Kureishi adapts The Black Album for the stage

The Black Album by Hanif Kureishi, a 1993 response to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, has been adapted for the stage by the author and will premiere at the National Theatre in London on July 14.

The novel follows Muslim students of various degrees of faith and radicalism as they react to Rushdie's controversial novel in late-80's London. As in The Satanic Verses, Kureishi explores the acclimitazation and repulsion of Western culture by Muslims in an increasingly multicultural London, both the external clashes between warring cultures and the internal clashes of competing identities and values.

In an essay for The Guardian, Kureishi writes:

The fatwa against Rushdie in February 1989 reignited my concern about the rise of Islamic radicalism, something I had become aware of while in Pakistan in 1982, where I was writing My Beautiful Laundrette. But for me, that wasn't the whole story. Much else of interest was happening at the end of the 80s: the music of Prince; the collapse of communism and the "velvet revolution"; the rise of the new dance music, along with the use of a revelatory new drug, ecstasy; Tiananmen Square; Madonna using Catholic imagery in Like a Prayer; postmodernism, "mash-ups", and the celebration of hybridity – partly the subject of The Satanic Verses.

This was also the period, or so I like to think, when Britain became aware that it was changing, or had already changed from a monocultural to a multiracial society, and had realised, at last, that there was no going back. This wasn't merely a confrontation with simple racism, the kind of thing I'd grown up with, which was usually referred to as "the colour problem". When I was young, it was taken for granted that to be black or Asian was to be inferior to the white man. And not for any particular reason. It was just a fact. This was much more than that. Almost blindly, a revolutionary, unprecedented social experiment had been taking place. The project was to turn – out of the end of the Empire, and on the basis of mass immigration – a predominantly white society into a racially mixed one, thus forming a new notion of what Britain was and would become.

A novelist and screenwriter--and now playwright--Kureishi was born in London in 1954 to a Pakistani father and English mother. His 1990 novel The Buddha of Suburbia won a Whitbread Award for best first novel, and his screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette, directed by Stephen Frears, was nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar at the 1987 Academy Awards.