poetry | Pandaemonium

GIL SCOTT-HERON, 1949-2011

May 30, 2011 by Kenan Malik

One of the most memorable gigs that I have ever been to was Gil Scott-Heron at the Brixton Academy. Drinks, drugs and prison had ravaged both body and voice. But he could mesmerize like few others. He possessed a sharp, sardonic wit, an emotional palette of exceptional richness, and an ability to allow your spirit to take flight. He was undefinable, unique, inspirational. And nothing, perhaps, better expresses those qualities, and his attitude to life and to politics, than the […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: gil scott-heron, jazz, music, poetry

THE POETRY OF AN OLD ATHEIST

April 25, 2011 by Kenan Malik

‘The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains.’ No, not the latest missive from Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris. In fact, it’s a missive not from a New Atheist at all, but from a very old one: Abul Ala Al-Ma’arri, a remarkable eleventh century Arab poet and freethinker. Today we have become used to thinking of the Islamic world as walled-in, insular, hostile to reason and […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: al-ma'arri, aquinas, arab literature, aristotle, atheism, falsafah, god, greek philosophy, ibn rushd, ibn sina, judeo-christian tradition, mu'tazilite, muslim rationalism, muslims, poetry, religion

THE BEST PART OF WRITING BOOKS…

March 24, 2011 by Kenan Malik

…is reading books. Whenever I’m writing a book, I tend to complain about not having the time to read ‘normal’ books – books, that is, whose reading is not strictly necessary for my writing. Currently there is an ever-growing pile of unread tomes from David Grossman’s The End of the Land to Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, from Gabriel Josipovici’s Whatever Happened to Modernism? to VS Ramachandran’s The Tell-tale Brain, a pile into which I can only plunge once my writing is […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: dante, milton, poetry