Salman Rushdie interview: A New York state of mind - “If you think about Beirut in the 1950s it was a fantastically open, cultured city. So was Damascus. So was Kabul. So was Tehran. These were all places which had come a long way. And now they seem to have slid back from that moment to something much less likable. And I’ve tried to say that these are questions which Muslim societies really need to ask themselves.”