SALMAN RUSHDIE, the writer, has called Britain’s Muslim leaders a “joke” and accused them of allowing radicalism to flourish.

The writer said there had been a “backsliding into bigotry” among Muslims both in Britain and around the world.

“In this country Muslim leaders are a kind of joke,” said the writer during a talk about his latest novel yesterday evening at the Edinburgh Book Festival. “Nobody follows them. There is no genuine organisation representing the Muslim community.”

Rushdie spent nine years in hiding after Ayatollah Khomeini, then leader of Iran, issued a fatwa in 1989 calling for his death over his novel The Satanic Verses and his words last night show his willingness to continue attacking intolerance in the Islamic world.

He said that while most Muslims opposed fundamentalism, the same could not always be said of the religion’s leaders in Britain. He called on what he called the “silent majority” of believers to take on the radicals.

“It [the majority] needs to stop being silent,” he said. “There is no genuine leadership and no genuine organisation that represents the majority. [Islam] needs to remember it is all right to disagree. It needs to take on board the basic tenets of a democratic country. The majority needs to make its voice heard.”

Senior Muslims who have recently appeared to support terrorism include Yaqub Zaki, deputy leader of the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain, who said earlier this month he would be “very happy” if there were a terrorist attack on Downing Street.

Rushdie argued: “Islam is going backwards very fast.”

Rushdie also talked about how, when he was younger, Islam had been a pacifist religion. “It’s not a religion of peace at the moment as it used to be. The jihadists have come in instead.”

Rushdie, who won the Booker Prize with his novel Midnight’s Children, went on to blame President George Bush for much of the radicalism in the Muslim world and said he had managed to spark a jihad — religious war — against the West.

“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.

“Our cities used to be amazing cosmopolitan places, now in the last half century this terrible thing has come and severed these places.”

The author also spoke about the insurgencies in Iraq and Kashmir, the territory disputed between India and Pakistan where his new novel, Shalimar, The Clown, is partly set.

Rushdie drew some parallels between insurgents in these conflicts and the French resistance movement in the second world war.

“It’s exactly the same thing but the context is different. I let the reader make the decision,” he said.

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