Salman Rushdie -- We all share his fatwa now

Salman Rushdie speaks with Rose Wild about the recent Kashmir earthquake, the imposition of Arab hijabs on South Asian women, and his new novel, Shalimar the Clown. Editor's note: I just finished Shalimar the Clown and found it a compelling look at our 21st-century conflict between, on the one hand, an active Islamicist minority who would Talibanize every continent on earth -- not just"establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia," as Pres. Bush claimed in his recent speech to the National Endowment for Democracy -- and, on the other hand, the idle majority in the West who struggle to comprehend that our only recourse is to actively wipe the Islamicists out. Rushdie moves his plot between today's First and Third Worlds, 1990s Los Angeles, World War II Europe and post-Partition Kashmir. Cast as a page-turning story of love and revenge, Shalimar the Clown is an elegy for our lost pre-9/11 world and a wake-up call that, on 9/11,"Everywhere was now a part of everywhere else. Russia, America, London, Kashmir. Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete."