Talk:Kenan Malik

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I have removed the section entitle "Politics", which is unsourced and inaccurate. Please do not restore this, as under the BLP policy it is necessary that we not include such material. This is the version that I've removed, and which I'll try to replace with something more accurate: In 1987 Malik stood in the UK general election for the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), a small trotskyist group. Malik wrote for the RCP's controversial magazine Living Marxism, later LM, which was closed in March 2000 following a libel lawsuit brought by British news agency ITN after an LM article claimed that ITN had faked a photograph of a prison camp holding Muslims during the Bosnian War. Although the RCP has now disbanded, Malik is still informally involved with the later incarnations of LM, the web magazine Spiked Online, which he has written for, and the Institute of Ideas (IoI). Metamagician3000 05:23, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

I've also fixed the comments about his review of Dawkins, which is actually quite a balanced review and nowhere near as unfavourable as we'd implied. What is there now is much more accurate. However, both the old version and the new version (even more, alas) imbalance the article. Much as the Dawkins' book has been enormously controversial in recent times, Malik's comment on it is a minor part of Malik's own career, which this article is about. We need to expand the article to deal with the other controversies that he has been more deeply involved in, and to create a proper perspective. Metamagician3000 05:31, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

I've now put back a briefer version of the politics section, which I think is more defensible and accurate, though it needs further checking. Metamagician3000 11:16, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Have worked my way through The Meaning of Race with a view to giving a better account of what it says - and have finished this part of the task including now putting in some links. Will do likewise with Man, Beast and Zombie when I have time, unless someone else gets there before me. Metamagician3000 05:09, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

We talk about there being two published books to date, but there are at least a couple of others according to Amazon, though they are not available. Does anyone know if these actually exist, or anything about them? Metamagician3000 06:18, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

I am removing the material about Malik's review of The God Delusion, but will keep it here for future reference if needed:

In reviewing Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion in late 2006, Malik expressed the view that Dawkins had presented lucid and powerful, if not entirely original, arguments against the existence of God. However, he found the book marred by a degree of naivety about the nature of religion's attractions for the faithful, and by a distorted understanding of its role in modern conflicts:

Dawkins's polemic against the need for religion is compelling, even if the arguments are not particularly new. Less persuasive is his attempt to explain what faith is and why people continue to believe. So great is his loathing for religion that it sometimes overwhelms his reasoned argument. ...Whatever our views on God — and I am as obdurate an atheist as Dawkins — blaming it all on religion does little to illuminate the nature of contemporary sectarian conflict." [(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/10/08/bodaw01.xml I don't believe in Richard Dawkins], The Daily Telegraph 2006)

The point is that, while this may be quite an important comment on The God Delusion, and should be mentioned in that article, it is a relatively small event in Malik's career. There are better examples that could be found of controversies that he has been involved in that loomed large in his life. Metamagician3000 09:53, 18 March 2007 (UTC)