Tag: religion

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

FROM THE VAULTS: ON TARIQ RAMADAN’S MEANING

March 10, 2013 by Kenan Malik

I am still closeted away, finishing my almost-finished book on the history of moral thought. So, here is another of my old book reviews, this one on Tariq Ramadan’s The Quest for Meaning. It was first published in the Independent in August 2010. In an age in which public intellectuals are often highly divisive figures – think of the storms surrounding Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins or Bernard-Henri Lévy – few generate more controversy than Tariq Ramadan. Political activist, Muslim scholar, […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: humanism, islam, religion, tariq ramadan

WHY I AM AN ATHEIST – THE VIDEO

February 3, 2013 by Kenan Malik

. This is a video of a conversation I had with the sociologist and broadcaster Laurie Taylor on ‘Why I am an atheist’. It was one in a ‘daisy chain’ of discussions on belief organized by 5×15 at the Wellcome Collection in London in December. The daisy chain featured, as well as Laurie Taylor and myself, Laurie’s son Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA (and a fellow-panelist of mine on The Moral Maze), Nick Spencer, director of research at the religious think tank Theos, and Linda Woodhead, Professor of […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: atheism, christianity, debates, laurie taylor, linda woodhead, matthew taylor, nick spencer, religion, religious freedom, talks, theos

A BOOK IN PROGRESS [PART 19]: BUDDHISM, REASON & FAITH

January 22, 2013 by Kenan Malik

Those who have followed the excerpts I have been publishing from my ‘Book in progress’ on the history of moral thought will know that there were several gaps in the chapters. That was because I left till the end a series of chapters on the Indian and Chinese traditions. These are now almost complete, and I will publish, as before, monthly extracts from each remaining chapter. Some of the chapters have been renumbered as you can see from the complete […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, History of moral thought • Tags: buddhism, ethics, kenan malik's books, religion

ON GAY MARRIAGE, RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND WILD HYSTERIA

January 18, 2013 by Kenan Malik

The European Court of Human Rights ruling this week on four cases of conflict over religious rights, and the continuing controversy in Britain, France and elsewhere on proposals to legalize gay marriage, shows the ongoing battle over how we should define religious freedom. I wrote a long post on this question last year, trying to establish some fundamental ground rules from first principles. Here I want to address one issue that has become prominent in recent weeks: the claim by […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: catholicism, christianity, cristina odone, equality, gay rights, religion, religious freedom

IN DEFENCE OF DEMOCRACY

November 21, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Jacques Berlinerblau has responded to my review of his book How to Be Secular. He thinks that, unlike his conservative Christian critics, I have not ‘take[n] the time to understand what [his] arguments actually are’ and have made instead a series of ‘misleading claims’ about them. I disagree with most of Berlinerblau’s list of what he regards as my misleading claims. I don’t want to go line by line through that list refuting each and every claim. I do, however, […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Culture & Books, Politics • Tags: democracy, jacques berlinerblau, locke, religion, secularism

A FOX DOES NOT MAKE A GOOD PROTECTOR OF THE HEN COOP

November 2, 2012 by Kenan Malik

The Canadian government is in the process of setting up an Office of Religious Freedom. Religious freedom is about the right of people to hold certain beliefs, and to act upon them, so long as in so doing they do not harm others or discriminate against them in the public sphere. It is the right to be free from interference from other faiths and from the state. For a government to set up an official body to oversee religious freedom […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: canada, identity politics, multiculturalism, religion, religious freedom, secularism

HOW TO BE SECULAR [PART 2]

October 29, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Jacques Berlinerblau, whoses book How to be Secular I reviewed in my last post, took umbrage on Twitter at my characterisation of his argument as anti-democratic. Twitter is not the best medium to have nuanced debate on these kinds of issues, but it was an interesting discussion (the heart of which was a debate not so much about secularism as about democracy) so I have curated the tweets via Storify (slightly reordered to make better sense of the discussion), with some comments thrown in. I hope, however that Jacques […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: atheism, democracy, religion, religious freedom, secularism

