HAMBURG, Germany, Aug. 28 (UPI) -- Salman Rushdie, the British-Indian novelist, told a German magazine religious fundamentalism is "the fundamental evil of our time."
"Almost all my friends are atheists -- I don't feel as though I'm an exception," Rushdie said in an interview with Der Spiegel. "If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea."
Rushdie's most recent novel, "Shalimar the Clown," is about a Kashmiri circus performer who becomes a terrorist out of a mix of political and personal motives.
Osama bin Laden had one good effect, Rushdie said, convincing some groups like the Basque ETA to abandon terror.
"But there's one thing we must all be clear about: Terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goals by some sort of illegitimate means," he said. "Whatever the murderers may be trying to achieve, creating a better world certainly isn't one of their goals."
Rushdie, a Muslim by birth, published "The Satanic Verses" in 1988, earning him Iranian death threats.
