The Black Album is a sprawling book about late 80s London, taking in radical Islam, ecstasy – and Prince. It wasn’t easy to adapt for theatre

Last summer I suggested to Jatinder Verma that we attempt a dramatisation of my second novel, The Black Album. This was a novel I had begun to think about in 1991, not long after the publication of The Buddha of Suburbia. Unlike that story, which I’d been trying to tell in numerous versions since I first decided to become a writer, aged 14, The Black Album was more or less contemporary, a “state of Britain” narrative not unlike those I’d grown up watching, enthralled and excited, on television and in the theatre, particularly the Royal Court.

Around the time of its publication in 1993, there had been talk of filming The Black Album. But instead of returning to something I had just written and was relieved to have done with, it seemed easier to write a new piece, with similar themes. This was My Son the Fanatic, a film shot in and around Halifax, starring Rachel Griffiths and Om Puri. Now, with the 20th anniversary of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie approaching, and since The Black Album is set in 1988/9 and concentrates on a small group of religious extremists, we thought my pre-7/7 novel might shed some light on some of the things that have happened since.

Not that I had read the novel since writing it; and if I felt hesitant – as I did – to see it revived in another form, it was because I was anxious that in the present mood it might, in places, seem a little frivolous. But the young radical Muslims I came to know at the time did appear to me to be both serious and intelligent – as well as naive, impressionable and half-mad. And it wasn’t as if the subject of liberalism and its relation to extreme religion had gone away.

It was debate, ideological confrontation and physical passion, that we had in mind when we sat down to work on the translation from prose to play. The novel, which has a thriller-like structure, is a sprawl of many scenes in numerous locations: foul pubs, a further education college, a mosque, clubs, parties, a boarding house, the street. It was impossible to retain this particular sense of late-80s London, so we had to create longer scenes and concentrate on the important and even dangerous arguments between characters, as they interrogated Islam, liberalism, consumer capitalism, as well as the place and meaning of literature.

The first draft was too much like a film. Jatinder reminded me that we had to be ruthless. He also reminded me how much I’ve learned about editing from the film and theatre directors I’ve worked with. If we were to create big parts for actors in scenes set in small rooms, we needed to turn prose into fervent talk, having the conversation carry the piece. We had to ensure the actors had sufficient material to see their parts clearly. The piece had to work for those who hadn’t read the book.

We worked on a number of drafts, and it was the usual business of writing: cutting, condensing, expanding, developing, putting in jokes and trying material in different places until the story moved forward naturally. I was particularly keen to keep the banter of students and their often adolescent attitudes, particularly towards sexuality. This was, after all, one of their most significant terrors: that the excitement the west offered would not only be too much for them, but for everyone.

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.

Now was the time for this to be evaluated. The fatwa, and the debate it stimulated, seemed to make this clear. Was it not significant that many of these discussions were about language? The Iranian condemnation of a writer had, after all, been aimed at his words. What, then, was the relationship between free speech and respect? What could and could not be said in a liberal society? How would different groups in this new society relate – or rather, speak – to one another?

The coercive force of language was something I had long been aware of. As a mixed-race child growing up in a white suburb, the debased language used about immigrants had helped fix and limit my identity. My early attempts to write now seem like an attempt to undo this stasis, to create a more fluid and complicated self through storytelling. In the 1970s, many of us became aware, via the scrutiny of the gay, feminist and black movements, of the power that language exerted. If the country was to change – excluding fewer people – so did the discourse, and why not? There were terms applied to certain groups that were reductive, stupid, humiliating, oppressive.

Liberals were in a tricky position, having to argue both for linguistic protectionism in some areas and for freedom in others. So when some Muslims began to speak of “respect” for their religion, and the “insult” of the Satanic Verses, the idea of free speech – its necessity and extension – was always presented as the conclusive argument. Criticism was essential in any society. This could be said, but not that. But how would this be decided, and by whom?

The Marxists, too, were finding the issue of the fatwa difficult. It was only partly a coincidence that Islamic fundamentalism came to the west in the year that other great cause, Marxist-communism, disappeared. The character of the stuttering socialist teacher in The Black Album was partly inspired by some of the strange convolutions of the disintegrating Left.

To struggle my way through this thicket of fine distinctions, I invented the story of Shahid, a somewhat lost and uncertain Asian kid from Kent – whose father has recently died – and who joins up, at college, with a band of similar-minded anti-racists. The story develops with Shahid discovering that the group are going further than anti-racist activism, beginning to organise themselves not only around the attack on Rushdie, but as Islamo-fascists who believe themselves to be in possession of the Truth.

This is a big intellectual leap. The group, and those they identify with, have powerful, imperialistic ideas of how the world should be. Soon, believing the west has sunk into a stew of decadence, consumerism and celebrity obsession – a not untypical fantasy about the west, corresponding to a not-unsimilar fantasy of the west about the sensual east, as Edward Said has argued – they believe it is their duty to bring about a new, pure world. To do this, they insist on a complete dominance of people’s private lives, and of women and female sexuality in particular.

Some of these attitudes were familiar to me: I grew up in the 60s and 70s when the desire for revolution, for violent change, was part of our style. Almost everyone I knew had wanted, and worked in some way to bring about, not only the modification of capitalism, but its overthrow. For us, from DH Lawrence to William Burroughs and the Sex Pistols, blasphemy and dissent was a blessed thing, kicking open the door to the future. The credo was: be proud of your blasphemy, these vile idols have been worshipped for too long!

But there was, mixed in with this rhetoric, a strong element of puritanism and self-hatred. There was a desire for the masochism of obedience and self-punishment, something illustrated not only by the Taliban, but by all revolts. Riaz, the earnest and clever leader of the small group Shahid joins, understands that hatred of the Other is an effective way of keeping his group together and moving forward. To do this, he has to create an effective paranoia. He must ensure that the idea of the Other is sufficiently horrible and dangerous to make it worth being afraid of. Just as the west has generated fantasies of the east for its own purposes, the east – this time stationed in the west – will do the same, ensuring a complete disjunction.

Of course, for some Muslims this disjunction is there from the start. To be bereft of religion is to be bereft of human value. In Karachi, people were both curious and amazed when I said I was an atheist. “So when you die,” said one of my cousins, “you’ll be all dressed up with nowhere to go?” At the same time Islamic societies, far from being “spiritual”, are – because of years of deprivation and envy – among the most materialistic on earth. Shopping and the mosque have no trouble in getting along.

Towards the end of The Black Album, with the help of his lecturer and soon-to-be girlfriend Deedee Osgood, Shahid understands that he has to withdraw from Riaz’s group in order to establish himself. This isn’t easy, as the group has provided him with solidarity, friendship and direction – and doesn’t want to let him go. He extracts himself, in part, by beginning to discover his sexuality and creativity. It is no accident that British and American pop, as exemplified for Shahid by Prince’s intelligent, sensual and prolific creativity, was in a particularly lively phase.

If, along with mythology, religions are among man’s most important and finest creations – with God perhaps being his greatest idea of all – Shahid also learns how corrupt and stultifying these concepts can become. It turns out that Shahid is one of the lucky ones, strong enough to find out that he’d rather effect the world as an artist than an activist. The others in his group are not so intelligent or objective; or perhaps they are just more passionate for political change. Whatever the reasons – and it is probably too late for psychological explanations – something had begun to stir in the late 80s that has had a profound effect on our world, and which we are still trying to come to terms with.