Malik, Kenan
Recommended Author Index

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  1. Against multiculturalism 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2002
    Multiculturalism is an authoritarian, anti-human outlook. True political progress requires not recognition but action, not respect but questioning, not the invocation of the Thought Police but the forging of common bonds and collective struggles.
  2. All cultures are not equal
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2002
    A common thread binds contemporary Western radicalism and fundamentalist Islam. On the surface the two seem poles apart: fundamentalists loathe Western decadence, Western radicals fear Islamic presumptions of certainty. But what unites the two is that both are rooted in contemporary nihilistic multiculturalism; both express, at best, ambivalence about, at worst outright rejection of, the ideas of modernity, universality, and progress; and both see no real alternative to Western power.
  3. An Annotated Bibliography of Nonsense
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1998
    Academic critics today not only question the impact of science upon society, but they also question the very idea of scientific rationality.
  4. Born in Bradford 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2005
    Multiculturalism transformed the character of antiracism. By the mid-1980s the focus of antiracist protest in Bradford had shifted from political issues, such as policing and immigration, to religious and cultural issues: a demand for Muslim schools and for separate education for girls, a campaign for halal meat to be served at school, and, most explosively, the confrontation over the publication of The Satanic Verses. Political struggles unite across ethnic or cultural divisions; cultural struggles inevitably fragment.
  5. The dirty d-word
    Resource Type: Article
    Diversity has become more than simply a way of describing the expansion of our experiences. It has also become a dogma about how we should live that has become as stultifying as old-fashioned racism - and often as divisive.
  6. Don't Incite Censorship
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2007
    Free speech for everyone but bigots is no free speech at all.
  7. An Expression of the Facts
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1998
    What the story of Darwin's long-forgotten masterpiece, and the continuing debate about its subject matter, tells us is that the scientific idea of the human is not simply an objective truth, but is shaped by wider issues such as the prevailing ideas of progress, notions of racial difference, and the understanding of the relationship between Man and Nature.
  8. Free Speech in a Plural Society
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2006
    The argument against free speech is really an argument in defence of particular sectional interests. And that is the best reason for rejecting restraints on speech. We can build a plural society in which free speech provides the means of engagement and dialogue between different parts of society.
  9. From Fatwa to Jihad 
    The Rushdie Affair and its Legacy
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2009
    Tells the story both of the Rushdie affair and of its transformative impact on cultural and political landscape of the West. The book explores the issues that the Rushide affair raised. in particular the questions of muliculturalism, radical Islam and free speech, and shows how in responding to these issues Western liberals have betrayed the fundamental beliefs of liberalism.
  10. How green are your ethics?
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2007
    The assumption that underlies much of the discussion on carbon neutrality is that any activity that emits CO2 - and that means virtually every human activity - is something to apologise for. All human activities must be judged by their carbon content, and the morality of an action gauged principally by its carbon count. Carbon calculators have become the moral barometers of our age.
  11. How Israel Created Its Monster
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2009
    How and why Israel helped Hamas to power.
  12. Identity is that which is given 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2008
    In this age of globalisation many people fret about Western culture taking over the world. But the greatest Western export is not Disney or McDonalds or Tom Cruise. It is the very idea of culture.
  13. The Islamophobia Myth
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2005
    Pretending that Muslims have never had it so bad might bolster community leaders and gain votes for politicians, but it does the rest of us, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, no favours at all. The more that the threat of Islamophobia is exaggerated, the more that ordinary Muslims come to accept that theirs is a community under constant attack. It helps create a siege mentality, stoking up anger and resentment, and making Muslim communities more inward looking and more open to religious extremism.
  14. Law and the wives of others
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2008
    How does a modern, plural democratic society deal with the desire of some minority groups to observe cultural norms at odds with the law of the land?
  15. Man, Beast and Zombie
    What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us About Human Nature
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2000   Published: 2001
    Drawing upon the ideas of evolutionary biology, cognitive science and artificial intelligence, Malik questions many of our assumptions about human nature.
  16. Merry Christmas from an Atheist
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2006
    I probably represent one of Archbishop John Sentanu's worst nightmares - I am not just an 'aggressive secularist' but a militant atheist to boot. But I have a Christmas tree in the house, I've sent out my Christmas cards, bought my Christmas presents and I will cook goose on Christmas Day. And I will probably listen to Bach's Christmas Oratorio or to Mahalia Jackson's wonderful gospel singing while I am doing so. Yet I don't have a religious bone in my body.
