The twentieth anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s death sentence on Salman Rushdie (right) takes place in February 2009. In this article for Index on Censorship magazine, Kenan Malik looks at the changes in liberal attitudes to free expression and offence from the Satanic Verses controversy to the present day.
Read here
Index on Censorship contributor Kenan Malik was a guest on the Little Atoms radio show last Friday.
You can listen to the interview here.
My colleague Neil Denny and I will be interviewing Kenan Malik on the Little Atoms radio show tonight. You can hear it live on Resonance FM at 7pm, or download next week from the Little Atoms site. We’re hoping to discuss Kenan’s last book, Strange Fruit, and the upcoming anniversary of Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie, but being a pro free expression programme, who knows where we’ll end up. What we do know is that it will be interesting. Kenan is one of our foremost thinkers on free expression, and is always worth listening to.
Fortunately, Kenan is also a friend of, and frequent contributor to, Index on Censorship. You can read his latest article from the new issue of Index on Censorship, in which he explains how Salman Rushdie’s critics lost the battle, but won the war against free speech here (pdf).
Journalist Shiv Malik was today ordered to must give police all tapes of conversations with alleged jihadist Hassan Butt, with whom he had been writing a book.
Justice Dyson also ruled that Malik must hand over copies of his notebooks within seven days. But he will be allowed to obscure material not directly relating to Butt in the copies.
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