Alongside her career as a journalist, Malik spent ten years in
emerging markets private equity. She writes on British and American politics,
identity politics and
Islamophobia. Her comments in
The Guardian after the
Charlie Hebdo shooting were quoted in
New York magazine and
The New York Times, a topic that she also spoke about on the BBC's
Newsnight alongside
David Aaronovitch of
The Times and
Myriam François-Cerrah of the
New Statesman. Malik's columns and dispatches for
Foreign Policy magazine focus on Sudanese politics. In 2015, Malik and
Peter Hitchens discussed the role of the
hijab and Muslim cultural identity in Britain on
Channel 4 News. In 2016, Malik was one of three columnists featured in
The Guardians "The Web We Want" series discussing
online abuse and negative comments they had received online regarding their work. Following this, she contributed to a session at the
British Parliament with the aim of tackling the
chilling effect online abuse has on emerging writers. In 2018, journalist
Peter Oborne described Malik in the
British Journalism Review as writing "with wit and punch about race, class, and gender, as well as Islam". Oborne characterised her as an example of a rising generation of politicized Muslim journalists who "use their identities to shed light on the inequalities in British society. They treat Islam as a political identity as much as a religious one. Being Muslim gives this millennial generation an air not of religious but of political defiance. For them, it is a tool for showing that Britain remains a country dominated by a small group of people." In 2019, Malik published
We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent, which was described by the South African
Sunday Times as a book in which "Malik examines and deciphers falsehoods that society has come to accept as truth." It was released in
paperback in 2020, and a new edition was published in 2021. In 2020, she appeared on
The Moral Maze as part of a debate hosted by
Michael Buerk along with
Mona Siddiqui,
Tim Stanley,
Andrew Doyle; the debate was over the "morality of the
British Empire". ==Honours and awards==