Sunday, August 28 2005 17:41 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

London: Accusing President George W Bush of being responsible for much of the radicalism in the Muslim world, India-born controversial writer Salman Rushdie has said that the US leader has done what al-Qaeda supremo Osama bin Laden "failed to do in sparking a 'jihad'."

Arguing that "Islam is going backwards very fast," Rushdie, during a talk on his latest novel 'Shalimar, The Clown' at Edinburgh Book Festival yesterday, also spoke 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 for his novel Midnight's Children, said that "in the 1950s and 1960s, in Kashmir, there was no radical Islam."

"It was a tolerant, a mystical type of Islam. Bush has now done what bin Laden failed to do in starting a 'jihad' (holy war). Our cities used to be amazing cosmopolitan places, now in the last half century this terrible thing has come and severed these places," he said while blaming the American President for much of the radicalism in the Muslim world.

The author also spoke about insurgencies in Iraq and Jammu and Kashmir, where is new book is partly set. He drew some parallels with insurgents in these conflicts and the French resistance movement during the Second World War. "It's exactly the same thing but the context is different. I let the reader make the decision."