Category Archives: Free Speech

IN SUPPORT OF OSMAN KAVALA

October 26, 2017 by Kenan Malik

Imagine a seminar in Washington. Around the table are Bernie Sanders supporters and alt right activists, fans of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump voters, auto workers and Wall Street bankers, abortion activists and Evangelical Christians. And all discussing the question of America’s political future, civilly and articulately, with deep disagreements but also with mutual respect. It would be difficult to imagine this in Washington. Still less that a similar seminar could take place in Istanbul. Yet, when I gave a […]

Categories: Free Speech, International, Justice & Liberties • Tags: armenia, censorship, free speech, kurds, liberties, osman kavala, turkey

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

FREE SPEECH AND UNSAFE SPACES

April 10, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is the transcript of a talk I gave on ‘Free speech on campus’ at a conference entitled ‘Forever Young?’, exploring questions about universities, shifts in generational attitudes and the meaning of adulthood. The conference was held at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, on 8 April 2017. . In February 2015, Zineb El Rhazoui, a Moroccan journalist at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, spoke at the University of Chicago Law School, having been invited by the French Society. It was […]

Categories: Academia, Free Speech • Tags: censorship, charlie hebdo, free speech, identity politics, laura kipnis, left, moral autonomy, offence, radicalism, safe space, self-censorship, students, therapeutic society, trigger warnings, universities

THOU SHALT NOT GIVE OFFENCE

March 23, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is an extract from the Afterword to the new edition of my book From Fatwa to Jihad: How the World Changed From The Satanic Verses to Charlie Hebdo. This extract looks at the free speech debates around the Danish cartoons and Charlie Hebdo. You can buy the book from most bookshops, or from Amazon or from the Book Depository. In December 2009, about nine months after From Fatwa to Jihad was first published, Index on Censorship, one of the world’s foremost […]

Categories: Free Speech, International • Tags: charlie hebdo, danish cartoons, france, free speech, index on censorship, islam, jytte klausen, liberal hypocrisy, liberalism, muslims, racism, salman rushdie, the satanic verses

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

JYLLANDS-POSTEN AND THE AYATOLLAH WITHIN

November 17, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Flemming Rose is the former culture editor of Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten who, in 2005, published the Muhammed cartoons and launched a global controversy. In a new book, De Besatte (The Possessed), Rose claims that far from defending freedom of expression, Jyllands-Posten attempted to gag him and to prevent him from saying or writing anything controversial. The Danish paper Information interviewed me about the case. This is a (rough) translation of the article. ‘Jyllands-Posten viste sin indre ayatollah’ Hans Henrik Rasmussen, […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: censorship, danish cartoons, denmark, diversity, flemming rose, free speech, geert wilders, index on censorship, jytte klausen, rushdie affair, self-censorship, the satanic verses

WHO IS APPROPRIATING WHAT?

September 14, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Last week the novelist Lionel Shriver gave the keynote address at the Brisbane Writers Festival. It did not go well. She addressed the question of ‘Fiction and identity politics’ (apparently the organizers had originally asked her to talk about ‘community and belonging’, but she had submitted to them a different topic), providing a robust critique of identity politics and of the idea of ‘cultural appropriation’. Beginning with a story about colleges attempting to ban the wearing of sombreros as an […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Free Speech • Tags: cultural appropriation, cultural ownership, free speech, herder, identity politics, immigration, lionel shriver, racism, romanticism

AND IF MY THOUGHT-DREAMS COULD BE SEEN…

July 31, 2016 by Kenan Malik

‘A poet’s work’, he answers. ‘To name the unnameable, to point a frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.’ And if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict, then they will nourish him. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses And if my thought-dreams could been seen They’d probably put my head in a guillotine But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only. Bob Dylan, It’s alright Ma, I’m […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Free Speech, International • Tags: apostasy, ashraf fayadh, blasphemy, culture, palestine, poetry, saudi arabia

