by Kenan Malik
London’s Olympic Park, that is. A day of colour, shape and speed. The speed came from, among others, the incomparable Usain Bolt, strolling through the 200m heats and the women in the 5000m heats. The shape from the stadia, especially Zaha Hadid’s Aquatic Centre. And the colour, quite unexpectedly, from the spectacular wildflower planting in the Park.
Categories: Photos
by Kenan Malik
How times change. There I was sitting in the Olympic stadium with my daughter. She had red, white and blue braids in her hair and was enthusiastically waving a Union Jack. When I was her age I would far rather have burned the flag than waved it. The Union Jack was then the property of jingoists and Empire loyalists, on the one hand, and of neo-fascists on the other. If I saw a pub or a housing estate with Union […]
Categories: Britain, Culture & Books, Sport • Tags: britishness, identity politics, london 2012, multiculturalism, nationalism, olympics, patriotism, sports
by Kenan Malik
As a coda to my previous post on abuse and how to deal with it, I am republishing this essay on changing notions of incitement that was first published in Index on Censorship in 2008. The essay was written in the context of the debate about the war on terror – it is an edited version of a talk I gave at an Index on Censorship conference on ‘Extremism and the Law: Free Speech in an Age of Terror’. It does not […]
Categories: Free Speech • Tags: free speech, hate speech, incitement laws, iqbal sacranie, liberties, lyrical terrorist, offence, rushdie affair, salman rushdie, terrorism, war on terror
by Kenan Malik
The arrest of a Dorset teenager for abuse of, and alleged death threats to, British Olympic diver Tom Daley on Twitter has divided both the Twittersphere and free speech activists. After Daley, and his partner Pete Waterfield, failed to win a medal in the synchronized diving competition, a Twitter user, @Rileyy_69, tweeted ‘You let your dad down’ (Daley’s father died last year of a brain tumour ). When Daley responded, understandably angry, @Rileyy_69 descended into abuse: Hope your crying now […]
Categories: Free Speech • Tags: free speech, hate speech, tom daley, twitter
by Kenan Malik
I love the Lakes. I am entranced by Skye. But I’m not sure that there is a landscape I find more captivating than the Yorkshire Dales. Yes, they seem forever to be wet, cold, misty and blustery, so much so that you half expect to see Heathcliff come striding across at any moment. Yet the seamless stitching together of bleak fells and pastoral valleys, of limestone and millstone grit, makes for a bewitching landscape. So, some photos taken earlier this month, […]
Categories: Photos
by Kenan Malik
As an aspiring teenage middle distance runner I once dreamed of competing at the Olympics. I grew up in the golden age of British middle distance running in the 1970s and 1980s. My hero was Steve Ovett, the bad boy of British athletics, arch rival and arch contrast to Sebastian Coe, the smooth establishment figure, whose destiny it always was to become first a Conservative MP and then the organizer of the 2012 London games. I was never either good enough […]
Categories: Britain, Sport • Tags: bob beamon, london 2012, nadia comaneci, olympics, sports, usain bolt
by Kenan Malik
‘I’m going to assume that you accept the materialist view of personality, that character/mind is determined by both the brain and environmental factors. You used the examples of trust and anger as emotions that are not necessarily good for the former or bad for the latter. But what about indisputably pernicious tendencies like sexual predation/violence, psychopathy or homicidal urges? If one accepted a materialist conception of the mind, then wouldn’t it be an uncontroversial good to use medical/scientific means to […]
Categories: Science & Technology • Tags: alex rosenberg, crime, free will, julian savulescu, liberties, materialism, mind, moral enhancement, morality, neuroscience, racism, sam harris
by Kenan Malik
Where do the wild things roam? In darkest, deepest Kent. Photos taken at Howlett’s Wildlife Park, within spitting distance of Canterbury Cathedral. A lynx with (half) a rabbit, a serval in hunting mode, a Javan langur, a lion-tailed macaque, a silverback gorilla, and a lynx again.
Categories: Photos
by Kenan Malik
One of the themes in contemporary discussions of morality of which I have been highly critical is the idea that science can, and should, determine right and wrong. Morality, as Sam Harris puts it in The Moral Landscape, is an ‘undeveloped branch of science’. Where there are disagreements over moral questions, he argues, ‘science will… decide’ which view is right ‘because the discrepant answers people give to them translate into differences in our brains, in the brains of others and in […]
Categories: Science & Technology • Tags: alex rosenberg, evil, free will, human agency, julian savulescu, morality, plato, religion, sam harris
by Kenan Malik
New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik presented this week a wonderful, sideways look at New York in his BBC Radio 4 documentary ‘Take the A-train’, a history of the A-train and of its importance to New York, to new Yorkers and to jazz. There is also a short video cut of Gopnik’s documentary (with some superb photographs). Take the A Train was, of course, one of Duke Ellington’s great standards, and so here, for no reason other than it is a […]
Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: jazz, music, new york
by Kenan Malik
My Milton K Wong lecture, ‘What’s wrong with multiculturalism?’, that I gave in Vancouver earlier this month, was broadcast on CBC on Friday. I have already posted the transcript of the talk, in two parts, here and here. (The broadcast has been slightly edited to fit the CBC schedule; the transcript is in full.) There is a Milton K Wong website dedicated to discussion and debate around the themes of the talk.
Categories: Multiculturalism • Tags: anders breivik, british asians, british politics, broadcasts, clash of civilizations, cultural diversity, danish cartoons, europe, far right, french politics, germany, guest workers, immigration, islam, multiculturalism, muslims, racism, riots, rushdie affair, turkish migrants
by Kenan Malik
Everything has gone from the world, The world has become empty again. Human animal. Humanity animality. Everything has gone from the world, I don’t see anything now. All that I see is My imagination. They don’t accept us as humans, They don’t accept us as animals either. And, as they would say, Humans have two dimensions. Humanity and animality, We are out of both of them today. So begins Samiullah Khalid Sahak’s poem Humanity. It is a poem about the […]
Categories: Culture & Books, War on terror • Tags: afghanistan, islam, islamism, jihadism, poetry, taliban, war on terror, war poetry
by Kenan Malik
Given the degree of fractious debate recently over ‘religious freedom’ – from questions of blasphemy and ‘defamation’ to the storm over gay marriage, from the controversy over the banning of the burqa to the hostility directed at the ‘Obamacare’ plan to include contraception in health insurance cover – I have been rethinking the question of freedom of religion. These notes are a starting point for debate, not a fully-fleshed out argument. 1 Religious freedom occupies a special place in contemporary political […]
Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: christianity, equality, ethics, free speech, gay rights, locke, religion, religious freedom, secularism, spinoza
by Kenan Malik
My name is Mo, short for Mohammed, I’m a second-generation immigrant cliché: Twenty-eight, disenfranchised, well educated. My mother is white, but I’m all Paki. My father owns a corner shop where I work, And I owe my allegiance to global Umma. My nation’s the Republic of Islam. So sings Mo, one of four would-be suicide bombers in a new opera Babur in London. Opera it may be, The Marriage of Figaro it ain’t. Babur in London explores issues of culture, identity, terrorism and history by […]
Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: babur in london, islam, islamism, jeet thayil, music, muslims, opera
by Kenan Malik
I remember the first time that I saw Sydney Opera House. I had seen innumerable photos of the building. There was, however, a spellbinding beauty in those concrete curves that could only be grasped in their presence, a beauty that no image had ever quite managed to convey. I feel much the same about the Canadian Rockies. It is a landscape much photographed, not least the iridescent turquoise of the lakes, such as Louise, Moraine and Peyto, that have become […]
Categories: Photos
Pandaemonium