"Even at this moment, when there have been explosions in a mosque or temple (in India) - it really hasn't worked. The Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the beginning they were always very secular-minded," the Booker prize-winning novelist told The Independent, in an interview published on Thursday.
"Whereas the radicalisation of Muslims in Britain is 'dreadful', Indian Muslims are a model which could be beneficially studied about how you show a minority community that their interests are best served by secular democracy, and not by religious communal politics. If you play the game of religious communal politics, you will always be outnumbered. That was the argument Nehru and Gandhi took to India's religious minorities, and it worked."
Rushdie said Kashmir was a model of pluralist tolerance. "It mingled and mixed with Hinduism, with mullahs even compromising on their austere monotheism by directing their followers to worship at the shrines of the local Hindu saints.
As he put it, "To be Kashmiri was to value what was shared far more highly than what divided." Rushdie said, "The Islam that now exists is not the Islam that I grew up with. The good guys are losing the battle within Islam."
Rushdie sees his career as falling into three acts. In the first, he wrote about his lost homelands - India and Pakistan. Then he wrote about the transition from that world to Britain, the journey across water to the West. "And now I think that the third act is to say, 'All right, all that happened,' he explained.
"The world has become this mixed up place, the age of mass migration has taken place and we live in its aftermath - now what?" He feared that many people are willfully misunderstanding the new Islamist virus that has spread through this new world. "People have been so knocked off balance by what's going on that their normally well-functioning moral sense seems to have lost its footing."
After 18 years in the Islamist cross-hairs, Rushdie wanted people to understand that this new Islamic fundamentalism is not simply the lump sum of all the bad things the West has done to Muslims, reflected back at us."
Stating that he did have a lot to criticise about the way in which the American government is behaving, or the British government, he said, "If tomorrow the Israel/Palestine issue was resolved to the total happiness of all parties, it would not diminish the amount of terrorism coming out of al- Qaeda by one jot.
It's not what they're after," he said. "Yes, it's a recruiting tool, rhetorically. Many people see there's an injustice there, and it helps them to get people into the gang, but it's not what they want. What they want is to change the nature of human life on earth into the image of the Taliban.
"If you want the whole earth to look like Taliban Afghanistan, then you're on the same side as them. If you don't want that, you're not. They do not represent the quest for human justice. That, I think, is one of the great mistakes of the left," Rushdie said.
He sensed soft racism in the refusal to see Islamic fundamentalists for what they are. When looking at the Christian fundamentalists of the United States, most people see an autonomous movement of superstitious madmen. But when they look at their Islamic equivalents, they assume they cannot mean what they say.
"One of the things that's commonly said by Islamists is that it's acceptable to bomb a disco, because a disco is a place where people are behaving in a disgusting way. Go away and die - that's all bin Laden wants you to do. It's not just about Iraq, it's about ham sandwiches and kissing in public places and sex with girls you're not married to. It's about life."