ACADEMIC FREEDOM AND ACADEMIC COWARDICE

July 22, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This is in response to the decision of the University of Cape Town to ‘disinvite’ Flemming Rose, former cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten responsible for publishing the Danish cartoons, from giving this year’s TB Davie Lecture on Academic Freedom. Last year, I was honoured to be invited to the University of Cape Town to give the 2015 TB Davie lecture. It was a privilege to have been able to become part of the history that is the TB Davie lecture, a history of resistance […]

Categories: Academia, Free Speech, International • Tags: academic freedom, danish cartoons, flemming rose, free speech, islamophobia

CONNECTEDNESS AND DISCONNECTEDNESS

May 25, 2016 by Kenan Malik

In 2010, I spoke at a seminar in Oxford when Timothy Garton Ash launched his Free Speech project to explore the state of free speech in the contemporary world. Now, out of that project has come Garton Ash’s new book, called, unsurprisingly, Free Speech. So, it was a pleasure to be invited to discuss the issues again this week at a Guardian debate, at Conway Hall in London, to launch the book, together with Rowan Williams, Joanna Williams, Jonathan Freedand and, of course, […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Free Speech • Tags: censorship, diversity, free speech, identity politics, timothy garton ash

WARNING: THIS MAY INJURE YOUR MODESTY

May 19, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Ahmed Naji is an Egyptian novelist and journalist who, in February, was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for ‘injuring public modesty’. In August 2014, Akhbar al-Adab, a state-funded literary magazine, had published an excerpt from his third novel, Istikhdam al-Hayah (Using Life), which had been previously approved by Egypt’s censorship authority. In the excerpt, the narrator smokes hashish, drinks alcohol with his friends, and enjoys a sexual relationship with a woman. Hani Saleh Tawfik, a 65-year-old Egyptian, filed a case against Naji, […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Free Speech • Tags: ahmed naji, censorship, egypt, fiction, free speech

HOW SHOULD WE LIVE IN A DIVERSE SOCIETY?

May 2, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of my talk at the Castrum Peregrini in Amsterdam on 2 May. (Apologies for the lack of links and references; I will sort them out in due course when I have more time.) ‘Can Europe be the same with different people in it?’ So asked the American writer Christopher Caldwell in his book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, published a few years ago. It is a question that has been asked with increasing urgency in […]

Categories: Free Speech, Multiculturalism • Tags: anti-semitism, christianity, clash of civilizations, diversity, europe, identity politics, immigration, integration, islam, judeo-christian tradition, karim miske, migration crisis, racism, trevor phillips

THE STRANGE CASE OF THE VENUS AND THE COVER-UP

April 28, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Back in January, when Iranian President Hassan Rouhani made an official visit to Rome, something strange happened to the statues he might have seen. Giovanni Tiso, a New Zealand-based writer and translator, tells here the story. Rouhani’s visit, and the Venus cover-up, might have taken place three months ago, but it is worth retelling the story, and putting it into context, because this is the kind of casual censorship that in many ways defines our time. As Giovanni writes, ‘this kind […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Free Speech, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: art, censorship, italy, nudity

AWAY WITH THE GATEKEEPERS!

April 14, 2016 by Kenan Malik

My latest column for Al Jazeera English on the the controversies over ‘cultural appropriation’ and what they reveal about the degradation of contemporary campaigns for social justice. It was published in AJE under the headline ‘The bane of cultural appropriation’. Another week, another controversy about ‘cultural appropriation’. The latest has been the furore over Justin Bieber’s dreadlocks. The Bieber furore followed similar controversies over Beyoncé’s Bollywood outfit, Kylie Jenner’s cornrows, Canadians practicing yoga, English students wearing sombreros and American students donning […]

Categories: Free Speech, Justice & Liberties, Race & Immigration • Tags: anti-racism, cultural appropriation, cultural ownership, herder, identity politics, justin bieber, racism, romanticism