The Independentinterviews Salman Rushdie the day after the videotape emerged that the London suicide bomber made in which he spoke with a British accent and tried to justify his actions. Rushdie spoke about the crisis in the Muslim world and the dangers of religious extremism.
Rushdie now feels "nostalgic for the days of the Seventies and Eighties, when the way in which minority groups organised themselves in this country was along secular lines", and notes: "It's been a bit hijacked in the last decade and a half by religious politics. I just think that it's important to get back to the other stuff. But while we're talking to the wrong people, it's difficult to see how we're going to solve any problems."
As for the foreign preachers of holy murder who now, at last, face expulsion, to report that Rushdie sounds relaxed about their loss would be putting it too blandly. "I have to tell you - I don't give a damn. They're awful people." But, given the recklessness with civil liberties he deplores in New Labour, he concedes: "The issue of the baby and the bath water does arise. I do think that the Government has strong authoritarian tendencies, and I do worry that, now that it feels justified in slinging people out, it'll start slinging out anyone whose face it doesn't like."
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In many ways, Rushdie's new novel, Shalimar the Clown (Jonathan Cape, £17.99), enacts exactly this dismaying process.
The book shows, through a quartet of tragically entangled lives, the descent into cyclical slaughter and repression of the once-idyllic valley of Kashmir. That "tasty green sweetmeat caught in a giant's teeth" has been torn for two decades between Islamist atrocities and Indian army reprisals. And the book depicts the globalisation of this conflict, in a rage-filled "time of demons" when family rows spill out over the oceans and "everywhere was a mirror of everywhere else".
As for the people of Kashmir, says Rushdie, their attitude towards the headscarved jihadi thugs and uniformed military thugs remains the same: "Would you both please f*** off. That has been, quite consistently, the position of ordinary people in Kashmir for the past 60 years. And that's the only option nobody considers."
Rushdie's new book is Shalimar the Clown (Random House) which -- so far anyway -- hasn't earned him another fatwa ordering his death. But it's still early: give them time.
