Category Archives: Atheism & Religion

SAUDI VICIOUSNESS AND WESTERN CYNICISM

August 27, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on Saudi Arabia’s ‘reform’ process, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 26 August 2018 under the headline ‘Don’t be deluded – our Saudi ‘partners’ are masters of repression’. Five Saudi activists face possible execution. Their crimes? ‘Participating in protests’, ‘chanting slogans hostile to the regime’ and ‘filming protests and publishing on social media’. The five, including women’s rights campaigner Israa al-Ghomgham, come from the Shia-majority Eastern Province. They have spent more than two years in […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, International, War on terror • Tags: iran, iranian revolution, islamism, jihadism, mohammed bin salman, saudi arabia, terrorism, western policy, yemen

RELIGIOUS FAITH AND FAITH IN HUMANITY

April 2, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay was published in the Observer, 1 April 2018, under the headline ‘Yes, we’ve lost our faith in God, but we’ve lost our faith in reason too’. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. So runs the inscription above the gates of hell in Dante’s Inferno. Through those gates walks Dante with his guide Virgil: Now sighs, loud wailing, lamentation Resounded through the starless air, So that I too began to weep. Unfamiliar tongues, horrendous accents, Words of suffering, cries of rage, […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: catholicism, christianity, dante, hell, human agency, humanism, inferno, pope francis, religion, the divine comedy, viktor frankl

RETHINKING THE CHALLENGE OF ANTI-MUSLIM BIGOTRY

November 15, 2017 by Kenan Malik

In 1997 the British anti-racist organisation the Runnymede Trust published its highly influential report Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All. The report both brought to public consciousness the reality of anti-Muslim bigotry and framed it in terms of ‘Islamophobia’ – indeed, it played a significant role in establishing the term as legitimate and important. Twenty years on, the Runnymede Trust has brought out a follow-up report Islamophobia: Still a Challenge for Us All, which is a stock-take on current views, […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Britain, Race & Immigration • Tags: anti-racism, british politics, diversity, free speech, gill valentine, hate speech, iqbal sacranie, islam, islamophobia, multiculturalism, muslims, offence, racism, runnymede trust

FROM THE SATANIC VERSES TO CHARLIE HEBDO

October 19, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is a talk I gave to the Integrity 20 conference in Brisbane, on 19 October 2017. On 14 February 1989, Valentine’s Day, the Ayotollah Khomeini issued his infamous fatwa against Salman Rushdie. It was a brutally shocking act that forced Salman Rushdie into hiding for almost a decade. 26 years later, on 7 January 2015, came an even more viscerally shocking act, when two gunmen forced their way into the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, sprayed […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Culture & Books, Free Speech, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: censorship, charlie hebdo, free speech, identity politics, islamism, left, multiculturalism, muslims, racism, salman rushdie, the satanic verses

WORDS STILL FAIL US WHEN WE TALK ABOUT MUSLIMS

September 3, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This essay was published in the Observer, 3 September 2017, under the headline ‘Fostering row exposes how words fail us when we talk about Muslims in Britain’. Court cases involving children being taken into care are inevitably messy. There are deep emotions involved and conflicting viewpoints. Parents are often angry, children confused and fearful. Those outside the process can find it difficult to discern the facts, as much of the decision-making takes place behind closed doors. Given all this, it […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Britain, Politics • Tags: adoption, andrew norfolk, british politics, culture, fostering, identity politics, islam, multiculturalism, muslims, racism, rotherham abuse scandal, tower hamlets

THE MAKING OF THE MUSLIM WORLD

June 12, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is a review of Christopher de Bellaigue’s The Islamic Enlightenment: The Modern Struggle Between Faith and Reason (Bodley Head), Cemil Aydin’s The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Harvard University Press) and Tariq Ramadan’s Islam: The Essentials (Pelican). It was published in the New Statesman, 9 June 2017. ‘The Turkish nation,’ Mehmed Ziya Gokalp wrote, ‘belongs to the Ural-Altai [language] group of peoples, to the Islamic umma, and to Western internationalism.’ Gokalp was an early-20th-century sociologist, […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Culture & Books • Tags: enlightenment, europe, imperialism, islam, islamic enlightenment, islamism, modernity, tariq ramadan, west

THE CHALLENGE OF THE JIHADI STATE OF MIND

May 11, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of a talk I gave at the Kreisky Forum in Vienna on 11 May 2017. It pulls together many of the themes from previous talks and essays. Last week a 20-year-old Briton called Damon Smith was found guilty of planting a homemade bomb filled with ball bearings on a London Underground train. Police discovered in his flat shredded pages of an article titled ‘Make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom’ from Inspire, a magazine published by an al-Qaida affiliate. […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, War on terror • Tags: assimilationism, france, identity politics, islam, islamic state, islamism, jihadism, multiculturalism, racism, radicalization, terrorism

WHY UPDATE FROM FATWA TO JIHAD?

