Category Archives: History

THE SHIFTING LINES OF THE PRESENT AND THE PAST

October 14, 2019 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the changing character of anti-German chauvinism and the contested lines of Britain’s relationship to its past, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 6 October 2019, under the headline ‘We can mention the war. Should we now talk about Britain’s darker history?’ ‘I wonder if Kenan Malik is clear that the “Don’t mention the war” episode of Fawlty Towers is intended to make fun of the British obsession with the Second World War that he criticises?’ So wrote an […]

Categories: Britain, History, Politics • Tags: angela merkel, anti-german chauvinism, brexit, don't mention the war, far right, fawlty towers, germany, john cleese, nazism, nigel farage, peterloo, racism, richard tice, susan neiman

THE POLITICAL GHOSTS OF EUGENICS MAY MATTER MORE THAN THE GENETIC

October 7, 2019 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the political legacy of the eugenics movement, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 6 October 2019, under the headline ‘The spirit of eugenics is still with us, as immigrants know to their cost’. Birth control. Intelligence tests. Town planning. Immigration controls. It’s striking how much of contemporary life has been shaped, at least in part, by the eugenics movement, as Eugenics: Science’s Greatest Scandal, a two-part BBC documentary by science writer Angela Saini and disability campaigner […]

Categories: History, Science & Technology • Tags: adam pearson, aldous huxley, angela saini, beatrice webb, david attenborough, eugenics, forced sterilisation, francis galton, immigration, population control, poverty, richard dawkins, working class

THE ILLIBERALISM OF THE PHILOSOPHER OF LIBERALISM

September 9, 2019 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on John Locke, Baruch Spinoza and the meaning of tolerance, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on politics as drama.) It was published on 8 September 2019, under the headline ‘Why western liberals have long picked the wrong historical hero’. Lost in the library of a small American college has lain a text by one of England’s foremost philosophers that no one knew he had written. ‘Reasons for tolerateing Papists equally with […]

Categories: History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: catholicism, enlightenment, free speech, jonathan israel, liberalism, locke, radical enlightenment, religious freedom, spinoza, tolerance

ISLAMIC ART AND FLORENCE

August 13, 2018 by Kenan Malik

I am away for a couple of weeks, so will be posting little new material on Pandaemonium. I am taking the opportunity to publish some of those shorter pieces from my Observer column that I don’t normally post on Pandaemonium. This short piece was published in the Observer on 8 July 2018 under the headline ‘Look at art for the deep connection between Europe and Islam’. The Adoration of the Magi is an early 15th-century altarpiece painting by the Italian painter Gentile da […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History • Tags: adoration of the magi, elif shafak, europe, florence, gentile da fabriano, islam, islamic art, renaissance

THE MEANING OF HERITAGE IN AN AGE OF IDENTITY

March 30, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of my keynote address to the Interpret Europe conference on ‘Heritage and Identity’ held in Kőszeg, Hungary, 23-26 March 2018. The skeleton was discovered in 1903 at Gough’s Cave in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, in south-west England. He became known as Cheddar Man, and is the oldest almost complete skeleton of Homo sapiens ever found in Britain. In the 1970s, radiocarbon dating suggested that he lived around 10,000 years ago, shortly after the first settlers crossed from continental […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: aya sofia, christianity, clash of civilizations, cordoba, cultural diversity, cultural heritage, culture, diversity, enlightenment, hagia sophia, herder, ibn rushd, identity politics, islam, istanbul, multiculturalism, romanticism, unesco

BRITAIN AND THE COVERT WAR IN YEMEN 1962-70

January 11, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This is an extract from Mark Curtis’ superb book Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses. It tells the story of Britain’s secret war in Yemen in the 1960s to restore the monarchy and Saudi control, and to protect its interests, and military base, in the region. Some 200,000 people were killed in the war. Curtis’study provides essential background to today’s conflict in Yemen. It was, Harold Macmillan observed at the time, ‘repugnant to political equity and prudence alike that […]

Categories: Britain, History, International • Tags: britain, british imperialism, imperialism, mark curtis, saudi arabia, yemen

IN SEARCH OF THE COMMON GOOD

November 23, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of the RICS Harris lecture that I gave on 14 November 2017 on ‘The public interest and the common good’. The public interest. The public advantage. The public good. The common good. These are all phrases that seem indispensible, phrases which we all use, and of which we have an instinctive understanding, yet the meanings of which are all contested and seemingly impossible to define. These phrases are often used interchangeably. Many philosophers and political thinkers would […]

Categories: History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: aquinas, aristotle, common good, enlightenment, ethics, greek philosophy, history of moral thought, individualism, liberalism, locke, mo tzu, public interest, social contract

LIGHT AND GRACE IN ISTANBUL

October 8, 2017 by Kenan Malik

‘I saw the monuments, the great ancient remains. From every ruin I learned, from every building I absorbed something.’ So wrote Mimar Sinan, perhaps the greatest architect of the premodern Islamic world, a figure whose work has been compared to that of the Renaissance architects and artists Brunelleschi and Michaelangelo, with whom he was a sixteenth century contemporary. Sinan was talking of the great ancient buildings of Baghdad and Damascus, of Persia and north Africa, one of his many sources […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History, International, Photos • Tags: architecture, islamic architecture, istanbul, mimar sinan, ottoman empire, photography, suleymaniye mosque

ON MORALITY AND ITS HISTORY

August 10, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of a talk I gave at the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. What can the history of morality tell us about the nature of morality? And about ourselves as human beings? These are the questions at the heart of The Quest for a Moral Compass. And these are the questions I want to explore tonight. For some, the questions themselves might seem absurd. It is striking that there are thousands of books about the […]

Categories: History, History of moral thought, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: anti-imperialism, christianity, enlightenment, europe, french revolution, greek philosophy, haitian revolution, history of moral thought, human agency, human nature, imperialism, modernity, monotheism, morality, nietzsche, plato, radical enlightenment, thrasymachus, viktor frankl

NEVER SAY THIS IS THE FINAL ROAD FOR YOU

April 23, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This week marked the anniversary of the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto. The Ghetto had been established by the Germans in 1940 in the Muranów district of the Polish capital, imprisoning some 400,000 Jews, virtually all of whom were eventually killed, either in concentration camps, through hunger and deprivation, through executions, or in the final destruction of the Ghetto. The uprising began on April 19, 1943, after German troops entered the Ghetto to deport its surviving inhabitants. Some 750 fighters […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History • Tags: arnold schonberg, holocaust, jews, paul robeson, warsaw ghetto

A LITTLE ALTERNATIVE READING

February 23, 2017 by Kenan Malik

To accompany my essay on the ‘decolonizing our minds’ debate at SOAS, the Observer asked me to compile a (very) short ‘alternative’ philosophy book list; alternative in the sense of being broadly non-European and consisting of works or authors of whom people may not have heard but nevertheless are significant in the history of ideas. Being limited to just six books necessarily makes the list arbitrary, but I have tried to find a selection that spans both history and geography, […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: al-ma'arri, chinese philosophy, clr james, ethics, frantz fanon, ibn rushd, islamic philosophy, jonathan israel, mo tzu, philosophy, toussaint l'ouverture

DECOLONIZING OUR MINDS?

February 19, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This essay was published in the Observer, 19 February 2017. ‘They Kant be serious!’, spluttered the Daily Mail headline in its most McEnroish tone. ‘PC students demand white philosophers including Plato and Descartes be dropped from university syllabus’. ‘Great thinkers too male and pale, students declare’, declared the Times. The Daily Telegraph, too, was outraged: ‘They are said to be the founding fathers of Western philosophy, whose ideas underpin civilised society. But students at a prestigious London university are demanding that […]

Categories: Academia, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: decolonising, diversity, enlightenment, frantz fanon, identity politics, jonathan israel, kant, kwame anthony appiah, locke, racism, radical enlightenment, soas, toussaint l'ouverture, university, whiteness

ALL THE NEWS THAT WAS FIT TO PRINT

December 6, 2016 by Kenan Malik

An excerpt from my latest column for the International New York Times on the panic about fake news: In the past, governments, mainstream institutions and newspapers manipulated news and information. Today, anyone with a Facebook account can do it. Instead of the carefully organized fake news of old, there is now an anarchic outflow of lies. What has changed is not that news is faked, but that the old gatekeepers of news have lost their power. Just as elite institutions […]

Categories: Free Speech, History, Politics • Tags: fake news, free press, news, post-truth

BEFORE FACEBOOK WAS THE COFFEE HOUSE

December 1, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Today it’s Facebook. 350 years ago it was the coffee house. In the late seventeenth century, as Markman Ellis tells in his book on the cultural history of the coffee house, there was panic in British royal circles that these newly-established drinking salons had become forums for political dissent, rebellious attitudes and the spreading of untruths. In June 1672, Charles II issued a proclamation ‘to restrain the Spreading of False News, and Licentious Talking of Matters of State and Government.’ […]

Categories: Free Speech, History • Tags: censorship, facebook, fake news, free press, free speech

THAT PROUD HISTORY OF WELCOMING REFUGEES

November 3, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Every time there is a debate about Western attitudes to refugees, many point to the West’s proud history of helping refugees, especially Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. In fact Western European nations and the USA were anything but welcoming to fleeing Jews. Britain even set up internment camps in Canada to detain German Jews as ‘enemy aliens’, often together with Nazis. Far from today’s failure to welcome refugees being a betrayal of that proud history, it is […]

Categories: History, Race & Immigration • Tags: anti-semitism, evian conference, franklin d roosevelt, jewish refugees, jews, nazis, refugees