"It's about pork sandwiches, short skirts and kissing too"

This interview was conducted before the Mumbai atrocities, but it can help readers to understand what is happening in Kashmir -- and how to respond.

And so it begins again: the low rumble of Islamist death-threats against a novelist, simply because he dares to revel in free speech and free thought in a free society. "We're all living under a fatwa now," Salman Rushdie sighs, listing his persecutors' long slew of victims, from Algerian novelists to Bali clubbers to Circle Line commuters. "You can see the fatwa as the overture to 9/11. It's not a direct line. Maybe you could say it was not the same piece of music. But in some way, it was a harbinger -- a small thing before a big thing. The first crow, you know, flying across the sky."

[ ... ]

Salman has looked down the barrel of Islamism, smelt its cordite, and survived. So he is perpetually being asked - how do we lift the collective fatwa on our transport systems, our nightclubs, our cities? How do we scrape meaning from his misery? "When people ask me how the West should adapt to Muslim sensitivities, I always say - the question is the wrong way round. The West should go on being itself. There is nothing wrong with the things that have for hundred of years have been acceptable - satire, irreverence, ridicule, even quite rude commentary - why the hell not?"

"But you see it every day, this surrender," he says. He runs through a list of the theatres and galleries that have censored themselves in the face of religious fundamentalist protests. He mentions that the entire British media - from the BBC down - placed itself in purdah during the Mohammed cartoons. "What I fear most is that when we look back in twenty-five years' time at this moment, what we will have seen is the surrender of the West, without a shot being fired. They'll say that in the name of tolerance and acceptance, we tied our own hands and slit our own throats. One of the things that have made me live my entire life in these countries is because I love the way people live here."

Salman sees surrender stamped on every one of the 'faith schools' being constructed by Tony Blair. "To say the solution to the problems religion has caused is more religion... it's just crazy," he says. It will only reinforce the sealing-off of Muslims from the world that is symbolised by the veil, which he sees as a hideous anti-feminist shroud, "a one-woman tent".

And he has another blast at Blair: looking to the United States as our anti-Islamist saviour is, he explains, a "terrible mistake. America, like all superpowers, uses only the criterion of self-interest. That's the way in which a superpower operates. Whether it's the Soviet Union or the United States. The criterion is what serves the interests of the power. When that coincides with what we call liberal democratic values then, yeah, it will be on that side. But superpowers of every stripe have a history of installing puppets which will serve their interests. Whether it's in Nicaragua or the Shah of Iran. You can't look to a superpower as a moral arbiter, because its job is not morality. Its job is the preservation of its sphere of influence."

I ask what he thinks about our mutual friend Christopher Hitchens' belief that the US has become a Jeffersonian superpower, bent on spreading democracy across the globe. "It's not true. It's just not true," he says. "You know, I met [Paul] Wolfowitz at Christopher's house on one occasion. And Wolfowitz turned out to be a really nice man - very charming, extremely intelligent, quite self-critical. Many things that you might not have expected him to be. But false idealism, as we know from Graham Greene, can be fantastically self-destructive." So Wolfowitz is Alden Pyle, the Quiet American, wreaking havoc in the name of righteousness? "Yes. I do think that someone in the name of virtue can do terrible damage, for entirely virtuous reasons. But I've never seen great power as having a moral dimension." Just after we meet, it is estimated by the Lancet that 650,000 Iraqis have been killed due to Quiet Americans (and Brits).

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