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Kenan Malik

Kenan Malik

The Guardian

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The EU pays Africa’s brutal militias to lock up migrants. Britain wants to follow suit

‘P lease help, today one person self dead by petrol because hopeless.” Sally Hayden received the text in October 2018. The Irish Times journalist...

04.06.2023 100

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

If you defend free speech, you must defend it all and not silence those you disagree with

Normally, I’m keen for this column to be widely read. This time, though, I hope not too widely. I’d be happy if it doesn’t catch the attention...

28.05.2023 70

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Once we ask the Lee Anderson question, our democracy is on a slippery slope

‘I ’ve looked at your website and it says you embrace democracy,” Tory MP and Conservative party deputy chair Lee Anderson said to Graham...

21.05.2023 200

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

It’s no longer ‘the will of the people’ to turn our back on asylum seekers

‘I t is designed to meet the will of the British people in a humane and fair way.” So wrote the home secretary, Suella Braverman, and the justice...

14.05.2023 10

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

If you think decent homes for all is an impossible dream, take a look at Vienna

W hy shouldn’t working-class people own their own homes? It’s a rhetorical question that has provided the justification for the transformation of...

07.05.2023 100

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Diane Abbott’s letter shows how antiracism has been reduced to decrying ‘white privilege’

I n 1996, Diane Abbott wrote a column for the Hackney Gazette objecting to the recruitment of Finnish nurses to work in a local hospital. The NHS,...

30.04.2023 100

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

When Cleopatra was alive, she wasn’t categorised by the colour of her skin

I n 1751, the great American polymath Benjamin Franklin worried about the small number of “purely white People in the World”. “All Africa,”...

23.04.2023 100

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

This obsession with a ‘new elite’ hides the real roots of power

I n 1956, the radical American sociologist C Wright Mills wrote about what he called, in the title of a book, The Power Elite . America’s elite,...

16.04.2023 70

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

This stark vision of Grenfell reveals so much about the elite that really rules us

I t opens with birdsong in the dark. It ends with brightly lit blank screen. In between, we look out from a helicopter, flying across London before...

09.04.2023 90

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

From the cradle to the grave, there is something rotten in the state of welfare

F rom the cradle to the grave. Once that phrase was a description of the ambition of the welfare state. Now, it is an illustration of how far that...

26.03.2023 100

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

‘Stop the boats’ does echo the language of the 30s – but those words were English

I t has become a familiar political pas de deux. One side draws an analogy between some current policy or practice and 1930s Germany, as if Nazis...

19.03.2023 650

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

The Observer view on how Xi Jinping plans to use his meeting with war crimes suspect Vladimir Putin

The welcome and overdue indictment of Vladimir Putin for war crimes allegedly committed in Ukraine confirms his position as a global outlaw. The...

19.03.2023 50

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Vermeer’s luminous interiors gave us a new way into the inner worlds of others

T here is a scene in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead in which the main character, John Ames, a pastor, walking to his church, comes across a...

12.03.2023 100

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Mezquita and Hagia Sophia: two sacred symbols and the culture wars that belie their complex history

C órdoba’s mosque-cathedral is one of the most glorious buildings in Europe. I was last there 30 years ago, but the memory is still vividly etched...

04.03.2023 5

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Politicians have the right to strong religious views. But not to be shielded from scrutiny

‘S ecularism now means a ban on religious people in public life.” “We seem to have ushered in a kind of reverse religious test.” “Does her...

26.02.2023 100

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

India enjoyed a free and vibrant media. Narendra Modi’s brazen attacks are a catastrophe

I n January, the BBC broadcast a two-part series, India: The Modi Question , which looked forensically at the role of Narendra Modi in fomenting the...

19.02.2023 70

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Prevent doesn’t stop radicalisation, and the Shawcross plan will just make it worse

Much of the thinking behind the counter-terror strategy is false. Expanding its remit and closing down criticism won’t help

12.02.2023 80

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Debt, bad; work, good: ‘pub bore’ beliefs that seal a miserable fate for the poorest

Politicians and the media often present policies as moral duties, when they are nothing of the sort

05.02.2023 100

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Focusing on diversity means we miss the big picture. It’s class that shapes our lives

In shifting our gaze from equality, we lose sight of the most marginalised

29.01.2023 300

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Hanif Kureishi helped liberate British Asians from their imposed identities

The writer, who is stricken in hospital after an accident, gave us real characters, not stereotypes

22.01.2023 80

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

An art treasure long cherished by Muslims is deemed offensive. But to whom?

An academic spat over a depiction of Muhammad reveals how the language of diversity is eviscerating its very meaning

08.01.2023 300

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

The Twitter Files should disturb liberal critics of Elon Musk – and here’s why

Leaked messages show an unhealthy link between social media and state security

01.01.2023 300

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Workable proposals? No, western immigration policy is a theatre of cruelty

Another week and more drownings in the Channel. Politicians’ words of regret are hypocritical: they chose not to prevent them

18.12.2022 100

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

ChatGPT can tell jokes, even write articles. But only humans can detect its fluent bullshit

It has been hailed as the AI program that could spell the end of search engines, but we should beware putting our trust in a machine

11.12.2022 60

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

White Britons are declining and immigrants help prop up Christianity. Does it matter?

New census data reveals a complex emerging society increasingly at ease with itself. Not that you’d know it from our bitter public rows

04.12.2022 60

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

It can be hard to distinguish the cultural claims of right and left. Just look at Qatar

Universal human rights or cultural imperialism? Divide clouds the debate over World Cup hosts

27.11.2022 100

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

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