Author Archives: Kenan Malik

FROM STREETFIGHTERS TO BOOKBURNERS

March 30, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Earlier this week I published an extract from my book From Fatwa to Jihad, that told the story of how the Asian Youth Movements were created in Britain in the 1970s. This second extract explains how the British state and religious conservatives joined forces to marginalise secular radicals in the name of multiculturalism. This is the story of how Bradford came to be painted green. The same story could be told about towns all over Britain. In the summer of […]

Categories: Britain, Multiculturalism • Tags: asian youth movement, black identity, bradford, britain, british asians, From Fatwa to Jihad, identity politics, kenan malik's books, multiculturalism, racism, secularism

HERE TO STAY, HERE TO FIGHT

March 28, 2012 by Kenan Malik

BBC Radio 4 broadcast a documentary this week by Zaiba Malik on the history of the Asian Youth Movements. For many of us who grew up in 1970s and 1980s, the AYMs were a central feature of our lives. Radical and secular, the movements challenged both the vicious racism that defined Britain in that era and many traditional values too, helping to establish an alternative leadership in Asian communities that confronted the conservatives on issues such as the role of […]

Categories: Britain, Multiculturalism, Race & Immigration • Tags: asian youth movement, black identity, britain, british asians, identity politics, kenan malik's books, racism, secularism

WE SHOULD TALK ABOUT THIS

March 18, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Actually, I seem to have been talking about this for much of the past two decades; ‘this’ being free speech, multiculturalism, Islam, Islamism, the issues at the heart of DV8’s extraordinary new show Can We Talk About This? now playing at London’s National Theatre. Lloyd Newsom’s company has, for more than quarter of a century, blurred the lines between dance and theatre as a way of, in the company’s own words, ‘reinvesting dance with meaning, particularly where this has been […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Free Speech, Multiculturalism • Tags: cultural diversity, dance, danish cartoons, dv8, free speech, geert wilders, islamism, martin amis, multiculturalism, muslims, ray honeyford

ON THE ROAD TO MORDOR

March 11, 2012 by Kenan Malik

The Cuillin on Skye, moody and broody and brilliantly menacing. We had driven there listening all the while to an audiobook of The Lord of the Rings. We might as well have been entering Mordor. The photos are best seen on my photoblog another lonely pixel.

Categories: Photos

WHY BOTH SIDES ARE WRONG IN THE RACE DEBATE

March 4, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Is race a biological reality? Or is it a social construction? It is a debate that shows no sign of being resolved. The more that we know of the genetics of human differences, ironically, the more fractious the debate seems to get, and the more entrenched the various positions seem to be. The latest issue of the magazine American Scientist contains a review by the biologist Jan Sapp of two books that insist that race has no biological validity. Sapp agrees. ‘The […]

Categories: Race & Immigration, Science & Technology • Tags: anthropology, cavalli-sforza, ernst mayr, genetics, jerry coyne, jon entine, population genetics, race realism, racial categories, racial science, sally satel, scientific classification

‘THE GREATEST NOVEL OF BELIEF AND UNBELIEF’

February 29, 2012 by Kenan Malik

A few months ago I chose five books to illustrate the idea of morality without God for The Browser’s Five Books interviews. Now, Richard Harries, the former Bishop of Oxford, has picked his list of five works through which to introduce Christianity. One book is common to both lists: Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. It is not surprising that both Harries and I should so treasure Dostoevsky’s last and greatest novel. There are few writers who possess the psychological power and the unnerving eye of Dostoevsky, few […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: christianity, dostoevsky, evil, god, religion, the brothers karamazov

GETTING OFFENSIVE WITH NIHAL

February 26, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Another video (or rather audio) that I had not realised was online. I had been invited to Nihal’s show on the BBC’s Asian Network for a two-minute spot to promote the Festival of South Asian Literature, at which I was speaking. I ended up staying an hour debating free speech, multiculturalism and the giving of offence.

