How to Understand Kashmir and Survive the Jihadis: An Interview with Sir Salman Rushdie - Ohann Hari

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".....