Category Archives: Culture & Books

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

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

BLUE NOTES ON A DESERT ISLAND

March 29, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the founding of Blue Note Records, the most iconic and influential of jazz labels, not just for its incomparable music but also for its group-breaking album covers. To mark that anniversary, Blue Note is re-releasing on vinyl 100 of its greatest albums (it was going to be 75 to coincide with the anniversary, but they found it impossible to squeeze their favourites down that […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: jazz, music

MY GOD, WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?

March 23, 2014 by Kenan Malik

Last week Saudi Arabia banned the works of poet Mahmoud Darwish from the Riyadh Book Fair for being ‘blasphemous’. Darwish, who died in 2008, was perhaps the most important Arab poet of his generation. He was born in 1942 in the village of al-Birwa to the north of what is now Israel. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, it was occupied by Israeli forces, its inhabitants forced to flee (many, like Darwish’s family, to nearby Lebanon), and the village itself destroyed the […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: mahmoud darwish, palestine, poetry

THE HUMAN HEART OF SACRED ART

March 5, 2014 by Kenan Malik

I have written a number of posts recently on the meaning of the sacred in art, including a discussion of music, in the wake of John Taverner’s death, and of the meaning of Marilynne Robinson’s novels. I pulled together some these posts and themes for an essay in the latest issue of New Humanist. It still feels like a work in progress; I will hopefully develop the ideas over time. There is a passage in Marilynne Robison’s novel Gilead in which the […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Culture & Books • Tags: art, dante, dieric bouts, humanism, leszek kolakowski, marilynne robinson, modernism, religion, religious art, rothko, sacred

HULLABALOO OVER THE SATANIC VERSES

February 18, 2014 by Kenan Malik

As a coda to my essay on the changing landscape of free speech in the 25 years since the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, here is ‘Hullabaloo over Satanic Verses’, a Channel 4 documentary first broadcast in 1989 on the night of the fatwa. It was made by the writer and documentary film maker Gita Sahgal, one of the great stalwarths of the struggle against racism and for free speech and women’s rights. She was a founder of the Southall Black Sisters and […]

Categories: Britain, Culture & Books, Free Speech • Tags: gita sahgal, islamism, liberalism, liberties, muslims, rushdie affair, salman rushdie, the satanic verses

IN THE SHADOW OF THE FATWA

February 14, 2014 by Kenan Malik

When he was a child Salman Rushdie’s father read to him ‘the great wonder tales of the East’ – the stories of Scheherazade from the Thousand and One Nights; the animal fables of the ancient Indian Panchatantra; ‘the marvels that poured like a waterfall from the Kathasaritsagara’, the famous 11th-century Sanskrit collection of myths; the ‘tales of the mighty heroes collected in the Hamzanama’ that tell of the legendary exploits of Amir Hamza, uncle to the Prophet Mohammed; and the ancient […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Free Speech • Tags: free speech, From Fatwa to Jihad, identity politics, liberalism, milton, peter mayer, rushdie affair, salman rushdie, the satanic verses, wendy denier

ANGELS AND DEVILS, MYTHS AND MONSTERS

February 1, 2014 by Kenan Malik

I was recently interviewed by Faculti, a superb website that publishes videos of authors and academics talking about their work. I discussed my book From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and its Legacy. Here are the two recordings from the Faculti interview. The first is a reading from the final section of From Fatwa to Jihad in which I argue that The Satanic Verses is not as most people imagine it to be; Salman Rushdie’s novel is not a critique […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Free Speech, Kenan Malik • Tags: From Fatwa to Jihad, kenan malik's books, rushdie affair, salma, the satanic verses

CHRISTIANITY AND LIBERALISM

January 25, 2014 by Kenan Malik

Review of Inventing the Individual by Larry Siedentop (Allen Lane) Towards the end of this engrossing, illuminating book, Larry Siedentop describes a fourteenth century battle between two Christian monastic orders. The Dominicans and the Franciscans were mendicant orders, begging monks who had abandoned the comforts of the cloisters to preach among the poor, largely in response to growing disaffection about the Church. At the heart of the struggle between the two groups, Siedentop suggests, lay ‘Contrasting accounts of relationship between […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: ancient greece, augustine, christianity, equality, history of ideas, history of moral thought, human agency, individualism, larry siedentop, liberalism, original sin

ON POETRY

January 19, 2014 by Kenan Malik

As one of the winners of the Ariadne’s Thread 2013 poetry competition, I am taking part in a poetry reading in West London on Tuesday. (Actually, I did not win but was commended – that’s poetic license for you.) The event is at The Old Ship, King Street, Richmond, TW9 1ND, at 7.30. Come along if you are in the area. I will publish my poem on Pandaemonium once it has been published in Ariadne’s Thread. In the meantime, here are three […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: howard nemerov, jane kenyon, poetry, ted hughes

FIVE BOOKS TO ARGUE WITH

January 8, 2014 by Kenan Malik

The best kind of book, to my mind, is the kind of book you can have an argument with. Not a book so wrong that I want to throw it across the room, but one that I disagree with and yet find challenging enough to force me to re-examine my own views, and often to put down my disagreements in writing to help me better to clarify them. So, here are five books for me to argue with over the […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: jonathan israel, joshua greene, larry siedentop, nicholas wade, roger scruton

CLR JAMES ON ENGLAND’S HUMILIATION

January 5, 2014 by Kenan Malik

In the wake of England’s cricketing humiliation at the hands of Australia (as complete a humiliation, and as abject a surrender, as I can remember in any sport) I thought I might call upon the great CLR James to analyze what has gone wrong. Novelist and orator, historian and revolutionary, Trotskyist and Pan-Africanist, James (whose birthday it would have been yesterday) was also a great lover of English culture, and of cricket in particular. He produced in Beyond a Boundary, […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: clr james, cricket, sport

THE DEVIL’S TUNES AND THE MUSIC OF ANGELS

December 25, 2013 by Kenan Malik

The devil has the best tunes? Perhaps. But the music of angels can be damn fine too. So, here is a Christmas soundtrack splicing some of my favourite gospel tracks with songs in which the devil pops up (most of which derive, of course, from the blues/gospel tradition). For the music of the angels I could easily have created a whole soundtrack simply of Mahalia Jackson songs, but I have restricted myself to just two, which open and close the […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: blues, gospel, music, religion

THE HAUNTING GRACE OF MARILYNNE ROBINSON

December 21, 2013 by Kenan Malik

Which book am I most looking forward to in 2014? Perhaps, surprisingly, Marilynne Robinson’s forthcoming novel, Lila. Robinson’s life and writing is suffused with religious faith, indeed with a strong-souled Calvinism (though, improbably, she tends to see John Calvin more as a kind of Erasmus-like humanist than as the firebrand preacher who railed against the human race as constituting a ‘teeming horde of infamies’). Her most celebrated collection of essays, The Death of Adam, she describes as ‘contrarian in method and […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: calvin, christianity, darwin, fiction, marilynne robinson, pablo neruda, poetry

WHAT IS SACRED ABOUT SACRED MUSIC?

November 18, 2013 by Kenan Malik

The death last week of composer John Tavener has led me to think about the idea of the ‘sacred’ in music. A profoundly religious man – he was a convert to Russian Orthodoxy – Tavener’s faith and sense of mysticism suffused much of his music. Historically, and in the minds of most people today, the sacred in music is, as it was with Tavener, inextricably linked with religious faith. Yet, I think that we lose something of what is ‘sacred’ about sacred […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Culture & Books • Tags: art, britten, classical music, leszek kolakowski, messiaen, modernism, religion, religious art, rothko, sacred, stravinsky