Salman Rushdie Discusses Extremism

Posted on September 8, 2005

The Independent interviews 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.

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".

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.

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