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A CENSORSHIP LESS VISIBLE

September 22, 2018 by Kenan Malik

These were my opening remarks at a debate on censorship in the theatre, held at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, 20 September 2018. Other speakers included Shereener Browne, Agnieszka Kolek and Anders Lustgarten. One of the problems in discussing censorship is that we often don’t recognize censorship for what it is. There is no longer the Lord Chamberlain marking scripts and cutting out the unacceptable. Instead, we, in effect, ourselves mark them. And that, ironically, makes censorship not more, but less, visible. In all my […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Free Speech • Tags: behzti, censorship, exhibit b, free speech, kehinde andrews, stella odunlame, theatre

DO I WANT PEOPLE TO SHUT UP?

December 5, 2014 by Kenan Malik

Anshuman Mondal, a lecturer in English at Brunel University, recently published an article on the academic website The Conversation criticising arguments for free speech. Advocates of free speech, of which I was a key specimen, were, Mondal claimed, trying to ‘shut up’ those who disagreed with them: By advocating blind adherence to the principle of free speech instead of accepting the ethical responsibilities attendant upon free speech, people like… Malik undermine the moral agency on which freedom rests. By dismissing other […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: anshuman mondal, behzti, censorship, exhibit b, free speech, morality, the satanic verses

EXHIBIT B AND THINKING FOR ONESELF

September 28, 2014 by Kenan Malik

Rushdie’s critics lost the battle – they failed to prevent the publication of The Satanic Verses. But they won the war. Policy makers and arts administrators came broadly to accept the argument that it was morally unacceptable to cause offence to other cultures, and that every community possessed the right to be consulted over how it may be depicted. So I wrote in ‘Arts for whose sake?’, the keynote essay in Beyond Belief – Theatre Freedom of Expression and Public […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Free Speech, Race & Immigration • Tags: behzti, exhibit b, free speech, index on censorship, offence, racism, rushdie affair

…BUT AGAINST MULTICULTURALISM

November 28, 2013 by Kenan Malik

Earlier this week, I posted an essay ‘In defence of diversity’. But if I am in favour of diversity, I am most certainly critical of multiculturalism. I have long argued that while we should value diversity as a form of lived experience, we should scorn multiculturalism as a political policy. So, as a complement to my defence of diversity, here are extracts from a series of essays and talks from over the years which sum up my critique of multicuturalism. […]

Categories: Multiculturalism • Tags: behzti, british asians, british politics, clash of civilizations, cultural diversity, david goodhart, edmund burke, free speech, immigration, integration, multiculturalism, muslims, rushdie affair

THE PLEASURES OF PLURALISM, THE PAIN OF OFFENCE

June 17, 2013 by Kenan Malik

I gave two talks this weekend. One was on ‘Turning diversity on its head’ at the sixth anniversary celebration of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB), the other on’Offence and censorship’ at an Artangel ‘Party for Freedom’. The two talks overlapped, so here I have stitched them together into a single post. The cartoons are from the wonderful Jesus and Mo. Almost twenty years ago, in 1994, the Independent newspaper asked me to write an essay on Tom Paine, the eighteenth-century […]

Categories: Free Speech, Multiculturalism • Tags: behzti, diversity, free speech, multiculturalism, offence, rushdie affair, tom paine

DIVERSITY, THE MARKET AND ARTISTIC FREE EXPRESSION

February 7, 2013 by Kenan Malik

I took part last week in a conference on artistic free expression called ‘Taking the Offensive’ organized by Index on Censorship. It was the culmination of a long project through which Index on Censorship has sought both to raise awareness of threats to artistic free expression and to clarify responses. Back in July 2011 Index on Censorship published, as part of this project, a report, Beyond Belief – Theatre, Freedom of Expression and Public Order. Taking as its starting point the controversies surrounding Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Free Speech, Multiculturalism • Tags: behzti, cultural policy, free speech, gurpreet kaur bhatti, liberties, multiculturalism, rushdie affair, social inclusion, the satanic verses

WHAT IS WRONG WITH MULTICULTURALISM? [PART 2]

June 7, 2012 by Kenan Malik

This is the second part of the transcript of my Milton K Wong lecture that I delivered in Vancouver last week. I posted the first part earlier this week. The talk will be broadcast in full on 22 June on the CBC’s Ideas strand. The story I have told so far is of a Europe that is not as plural as many imagine it to be, and of immigrants less assertive of their cultural identities than they are claimed to be. Multicultural policies emerged not because […]

Categories: Free Speech, Multiculturalism • Tags: anders breivik, behzti, british politics, clash of civilizations, cultural diversity, danish cartoons, diversity, europe, far right, handsworth riots, isaiah berlin, islam, multiculturalism, muslims, racism, riots, rushdie affair, will kymlicka

LIBERATING FREE SPEECH FROM THE SHACKLES OF BAD FAITH

April 2, 2012 by Kenan Malik

‘I have definitely become a free speech fundamentalist,’ says Flemming Rose. Perhaps that should not be surprising. It was, after all, Rose who, as culture editor of the newspaper Jyllands-Posten, helped launch the Danish cartoon controversy in 2005. He had picked up on a story about the difficulties that children’s author Kåre Bluitgen had faced in finding an illustrator for a book he was writing on Islam. Every illustrator that Bluitgen had contacted had been worried that he would end […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: behzti, danish cartoons, flemming rose, free speech, index on censorship, islamism, islamophobia, jytte klausen, kenan malik's books, liberal hypocrisy, liberties, locke, racism, rushdie affair

BEYOND THE SACRED

January 29, 2012 by Kenan Malik

I gave a talk called ‘Beyond the sacred’, on the changing character of ideas of the sacred and of blasphemy, at a conference on blasphemy organised this weekend by the Centre for Inquiry at London’s Conway Hall on Saturday. Here is a transcript. To talk about blasphemy is also to talk about the idea of the sacred. To see something as blasphemous is to see it in some way as violating a sacred space. In recent years, both the notion […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Free Speech • Tags: behzti, blasphemy, charles taylor, free speech, identity politics, islamism, jesus and mo, kolokowski, liberties, muslims, olivier roy, religion, rushdie affair, sacred, salman rushdie, ziauddin sardar

ARTS FOR WHOSE SAKE?

July 5, 2011 by Kenan Malik

Today Index on Censorship published its report, Beyond Belief – Theatre, Freedom of Expression and Public Order. Taking as its starting point the controversies surrounding Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s 2004 play Behzti – which was forced off stage by violent demonstrations by members of the Sikh community outraged by scenes in the play depicting rape and violence in a gurdwara – and her 2010 follow-up work Behud, the report explores the issue of the policing of controversial art. Among those contributing to the report are Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Free Speech • Tags: behzti, cultural policy, free speech, gurpreet kaur bhatti, liberties, multiculturalism, social inclusion