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ISLAM AND FREE SPEECH: AN OLD DEBATE

July 7, 2013 by Kenan Malik

A 2006 debate, in fact, between myself and Imran Khan (the lawyer not the cricketer) on the issue of Islam, free speech and the Danish cartoons for a special Channel 4 Dispatches programme. I had not realized that the broadcast was available on YouTube. The issues we debated remain strikingly relevant. Perhaps the most telling moment came when the moderator Jon Snow announced an audience poll to see whether the cartoons should be shown on the programme. The audience overwhelmingly […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: broadcasts, danish cartoons, debates, free speech, islam, offence

AN ESSAY ON THOMAS PAINE (JUST A LITTLE BIT CENSORED)

June 24, 2013 by Kenan Malik

In my talk on pluralism and the giving of offence, I mentioned my 1994 essay on Thomas Paine that had been censored by the Independent because I opened it with a quote from The Satanic Verses. Here is that essay, in the form in which it was finally published. And this is the quote from The Satanic Verses that was felt to be too offensive. It describes the moment that Salman, the scribe who writes down the revelations that Mahound receives from […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Free Speech • Tags: christianity, edmund burke, enlightenment, free speech, offence, religion, rushdie affair, the satanic verses, tom paine

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

FREE SPEECH AND CULTURAL SENSITIVITIES: A DEBATE

March 21, 2013 by Kenan Malik

I have just taken part in an exchange of letters with Nada Shabout, director of the Contemporary Arab and Muslim Cultural Studies at the University of North Texas, which focused on the question: ‘Should religious or cultural sensibilities ever limit free speech?’ These first four letters are published in the latest edition of Index on Censorship magazine. There was no room to take the debate further in print, but we are continuing the discussion. The new exchanges will be published […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: danish cartoons, debates, free speech, islam, islamophobia, offence, racism, religion, religious freedom, rushdie affair

GERALD SCARFE, ANTI-SEMITISM AND THE DANISH CARTOONS

January 30, 2013 by Kenan Malik

How should we respond to the controversy over the Gerald Scarfe cartoon? Last Sunday – Holocaust Memorial Day – the Sunday Times published a cartoon by Scarfe, its regular cartoonist, depicting the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu building a wall with blood-red coloured cement, in which were trapped Palestinians. The cartoon instantly created international outrage. The Board of Deputies of British Jews, which has complained to the Press Complaints Commission, denounced the cartoon as ‘shockingly reminiscent of the blood libel […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: anti-semitism, danish cartoons, free speech, gerald scarce, israel, liberal hypocrisy, offence, racism

OUT OF BOUNDS

August 5, 2012 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