's books

THE UNRAVELLING OF MORALITY

April 29, 2014 by Kenan Malik

My book The Quest for a Moral Compass is published this week. There has already been an early review in the Tablet from the former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who compared the book to Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy: This is intellectual history in the grand manner, in the tradition of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, written with the same clarity, accessibility and narrative verve as the master himself. As the subtitle, “a global history of ethics”, makes clear, […]

Categories: History of moral thought, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: alasdair macintyre, aquinas, aristotle, emotivism, enlightenment, ethics, history of moral thought, human agency, human nature, liberalism, marxism, modernity, moral autonomy, teleology, virtue ethics

ON A DESERT ISLAND (OR TWO) WITHOUT A BLUE NOTE

April 27, 2014 by Kenan Malik

Last month, on the 75th anniversary of the founding of Blue Note, I whittled down the Blue Note catalogue to just eight albums that I would take to a desert island. Blue Note is the most iconic of jazz labels; yet, as I wrote last month, ‘if I were to compile a list of my favourite jazz recordings, not that many would probably be from Blue Note.’ So here are the non-Blue Note jazz albums to take to a desert […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: jazz, music

ON THE ROAD

April 25, 2014 by Kenan Malik

I am giving a number of talks over the next couple of months, both about my new book The Quest for a Moral Compass and on other issues from freedom of expression to the Enlightenment. Do come along if you are able. . 3 May Belfast Free as a Bird? Belfast Exposed The Exchange Place 23 Donegall Street Belfast BT1 2FF 15.30-17.00 A discussion about artistic freedom of expression with Johnanna Schwartz, John Johnson, Sinead O’Donnell and myself. There will also […]

Categories: Kenan Malik • Tags: broadcasts, talks

A BROTHERHOOD INQUIRY IN BAD FAITH

April 22, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is my latest column for the International New York Times is on David Cameron’s inquiry into the Muslim Brotherhood. The full version I will publish on Pandaemonium next month. Imagine that an elected president is ousted by the military. That the president’s party is declared a ‘terrorist’ organization. That dozens of protesters are shot in the streets, thousands of people imprisoned and hundreds sentenced to death. How should a liberal democracy respond? Presumably, by condemning the coup, denouncing the violence […]

Categories: Britain, International • Tags: arab spring, britain, democracy, egypt, islamism, muslim brotherhood, saudi arabia, war on terror, western policy

I AM THE BEGGAR OF THE WORLD

April 20, 2014 by Kenan Malik

Two years ago, the publication of a volume of Taliban poetry caused considerable outrage. Colonel Richard Kemp, a former British commander in Afghanistan, denounced The Poetry of the Taliban as ‘self-justifying propaganda’ giving ‘oxygen of publicity to an extremist group which is the enemy of this country.’ A new volume of Afghan poetry has just been published with far less fanfare. I Am a Beggar of the World is both more significant as a poetry collection, and more revealing of Afghan […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Women • Tags: afghanistan, poetry, women's rights

POLICING BY CRISIS

April 18, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of my Internation New York Times column on the crisis in British policing, published last month under the title ‘Britain’s Bobbies in the Dock’. I also wrote a subsequent post on the framing of Winston Silcott. In March, Britain’s Home Secretary, Theresa May, announced a public inquiry into claims that the Metropolitan Police had spied on a black family even as the force was supposed to be investigating the racist killing of the family’s eldest […]

Categories: Britain, Justice & Liberties • Tags: britain, irish struggle, lord denning, miscarriage of justice, police, police racism, racism, stephen lawrence, winston silcott

CAST OUT BEYOND THE EMBRACE OF THE LAW

April 15, 2014 by Kenan Malik

In January, the British Home Secretary, Theresa May, introduced a last-minute measure to the government’s Immigration Bill that would enable her to remove the citizenship of any terror suspects whose conduct is ‘seriously prejudicial to the interests of the UK’, even if to do so made them stateless. It is, May insisted, a necessary measure in the war on terror. An article in the New York Times last week highlighted the way that even without the new law, Britain already […]

Categories: Britain, Justice & Liberties, Politics • Tags: britain, citizenship, immigration, totalitarianism, war on terror