Categories: Free Speech, Multiculturalism • Tags: british asians, britishness, broadcasts, free speech, identity politics, islamism, multiculturalism, muslims, rushdie affair, salman rushdie

FREE SPEECH AND DOUBLE STANDARDS

February 22, 2012 by Kenan Malik

I have written an essay for the upcoming 40th anniversary issue of Index on Censorship that explores the changing character of the free speech debate in recent decades. It includes an interview with Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten, whose challenge to cartoonists to depict the Prophet Muhammad helped launch the Danish cartoon controversy. I will publish the essay in full when the new issue of Index comes out in March. But here is a short extract that probes the question […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: ayaan hirsi ali, danish cartoons, flemming rose, free speech, geert wilders, islam, islamism, liberal hypocrisy, liberties, locke, martin amis, milton, muslims

SAYING IT LIKE IT IS WITH HANIF KUREISHI

February 19, 2012 by Kenan Malik

For no reason other than that I had never realised this video was online, here is my conversation with Hanif Kureishi at last year’s Festival of Asian Literature in London, in an event entitled ‘Saying It Like It Is: Culture, Free Speech and Power.’ And here, too, is the essay I wrote, at the time of that conversation, about my debt, and that of my generation, to Kureishi’s writing.

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: british asians, britishness, free speech, hanif kureishi, identity politics, islamism, multiculturalism, muslims, racism, rushdie affair

TO RENDITION JUSTICE

February 15, 2012 by Kenan Malik

By next Monday William Hague and Phillip Hammond could be behind bars. In December, the Court of Appeal ruled that the foreign and defence secretaries had by February 20th to produce before the court a Pakistani rice merchant, Yunus Rahmatullah; if they did not, then the court would ‘be moved to commit you to prison for your contempt in not obeying the said writ’. Hague and Hammond will not, of course, be sent down. But the Rahmatullah case does reveal, yet […]

Categories: Justice & Liberties, War on terror • Tags: anti-terror laws, barack obama, britain, guantanamo bay, liberal hypocrisy, liberties, rendition, usa, war on terror

THE COLOUR OF ICE

February 9, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Photos taken while Britain was freezing last weekend. They were, as so often, taken in and around Blythe Hill Fields in south London, which I have also photographed in fog and at sunset. Check out also my photoblog, another lonely pixel, from which some of these photos come.

Categories: Photos

WHO NEEDS GOD?

February 6, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Like a lion, perhaps, in a den of Daniels, I gave a talk last week on ‘Why I am an atheist’ to theology students at Bristol’s Trinity College. It was an enjoyable event, and hopefully helped me to think through and sharpen my arguments (though not, I suspect, to change anyone’s mind). Here’s the transcript. There are three kinds of arguments that an atheist can make in defence of the insistence that no God exists. First, he or she can argue […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: aquinas, aristotle, atheism, camus, christianity, ethics, euthyphro dilemma, first cause, god, greek philosophy, religion, william craig

BEYOND THE SACRED

January 29, 2012 by Kenan Malik

I gave a talk called ‘Beyond the sacred’, on the changing character of ideas of the sacred and of blasphemy, at a conference on blasphemy organised this weekend by the Centre for Inquiry at London’s Conway Hall on Saturday. Here is a transcript. To talk about blasphemy is also to talk about the idea of the sacred. To see something as blasphemous is to see it in some way as violating a sacred space. In recent years, both the notion […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Free Speech • Tags: behzti, blasphemy, charles taylor, free speech, identity politics, islamism, jesus and mo, kolokowski, liberties, muslims, olivier roy, religion, rushdie affair, sacred, salman rushdie, ziauddin sardar

AMERICA IS NOT BOTSWANA

January 27, 2012 by Kenan Malik

John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer, was charged this week with espionage for disclosing to journalists classified information about the capture and torture of Abu Zubaydah, a suspected al-Qaeda member. Before Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2009, just three Americans had ever been prosecuted by their government for espionage for leaking stories to journalists. Kiriakou Is the sixth person to face such charges under Obama. In less than four years under Obama, in other words, twice as many people […]

Categories: Free Speech, Justice & Liberties, War on terror • Tags: barack obama, free speech, liberties, rendition, usa, war on terror

TO NAME THE UNNAMEABLE

January 22, 2012 by Kenan Malik

‘A poet’s work. To name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.’ So says the irreverent, satirical poet Baal in The Satanic Verses. What the storm over Salman Rushdie’s non-appearance at the Jaipur Literature Festival reveals is that too few people these days think like Baal. Rushdie was due to have attended the festival – which is quickly becoming one of the most important global literary […]

Categories: Free Speech, International • Tags: free speech, hari kunzru, india, jaipur literary festival, milton, rushdie affair, salman rushdie, the satanic verses