THE writer Salman Rushdie, who was put under a death sentence for insulting the prophet Muhammad, has raised the stakes with an essay in praise of pornography.

Rushdie argues that a free and civilised society should be judged by its willingness to accept pornography.

His views, to be published alongside images of American porn stars in a book called XXX:30 Porn Star, are likely to infuriate Christians and Muslims alike. Iranian hardliners recently renewed a death sentence on him after the original fatwah was lifted.

In an extract from his essay, The East is Blue, to be published this autumn, Rushdie implies that Muslims are avid consumers of pornography because of the segregation of the sexes.

He writes: “Pornography exists everywhere, of course, but when it comes into societies in which it’s difficult for young men and women to get together and do what young men and women often like doing, it satisfies a more general need.”

He adds: “While doing so, it sometimes becomes a kind of standard-bearer for freedom, even civilisation.”

According to Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, the book’s photographer, Rushdie supports his argument with statistics about the volume of porn traffic on the internet in Pakistan.

The libertarian arguments in Rushdie’s essay on pornography represent a provocative twist on a debate he began three years ago to define what aspects of western society should be defended against the ideology of Muslim terrorism.

In the aftermath of the Al-Qaeda attack on America in 2001 he insisted that the “fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings” and asked: “What will we risk our lives to defend? “Can we unanimously concur that . . . even short skirts and dancing are worth dying for?” He claimed that fundamentalists were against “pluralism, secularism . . . sex”.

To his critics, Rushdie’s eagerness to write about sex detracts from his literary strengths. Ziauddin Sardar, the Muslim academic, observed that a character in The Satanic Verses seemed sex-crazed. “Rushdie portrays Mohammed as a banal, frantic man obsessed with sex,” he said.

Rushdie’s recent novel Fury had mixed reviews amid suggestions that it drew on his love life with Padma Lakshmi, who is 26 years his junior. It was nominated for the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award but failed to win. Earlier this year Lakshmi became his fourth wife in a Hindu ceremony in Manhattan, which was photographed by Hello! magazine. They live in New York.

Rushdie is joined by some of the most prominent figures in American literature, music and cinema in his campaign to welcome pornography into the mainstream.

Gore Vidal, the grand old man of American letters, writes in the foreword to XXX:30 Porn Star that America is a puritanical society which has fettered sexuality with unnecessary constraints. “We didn’t take sex so seriously thousands of years ago because we had so many other things to worry about, such as surviving,” he says.

John Malkovich, the actor who starred in the film Dangerous Liaisons, writes about the excitement of seeing his first porn movie Emmanuelle while he was at college during the 1970s. Lou Reed, the singer, muses about “horny bored housewives”.

The book was inspired by the death in 2002 of Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat which brought previously unmentionable sexual practices into the cinematic mainstream. By then she had become a campaigner against pornography and claimed that her husband had forced her to perform some of her scenes at gunpoint.

According to Rowan Pelling, editor of The Erotic Review, the changing attitude of women to pornography has eased its acceptance into the mainstream. “There was a time when feminists saw it as bad. It’s not really so now, except where there is coercive sex. Society moves on,” she said.

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