BRITAIN: Novelist Salman Rushdie believes the Muslim Council of Britain is not moderate. Deaglán de Bréadún reports
Writer Salman Rushdie is back in the headlines again because of his sharp and repeated criticisms of some Muslim community leaders in Britain.
The Muslim Council of Britain, an umbrella group of about 250 organisations throughout the UK, is his main target and Rushdie told BBC Radio Four yesterday: "It's a moot point how many people actually follow them. But I think the mistake is to see these people as being somehow the voice of moderation."
The Indian-born writer, who lived under a death threat for nine years after a fatwa was issued against him in 1989 by Iran's religious leader, added: "What really needs to happen is that the very large majority of British people of Muslim origin who don't want to be just defined in terms of their religion start speaking up and creating a genuine voice which represents the majority rather than these kind of minority figures claiming to be important."
But he also saw some positive developments: "I think it's quite encouraging that there are beginning to be a number of voices speaking up, saying 'We don't accept these leaders'."
The writer also criticised Prime Minister Tony Blair for relying on organisations like the Muslim Council in the fight against extremism: "I think it's a very bad mistake." Interviewed also in the Guardian yesterday, Rushdie attacked the policies of successive British governments.
"England made a very big, historical mistake to allow itself to become the kind of terrorist capital of the world. And people were telling them this for 20 years. It was just dumb.
"The idea that by allowing all these groups to hang out here it would somehow protect England from attack was a deliberate philosophy. And it's not even party political because both of them did it. Thatcher did it, Blair did it. I think it's extraordinary to see people screaming hate while living off the state."
Rushdie called recently for a "Muslim reformation" to bring Islam into the modern age, as he saw it. Speaking at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Saturday he said: "In this country Muslim leaders are a kind of joke. Nobody follows them. There is no genuine organisation representing the Muslim community."
But the novelist did not spare US president George Bush, whom he blamed for inciting Muslims to revolt. "In the 1950s and 1960s, in Kashmir, there was no radical Islam," he said. "It was a tolerant, a mystical type of Islam. Bush has now done what bin Laden failed to do in starting a jihad."
Ayatollah Khomeini, the late Iranian religious leader, condemned Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, for being "blasphemous against Islam" and said the author was guilty of the crime of "apostasy" for attempting to abandon his Muslim faith. The death threat was effectively lifted by the Iranian government in 1998.
Rushdie's latest work, Shalimar the Clown, focuses on the disputed region of Kashmir on the India-Pakistan border and the novel has been longlisted for the Booker Prize.