Rushdie says something wrong at heart of Islam

PARIS - British author Salman Rushdie, who lived in hiding for nine years under a death sentence from Iran's supreme leader, said in an interview published on Thursday that something had gone wrong at the heart of Islam.

Rushdie told Le Monde newspaper that his years fleeing the 1989 fatwa from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had forced him to pay close attention to a radicalization of the Muslim world.

"Something has gone wrong at the heart of Islam. It is quite recent. I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of culture," he said in an interview published in French.

"For me, it is a tragedy that this culture has regressed to this point, like a self-inflicted wound. The Islam in which I grew up was open, influenced by Sufism and Hinduism, and not like the one which is spreading rapidly at the moment." (continue reading...)