  17. Mistaken Identity
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2008
    Historically, antiracists challenged both the practice of racism and the process of racialisation; that is, both the practice of discriminating against people by virtue of their race and the insistence that an individual can be defined by the group to which he or she belongs. Today's multiculturalists argue that to fight racism one must celebrate group identity. The consequence has been the resurrection of racial ideas and the imprisonment of people within their cultural identities. Racial theorists and multiculturalists, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut observes, have 'conflicting credos but the same vision of the world'. Both fetishise difference. Both seek to 'confine individuals to their group of origin'. Both undermine 'any possibility of natural or cultural community among peoples'. Challenging such a politics of difference has become as important today as challenging racism.
  18. The new language of diversity
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2009
    Racial talk today is as likely to come out of the mouths of liberal anti-racists as of reactionary racial scientists.
  19. No platform or no democracy?
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1996
    Rather than promoting themselves as vehicles for broadening access to discussion and debate, universities now seek to present themselves as highly regulated institutions in which students will be protected from unsolicited or offensive ideas.
  20. Protect the Freedom to Shock
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2001
    Far from being the cornerstone of a diverse, plural society, the refusal to give offence shows respect neither for oneself nor for others. Respect for oneself requires self-belief, a willingness to take a stand, to be unpopular, to refuse to see oneself as a victim easily disturbed by provocative beliefs. Respecting others means not ignoring them but engaging with them by putting them on their mettle and challenging their ideas and arguments. Without heated, entrenched debate a plural society becomes but a hollow shell.
  21. Race Obsession harms those it is meant to help
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2009
    Ethnic monitoring does not just produce misleading data. The process of classification often creates the very problems it is supposed to solve. Local authorities have used ethnic categories not only as a means of collecting data but also as a way of distributing political power - by promoting certain 'community leaders' - and of disbursing public funds through ethnically-based projects. Once the allocation of power, resources and opportunities becomes linked to membership of particular groups, then people inevitably begin to identify themselves in terms of those ethnicities, and only those ethnicities.
  22. The Real Value of Diversity 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2002
    The real failure of multiculturalism is its failure to understand what is valuable about cultural diversity. There is nothing good in itself about diversity. It is important because it allows us to compare and contrast different values, beliefs and lifestyles, make judgements upon them, and decide which are better and which worse. It is important, in other words, because it allows us to engage in political dialogue and debate that can help create more universal values and beliefs. But it is precisely such dialogue and debate, and the making of such judgements, that multiculturalism attempts to suppress in the name of 'tolerance' and 'respect'.
  23. Strange Fruit 
    Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2008
    Malik makes the case that most anti-racists accept the belief, also held by racialists and outright racists, that differences between groups are of great importance. While racialists attribute the differences to biology, anti-racists attribute them to deep-rooted cultural traditions which are typically seen as inherent in the group. Malik argues that these positions are actually quite similar, and makes the case that racism and racial inequality are best combatted by focusing not on our differences but on what unites us. Malik also strongly criticizes the cultural relativism of many anti-racists, and their increasing tendency to reject science as some kind of western imperialist conspiracy to oppress the rest of the world.
  24. 'Take me to your leader'
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2009
  25. The Theology of Respect
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2006
    What the new theology demands is, in fact, not respect but obedience. 'You will only say or do what we think is acceptable' has become the credo of the multiculturalist censor. It is an attitude that turns the notion of respect on its head.
  26. Thinking Outside the Box
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2007
    Ignoring racism on the grounds that all citizens are equal and hence that racial or cultural differences are immaterial is clearly unacceptable. But so is labelling individuals by race, culture or faith and creating conflicts by institutionalising such differences in public policy.
  27. Who owns knowledge?
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2007
    The resurgence of a Romantic view of culture poses a real menace to the free flow of knowledge and threatens to corral it into intellectual Bantustans. The ideas of free speech and open debate become meaningless if we fail to defend a universalist concept of knowledge or if we accept the notion of science as but a local view whose factual claims must defer to cultural and political needs. If scientific debate is constrained to express only sentiments with which people feel comfortable, culturally and politically, then science dies as the line between knowledge and myth becomes eroded.
  28. Who's afraid of the BNP?
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2009
    How should a liberal democratic society respond to an organization such as the BNP? Should the political mainstream ostracise the BNP or engage with it? And if engage, how?
  29. Why both sides are wrong in the race debate 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2008
    For all the talk about culture as fluid and changing, multiculturalism, no less than old-fashioned racism, invariably leads people to think of human groups in fixed terms.
  30. Why do we still believe in race?
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2007
    Races are difficult to define and there are no objective rules for deciding what constitutes a race or to what race a person belongs. People can belong to many races at the same time.