saudi arabia | Pandaemonium

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

BRITAIN AND THE COVERT WAR IN YEMEN 1962-70

January 11, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This is an extract from Mark Curtis’ superb book Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses. It tells the story of Britain’s secret war in Yemen in the 1960s to restore the monarchy and Saudi control, and to protect its interests, and military base, in the region. Some 200,000 people were killed in the war. Curtis’study provides essential background to today’s conflict in Yemen. It was, Harold Macmillan observed at the time, ‘repugnant to political equity and prudence alike that […]

Categories: Britain, History, International • Tags: britain, british imperialism, imperialism, mark curtis, saudi arabia, yemen

ON THOSE ‘DIFFICULT CONVERSATIONS’

June 5, 2017 by Kenan Malik

In her speech outside No 10 Downing Street on Sunday morning in response to the London Bridge attack the night before, Theresa May insisted that ‘enough is enough’. ‘We cannot’, she said, ‘pretend that things can continue as they are.’ There is ‘far too much tolerance of extremism in our country’. Rooting out extremism ‘will require some difficult, and often embarrassing, conversations’. It was a speech long on rhetoric, but short on sense. It is May herself, first as Home […]

Categories: Britain, War on terror • Tags: war on terror, islamism, free speech, british politics, jihadism, terrorism, saudi arabia, theresa may

AND IF MY THOUGHT-DREAMS COULD BE SEEN…

July 31, 2016 by Kenan Malik

‘A poet’s work’, he answers. ‘To name the unnameable, to point a frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.’ And if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict, then they will nourish him. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses And if my thought-dreams could been seen They’d probably put my head in a guillotine But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only. Bob Dylan, It’s alright Ma, I’m […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Free Speech, International • Tags: apostasy, ashraf fayadh, blasphemy, culture, palestine, poetry, saudi arabia

WHY NO OUTRAGE OVER YEMEN?

July 13, 2015 by Kenan Malik

Sophia Dingli is a lecturer in International Relations at the University of Hull. In this article she questions why Western commentators, who have been vocal about the Israel’s attack on Gaza and the brutality of IS, have been so silent about the conflict in Yemen. It was first published in The Conversation. Sophia Dingli More than 2,800 people are dead in Yemen – so why aren’t we outraged? In the summer of 2014, our screens were inundated with videos of […]

Categories: International • Tags: saudi arabia, war on terror, western policy, yemen

HOW A BUNCH OF VICIOUS CHANCERS BECAME MEN OF WISDOM

January 25, 2015 by Kenan Malik

‘The world has lost a revered leader’, claimed US Secretary of John Kerry on the death last week of Saudi King Abdullah, a ‘man of wisdom and vision’, in Kerry’s words. David Cameron praised his ‘commitment to peace’ and ordered flags to be flown at half mast on government buildings. Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, even hailed him as a proto-feminist, a ‘strong advocate of women’. In reality, the man that virtually every Western leader has […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, History, International • Tags: arab world, imperialism, islam, islamism, saudi arabia, wahhabism, western policy

A BROTHERHOOD INQUIRY IN BAD FAITH

April 22, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is my latest column for the International New York Times is on David Cameron’s inquiry into the Muslim Brotherhood. The full version I will publish on Pandaemonium next month. Imagine that an elected president is ousted by the military. That the president’s party is declared a ‘terrorist’ organization. That dozens of protesters are shot in the streets, thousands of people imprisoned and hundreds sentenced to death. How should a liberal democracy respond? Presumably, by condemning the coup, denouncing the violence […]

Categories: Britain, International • Tags: arab spring, britain, democracy, egypt, islamism, muslim brotherhood, saudi arabia, war on terror, western policy