February 9, 2017 by Kenan Malik

My book From Fatwa to Jihad was first published in 2009, on the twentieth anniversary of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Eight years on, I have just published an updated version with a new Afterword. Why? In 1989 the fatwa against Salman Rushdie had come as a great shock, both in Britain and globally, and its consequences reverberated through both domestic and international politics in the two decades that followed. Much was written about it. Yet, there had been little […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Culture & Books, Kenan Malik • Tags: assimilationism, charlie hebdo, free speech, From Fatwa to Jihad, islamism, jihadism, kenan malik's books, radicalization, rushdie affair, the satanic verses

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

BEYOND FEAR AND INDIFFERENCE

May 15, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This essay on Sadiq Khan’s London Mayoral victory, Trevor Philips’new pamphlet on diversity and the public discourse on Islam was published in the Observer, under the headline ‘Muslims are not a ‘different’ class of Briton: we’re as messy as the rest’. ‘It shows it is possible to be Muslim and a Westerner. Western values are compatible with Islam.’ So said Sadiq Khan after his victory as London mayor. Trevor Phillips, former chief of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, takes […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Britain, Multiculturalism • Tags: britain, british asians, free speech, identity politics, islam, muslims, sadiq khan, trevor phillips

THE VIEW FROM NORTH AFRICA

May 11, 2016 by Kenan Malik

The Konrad Adenauer Foundation has published a fascinating poll on attitudes to religion and politics in five North African countries (Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco). It reveals wide differences between the countries in political and religious attitudes – Tunisia being by far the least religious and most liberal, and Libya the most religious and conservative. There are also some depressingly familiar commonalities – particularly conspiracy theories about the creation Daech/IS. Tunisia is, of course, the only democracy among these states, […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, International • Tags: algeria, egypt, islam, libya, morocco, muslims, north africa, tunisia

TALKING ABOUT RADICALIZATION

April 20, 2016 by Kenan Malik

I took part last month in a discussion about ‘Contemporary Understandings of Radicalization’ at King’s College, London. Organised by the King’s College War Studies Society and the Remote Control Project, the other speakers were Shiraz Maher and Claire Lauterbach of Privacy International. Here is my introduction. One of the problems with discussing the concept of radicalization is that it can mean all things to all people. In one sense it simply means ‘the process by which terrorists become terrorists’. But, radicalization, […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, War on terror • Tags: islam, islamism, jihadism, left, muslims, olivier roy, radicalization

SO, WHAT DO BRITISH MUSLIMS REALLY THINK?

April 12, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This Wednesday, Channel 4 in Britain will broadcast a Trevor Phillips documentary on ‘What British Muslims really think’. On Sunday, the Sunday Times published details of an ICM poll about Muslim attitudes commissioned for the programme and ran an essay by Phillips on Muslim integration. The headlines generated by the poll – ‘Half of British Muslims want gay sex banned says poll’; ‘Most Muslims would not give terror tip-offs’, etc – and Phillip’s argument (‘the integration of Muslims will probably […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Britain • Tags: british asians, britishness, islam, islamophobia, muslims, religion, trevor phillips

THE FOURTH WAVE OF EUROPEAN JIHADIS

April 3, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Rik Coolsaet, Professor of International Relations at Ghent University and a Senior Associate Fellow at the Egmont-Royal Institute for International Relations in Brussels, has just published an important and insightful paper on Belgian jihadis. It provides a comprehensive overview of jihadi scene in Belgium and, in doing so, challenges many of the myths about radicalization that I mentioned in my recent New York Times article. It is worth looking at Coolsaet’s argument in detail. Today’s European jihadis comprise, Coolsaet argues, […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, International, War on terror • Tags: europe, islamic state, islamism, jihadism, marc sageman, olivier roy, radicalization, rik coolsaet, terrorism

COUNTER-TERROR POLICY: THE MYTHS AND THE FAILURES

March 30, 2016 by Kenan Malik

An excerpt from my latest column for the International New York Times on why ‘radicalization’ is a flawed concept. It was published under the headline ‘The Little We Know About the Jihadists in Our Midst’. The evidence suggests that the concept is flawed and that such anti-jihadist measures are ineffective, even counterproductive. A secret British government memorandum leaked in 2010 dismissed the idea that there was ‘a linear ‘conveyor belt’ moving from grievance, through radicalization, to violence’. A 2010 American […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, War on terror • Tags: counter-terrorism, islam, islamism, jihadism, marc sageman, radicalization, war on terror