Tag: anti-imperialism

ILLUMINATING AND OBSCURING

August 8, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This is a review of Pankaj Mishra’s Bland Fanatics, published in the Observer, 2 August 2020. ‘What is it’, the Austro-Hungarian novelist Joseph Roth asked rhetorically in 1927, in a preface to his book The Wandering Jews, ‘that allows European states to go spreading civilisation and ethics in foreign parts but not at home?’ Forty years later, as American cities burned while American bombs rained down on Vietnam, James Baldwin made a similar point, though reversing Roth’s formulation. ‘A racist […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Politics • Tags: anti-imperialism, bland fanatics, imperialism, liberalism, pankaj mishra, racism, the age of anger

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

AFTER BRUSSELS: ONCE AGAIN THINKING THROUGH TERROR

March 23, 2016 by Kenan Malik

‘Solidarity and anger. Those were my immediate emotions’. So I wrote last November after the Paris attacks: ‘Solidarity with the people of Paris, anger at the depraved, nihilistic savagery of the terrorists.’ My emotions are much the same after the savage attacks in Brussels this week. ‘But, beyond solidarity and anger,’, I observed in November, ‘we need also analysis.’ I have written much over the past few years about why conventional views about radicalization and the making of European jihadis […]

Categories: International, War on terror • Tags: anti-imperialism, identity politics, islam, islamism, jihadism, left, migration crisis, muslims, radicalization, terrorism

ON THE QUEST FOR A MORAL COMPASS

January 25, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This is the text of my talk at the Galle Literary Festival Last week. 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 what I want to explore today. For some, the questions themselves might seem absurd. There is a widespread perception of morality as occupying a sphere of its own. We imagine that morality can, and should, be understood in its […]

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

RECOLONIZED BY THE PAST

January 13, 2016 by Kenan Malik

My latest column for Al Jazeera English is about the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ in Oxford. It began as a campaign at the University of Cape Town to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes that stood on the campus. For the protestors, the statue represented everything that Rhodes himself stood for: racism, colonialism, plunder, white supremacy, and the oppression of black people. Last April, a month after the protests began, the university authorities removed the statue. By then, the protests had moved […]

Categories: Britain, Justice & Liberties • Tags: anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, cecil rhodes, imperialism, racism

WHY DO JIHADIS SEEM SO EVIL?

November 22, 2015 by Kenan Malik

This article on why jihadis seem willing to commit acts that appear so depraved or evil was published in the Observer under the headline ‘Why do Islamist groups in particular seem so much more sadistic, even evil?’ The day before the Paris carnage, two suicide bombers killed at least 40 people in a Shia district of Beirut. The week after, two suicide bombings of street markets in Nigeria killed 49 people. Faced with such atrocities, we can often do little […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Philosophy & Ethics, War on terror • Tags: anti-imperialism, evil, identity politics, islamism, jihadism, morality, religion, western policy

AFTER PARIS

November 15, 2015 by Kenan Malik

Solidarity and anger. Those were my immediate emotions, watching the carnage unfold on the streets of Paris. Solidarity with the people of Paris, anger at the depraved, nihilistic savagery of the terrorists. Those remain my main emotions, even now. But, beyond solidarity and anger, we need also analysis. So here are two articles, thinking through some of the issues. The first looks at, and challenges, two popular explanations for why the carnage was unleashed – Western foreign policy, on the […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, International, Politics, War on terror • Tags: anti-imperialism, assimilationism, british politics, france, imperialism, islamic state, islamism, jihadism, multiculturalism, syria, terrorism

EVIL AND THE ISLAMIC STATE

July 16, 2015 by Kenan Malik

‘The problem of evil’, Hannah Arendt wrote in 1945, ‘will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe.’ The historical and moral significance of contemporary jihadism is miniscule when compared to that of the Holocaust and the Final Solution. And yet jihadism has raised again the question of evil. Not evil in the sense of genocide but as expressed through acts of barbarity so inhuman that they are difficult to comprehend. The barbarism of Islamic State, in particular, […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, International, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: anti-humanism, anti-imperialism, evil, freedom struggles, hannah arendt, identity politics, islam, islamic state, islamism, jihadism, left, marc sageman, morality

RADICAL ISLAM AND THE RAGE AGAINST MODERNITY

January 28, 2015 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of the article on ‘Radical Islam, Nihilist Rage’ published last month in the New York Times. Faced with a horror such as the slaughter of 148 schoolchildren and staff by the Taliban in Pakistan, it is tempting to describe the act as ‘inhuman’ or ‘medieval’. What made the massacre particularly chilling, though, is that it was neither. The killings were all too human and of our time. The Peshawar massacre may have been particularly abhorrent, […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, International, Justice & Liberties, War on terror • Tags: anti-imperialism, boko haram, frantz fanon, islam, islamic state, islamism, left, pakistan, religion, taliban