HOW TO BE SECULAR? PERHAPS NOT

October 27, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Back at the beginning of the US Presidential campaign Mitt Romney accused Barack Obama of launching ‘a war on religion’ and of wanting ‘to establish a religion in America known as secularism’. The irony is that Obama himself, even before entering the White House, had made clear his own disdain for secularism. In his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama had chided fellow Democrats for equating ‘tolerance with secularism’. In embracing secularism, he wrote, Democrats ‘forfeit the moral language that […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: atheism, locke, new atheism, religion, religious freedom, secularism

ON THE SECOND COMING OF RELIGION

October 4, 2012 by Kenan Malik

My essay on ‘The Myths of Muslim Rage’ sparked a debate about the relationship between religion and politics. Many challenged the idea that the conflicts over The Satanic Verses two decades ago, and over the Innocence of Muslims now, find their roots as much in political conflict as in religious belief. ‘Regardless of who may have been “pulling the strings” and for what reasons’, as one critic put it in commenting on the essay, ‘the fact that those strings can […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: alister mcgrath, atheism, charles taylor, darwin, fundamentalism, identity politics, islam, islamism, linda woodhead, marx, nietzsche, nilufer gole, olivier, paul heelas, religion, return of religion, secularism

WHEN SCIENCE HARKS BACK TO A BIBLICAL VIEW OF MORALITY

July 5, 2012 by Kenan Malik

One of the themes in contemporary discussions of morality of which I have been highly critical is the idea that science can, and should, determine right and wrong. Morality, as Sam Harris puts it in The Moral Landscape, is an ‘undeveloped branch of science’. Where there are disagreements over moral questions, he argues, ‘science will… decide’ which view is right ‘because the discrepant answers people give to them translate into differences in our brains, in the brains of others and in […]

Categories: Science & Technology • Tags: alex rosenberg, evil, free will, human agency, julian savulescu, morality, plato, religion, sam harris

NOTES ON RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

June 17, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Given the degree of fractious debate recently over ‘religious freedom’ – from questions of blasphemy and ‘defamation’ to the storm over gay marriage, from the controversy over the banning of the burqa to the hostility directed at the ‘Obamacare’ plan to include contraception in health insurance cover – I have been rethinking the question of freedom of religion. These notes are a starting point for debate, not a fully-fleshed out argument. 1 Religious freedom occupies a special place in contemporary political […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: christianity, equality, ethics, free speech, gay rights, locke, religion, religious freedom, secularism, spinoza

WHY HATE SPEECH SHOULD NOT BE BANNED

April 19, 2012 by Kenan Malik

I gave an interview last year to Peter Molnar for a book on the regulation of hate speech that he was editing with Michael Herz. The book comes out of a series of conferences and seminars organised by New York’s Cardozo School of Law and the Central European University in Budapest. (I presented a paper at a seminar in Budapest). Other contributors include Jeremy Waldron, Ronald Dworkin, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Nadine Strossen and Bhikhu Parekh. The book is finally published this […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: blasphemy, far right, free speech, hate speech, holocaust denial, homophobia, incitement laws, james watson, liberties, race relations act, racism, religion, religious hatred law, rwanda

A BOOK IN PROGRESS [PART 14]: SARTRE AND THE ANGUISH OF FREEDOM

March 25, 2012 by Kenan Malik

In the series of extracts from my almost-finished book on the history of moral thought, I have reached Chapter 15, which looks at existentialism, and primarily the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre. This extract is from the section that explores Sartre’s concept of freedom and his relationship to Marxism. ‘Existence comes before essence’. So claimed Sartre in his celebrated 1946 lecture Existentialism is a Humanism. It is a phrase that gets to the heart (one might even say the essence) […]

Categories: History of moral thought • Tags: aristotle, camus, consciousness, darwin, descartes, existentialism, free will, human agency, human nature, humanism, kierkegaard, marx, morality, religion, sartre

ABORTION, INFANTICIDE, HUMANITY, FREE SPEECH

March 7, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Is there no moral distinction between killing a newborn baby and aborting a fetus? And should an academic paper that seemingly advocated the killing of newborns have ever been published? Those are the questions at the heart of a controversy that has erupted after the publication of a paper entitled ‘After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?’ in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Two Australian academics, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, argued that the moral status of a newborn baby was […]

Categories: Free Speech, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: abortion, atheism, ethics, free speech, humanism, infanticide, peter singer, religion, utilitarianism, women's rights