Twenty years on, the controversial author is finally detecting a change in attitude to The Satanic Verses

SALMAN RUSHDIE believes some of his critics "sit like dragons on the treasure". The Booker heavyweight, who was knighted last year, was quick to launch into a tirade about a review of his new book when he visited Dublin recently. It's certainly not the first time Rushdie has felt misunderstood. Since the fatwa, and all the furore that followed the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988, Rushdie has struggled with his image as a political symbol. He's often courted controversy and celebrity - criticising faith-based schools and the burqa, or hanging out with Bono and even making a cameo appearance in the Bridget Jones movie. But now he's weary of making the headlines.

"I think many people think of me more as a political creature than a literary creature - that's not how I feel about myself," he says.

Rushdie is dressed casually in jeans and a jumper, and every now and then sips from a glass of red wine. "I became this person that people would turn to for a comment on this or that contemporary or political issue," he says. "I don't want to end up being a talking head. That was never my plan for life."

What Rushdie really wants to talk about is the lustful, enchanted and darkly occult world of his latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence. Set in the 15th and 16th centuries, this tale of love and power moves between the Mughal empire in India and the Renaissance times in Italy. Rushdie spent years on the research, evident in the pages and pages of the book's bibliography. But it was his father's bedtime stories that first got Rushdie interested in the magical tales of the Orient. "My father introduced me to the Eastern wonder tales, like Ali Babba and Aladdin," he says. "My mother was a storyteller of a different kind: she was the world champion gossip and knew everything about everyone."

The Enchantress of Florence is Rushdie's most explicit novel to date. The narrative frequently strays under the covers, moving from whorehouses to upper-class bedrooms and everywhere in between. While there are rich and colourful descriptions, the sexual references are sometimes peppered with expletives. So why now, after 10 novels and many other works of non-fiction, is Rushdie so interested in writing about sex? "The world I was describing in the book was so sexually active, that in order to talk about it properly, I had to let that stuff in," he says.

Writing about sex in the 15th or 16th centuries was easier than writing about it now, he agrees. "The rule I made for myself [while writing the book] was that the sex has got to serve some other purpose . . . it has to advance your knowledge of the character or the story." Coming from an Indian background, he says, made him a little inhibited about the whole issue. "The first explicit sex scene I wrote is in The Moor's Last Sigh, when the couple have sex in the warehouse," he says. "But even there, the narrator is very tongue-tied, because he is talking about his parents."

Women's erotic power is also a central theme in the book. Most of the female characters are either prostitutes or goddesses, bewitching men or spurning them. Is this not the type of imagery women have been trying to get away from? "You have to understand that people at a certain time thought a certain way, and if you're trying to write a real novel about the past, it can't be post-Freudian, it can't be post-feminist," Rushdie explains. "Otherwise it's too knowing."

Rushdie's previous book, Shalimar the Clown, was about the disputed territories of Kashmir. "The last novel I wrote was very political, this time I thought it was good to get away from the contemporary." As a reader, however, it's hard to escape the contemporary relevance of elements of the book. One of the characters, for example, wonders "if faith is no more than an error of our ancestors".

Initially, Rushdie seems slow to enter into a conversation about religion - but that quickly fades. "Why is it that 95 per cent of the world has the same religion that their parents do? Why is it inherited - you shouldn't believe in it just 'cause your parents did," he says. "I come from a generation which thought [the issue of religion] had gone away. The thing about the 1960s and 1970s is we really thought that the idea of religion being a serious public force was over. We were wrong," he says.

Twenty years after The Satanic Verses, Rushdie feels like the whole controversy is still "like an albatross" around his neck. But people's attitudes to the book are starting to change, he believes. "I've had more than one person come up to me and confess that they'd been involved in demonstrations and protests [against The Satanic Verses] and then 10 years later had grown up enough to read the book and had no problem with it."

Ironically at the time, perhaps, Rushdie believed The Satanic Verses was the least political book he had written. He had already published two novels, Shame and Midnight's Children (which won the Booker), about the world he came from. The Satanic Verses aimed to explore migration, but that got lost in the controversy over Islam.

"Instead of having an intellectual argument about the book," he says, "you were having a discussion about international terrorism . . . it became this cause célèbre and you had to take positions." But Rushdie can see a positive side to it all now. "I can't say that it was fun, but I'm glad it's all over," he says. And if he had to go back, he'd write it again. "One of the good things about being at this particular end of the story is that finally people are getting to read it as a book and not as a kind of hot potato."

Born in Bombay in 1947, he studied in Cambridge and worked in advertising before turning to writing. As an experienced and "devoted" multiculturalist, immigration is still a strong talking point for Rushdie. In 2006, he caused a stir when he backed comments by British Minister Jack Straw criticising the wearing of the niqab in the UK. "The great danger is when this liberal attitude to multiculturalism slides downwards into cultural relativisim and people start exonerating things that they would not normally accept on the grounds of 'oh it's their culture'," he says now.

Rushdie lives in London and New York, but also tries to visit Bombay once a year. He has two sons and last year divorced his fourth wife, the model and actress Padma Lakshmi. "I have a plural sense of home," he says. "I've had a house in New York for nine years, so I do feel at home. But I'll always feel at home in London and when I go to Bombay I have a sense of home too, although I haven't lived there for a long time."

The next book will be for children, he says, although he would like to write a spy novel. After years of bodyguards and secret surveillance during the fatwa, he certainly has enough first-hand experiences.

The Enchantress of Florenceis published by Jonathan Cape, £18.99