RADICAL ISLAM, NIHILIST RAGE

January 5, 2015 by Kenan Malik

My latest column for the New York Times is on radical Islam and about what acts such as the massacre of school children in Peshawar by the Taliban tell us about Islam and about radicalism. Here are the opening paragraphs; you can read the full version in the NYT. Faced with a horror like the slaughter of 148 schoolchildren and school staff members by the Taliban in Pakistan, it is tempting to describe the act as ‘inhuman’ or ‘medieval’. What made […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, International, Justice & Liberties, War on terror • Tags: anti-imperialism, islam, islamism, religion, taliban, western policy

‘WEEP NOT NOW MY LOVE’

September 25, 2013 by Kenan Malik

Among the many who died in the al-Shabab attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi last weekend was one of the great figures of African literature, the Ghanaian poet and novelist Kofi Awoonor. He had been visiting Nairobi to speak at the Storymoja Hay festival, a celebration of writing and storytelling. Poet, novelist, playwright, actor, diplomat and statesman, Awoonor was born in 1935 in Wheta, in what was then the Gold Coast. His work was deeply rooted in the […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: african literature, anti-imperialism, chinua achebe, edward said, kofi awoonor

FROM THE VAULTS: CLR JAMES AND THE BLACK JACOBINS

March 7, 2013 by Kenan Malik

As I continue my life in purdah, trying to complete my book, here is the second book review drawn from the vaults. The review is of CLR James’ The Black Jacobins; it was originally published in August 2010 on Norman Geras’ normblog, as part of his Writer’s Choice series. The poet and statesman Aimé Césaire once wrote of Haiti that it was here that the colonial knot was first tied. It was also in Haiti, Césaire added, that the knot […]

Categories: History • Tags: anti-imperialism, clr james, enlightenment, haitian revolution, toussaint l'ouverture, universalism

HUMANISM, ANTIHUMANISM AND THE RADICAL TRADITION

November 6, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Back in September, I wrote an essay about Judith Butler and the controversy over her winning the Adorno Prize. It touched off a debate in Pandaemonium, less because of my defence of Butler’s right to win the prize than my criticism of her work and, in particular, of her poststructuralism. I noted then that I have written little directly on Butler’s main theme, gender, but much, in the context of the debate about race, on poststructuralist / postmodernist conceptions of […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: anti-imperialism, antihumanism, claude levi-strauss, enlightenment, frantz fanon, freedom struggles, holocaust, humanism, imperialism, liberalism, lukacs, marx, marxism, nazism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, race, sartre, theodor adorno, tzvetan todorov, universalism, zygmunt bauman

CLR JAMES, FRANTZ FANON AND THE MEANING OF LIBERATION

April 16, 2012 by Kenan Malik

1776. 1789. 1917. The American. The French. The Russian. The three great revolutions of the modern world. The three revolutions with which everyone is familiar, each one telling a different story about modernity. Yet, as I argued in my previous post, the fourth great revolution that helped define modernity – the Haitian Revolution of 1791 – is one that barely anyone remembers these days. It was the first true successful revolt in history. But more than that, the Haitian Revolution was […]

Categories: Race & Immigration • Tags: anti-imperialism, black politics, claude levi-strauss, clr james, frantz fanon, freedom struggles, haitian revolution, herder, imperialism, negritude, racism, sartre, separatism, universalism

MYTHS AND REALITIES OF 9/11

September 9, 2011 by Kenan Malik

A recent poll by the Pew Trust showed that virtually every American can remember where they were on the morning of 11 September 2001. Most recognize the profound changes that 9/11 has wrought to the nation. But America is divided down the middle on the question of whether the USA brought the attack upon itself. Forty-three percent of those polled thought that 9/11 was caused by US ‘wrongdoing’; 45% disagreed. Perhaps no set of statistics better expresses the confusions and ambiguities […]

Categories: International, War on terror • Tags: 7/7, 9/11, 9/11 commission, anders breivik, anti-imperialism, anti-terror laws, charles kurzman, clash of civilizations, culture of fear, ground zero mosque, guantanamo bay, identity politics, imperialism, islamism, islamophobia, jason burke, jihadism, liberties, mary beard, muslims, osama bin laden, phillip zelikow, stephen howe, tariq ali, terrorism, tzvetan todorov, usa, war on terror, western civilization, western policy