iran | Pandaemonium

REFUGEE POLICY FROM INSIDE THE BUNKER

August 24, 2021 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the Afghan crisis and Home Office refugee policy, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 22 August 2021, under the headline “Britain’s offer to Afghan refugees is not ‘generous’. It’s blindly inhumane”. Boris Johnson and Priti Patel believe that Britain’s “bespoke scheme” for Afghan refugees is “one of the most generous in our country’s history”. That says more about their ignorance of British history than it does about the scheme itself. The government has promised 5,000 refugees […]

Categories: Britain, International, Race & Immigration • Tags: afghan refugees, afghanistan, asylum seekers, boris johnson, david blunkett, deportations, home office, hungarian refugees, iran, margaret thatcher, nationality and borders bill, pakistan, priti patel, refugees, ted heath, ugandan asians, vietnamese boat people

FROM BOOK TO FATWA

February 15, 2019 by Kenan Malik

This week marks the 30th anniversary of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie (it was issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini on Valentine’s Day, 14 February 1989). To mark the anniversary, here is an extract from Chapter 1 of my book From Fatwa to Jihad (pp 1-10),which tells the story of how the conflict over The Satanic Verses first arose. . 1 ‘It would be absurd to think that a book can cause riots’, Salman Rushdie told the Indian journalist Shrabani Basu […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Culture & Books, Free Speech • Tags: ayatollah khomeini, fatwa, ghayasuddin siddiqui, iran, islam, islamism, muslims, rushdie affair, salman rushdie, saudi arabia, the satanic verses

SAUDI VICIOUSNESS AND WESTERN CYNICISM

August 27, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on Saudi Arabia’s ‘reform’ process, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 26 August 2018 under the headline ‘Don’t be deluded – our Saudi ‘partners’ are masters of repression’. Five Saudi activists face possible execution. Their crimes? ‘Participating in protests’, ‘chanting slogans hostile to the regime’ and ‘filming protests and publishing on social media’. The five, including women’s rights campaigner Israa al-Ghomgham, come from the Shia-majority Eastern Province. They have spent more than two years in […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, International, War on terror • Tags: iran, iranian revolution, islamism, jihadism, mohammed bin salman, saudi arabia, terrorism, western policy, yemen

IRANIAN BLUES

July 25, 2015 by Kenan Malik

No, not a political post, but a musical one. I have only recently started listening to Iranian blues and jazz. There is here a wonderful store of music, both traditional and modern, beautiful and often haunting, related to, but different from, forms of Arab and North African blues and jazz. So, here is a compilation of some of my favourite singers, or at least those I have so far discovered. There must be countless artists that I should know about […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: blues, iran, music

‘OF DEBATE, OF DISPUTE, OF DISSENT’

September 20, 2012 by Kenan Malik

When he was a child Salman Rushdie’s father read to him ‘the great wonder tales of the East’ – the stories of Scheherazade from the Thousand and One Nights, the animal fables of the ancient Indian Panchatantra, ‘the marvels that poured like a waterfall from the Kathasaritsagara’, the famous 11th-century Sanskrit collection of myths, the ‘tales of the mighty heroes collected in the Hamzanama’, that tell of the legendary exploits of Amir Hamza, uncle to the Prophet Mohammed, and the […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: free speech, iran, islam, islamism, joseph anton, midnight's children, peter mayer, rushdie affair, salman rushdie, the satanic verses

THE TERRORISTS THAT ARE AND THE TERRORISTS THAT AREN’T

January 16, 2012 by Kenan Malik

When is a terrorist not a terrorist? When, apparently, he is ‘our’ terrorist. Last week Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a professor at Tehran’s technical university, and deputy director of commerce at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility, was blown up by a bomb attached to his car. He was the fourth Iranian nuclear scientist to be killed in the past two years, part of what appears to be a concerted assassination campaign against people deemed key to Teheran’s nuclear ambitions. It is […]

Categories: War on terror • Tags: britain, iran, israel, libya, rendition, terrorism, war on terror, western policy