Source: News24.com
By: Edited by Elmarie Jack
(LONDON, ENGLAND) — Writer Salman Rushdie, in an essay to be published in the autumn, has praised pornography and implied that it is common in Muslim societies as a result of the segregation of the sexes in Muslim culture, it was reported in the Sunday Times.
The 57-year-old author, in remarks certain to stir further controversy in the Islamic world, backs his views with statistics about the volume of porn traffic on the internet in Pakistan.
“Pornography exists everywhere – 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,” an extract from the essay the East is Blue reads.
He also argues that a free and civilised society should be judged by its willingness to accept pornography.
His essay, to be published with images of American porn stars in a book called XXX:30 Porn Star, also states that pornography “becomes a kind of standard-bearer for freedom, even civilisation,” the newspaper quoted the author as saying.
Born in India, Rushdie is best known for his novel the Satanic Verses (1989), a fantasy whose publication aroused the wrath of many Muslims and prompted Iran’s late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to issue a death decree, later dropped by the Iranian administration.
