The year is 1989, and Shahid, a young Asian, moves from comfortable, suburban Kent to sample life as a London student. He’s wide open to influences, and is quickly snapped up by a fundamentalist Muslim brotherhood. He also gets embroiled in a passionate affair with a lecturer. Shahid is truly torn between two sets of conflicting values.

Thus runs the plotline of Hanif Kureishi’s novel The Black Album. Now Kureishi — perhaps best known for the screenplay of My Beautiful Laundrette — has adapted his book into a play, staged by the National Theatre and Tara Arts. I asked him how the idea for The Black Album came about.

“I’d been in Pakistan in the early 1980s, and my family had made me aware of fundamentalism in that country — the force of Islam as a political entity. But, like most of us, I hadn’t really become aware of it in the west until the fatwa and campaign against Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1989. After that, I started to do some research, near where I used to live in Hammersmith.

“I went to mosques, and to Hammersmith College, where I hung out with a bunch of kids and got involved with this particular ideology. I followed them around, interviewed them, and wrote stuff down. I became fascinated by what they were about. I then wrote The Black Album, which is partly about fundamentalism, but it also includes dance culture, and other post-modern stuff that was around at that time. It’s all mixed up in the story.”

So did any of the kids Kureishi met end up as characters in the book, and in the play?

“I don’t think I used anyone in particular, but I did incorporate a lot of the dialogue, and many of the things that were said to me. I wrote them down and kept them. I can’t remember exactly, but I must have heard something, thought it was hilarious, and passed it on to one or other of the characters.

“But the main thing I’ve tried to do is to create a balance between the characters: if you’ve got a group, you need a leader, a follower, and relationships like that. The point for me wasn’t to try to represent people I’d actually met, but to make a story that works.”

The novel was first published in 1995, well before 9/11, and the London bombings. How much temptation was there to rewrite things for the play, to add the benefit of hindsight?

“It would have seemed too knowing — the kids I portray didn’t know what was ahead. Nor did any of us. So we tried to keep it as much in the original period as possible. I think it would have been a bit daft to try and integrate later ideas into the play.”

One reviewer has described Hanif Kureishi’s instincts as “affectionately satirical”, perhaps an odd expression in view of deeply serious issues raised in The Black Album. But Kureishi seemed entirely happy and laid back about the description.

“I find the world amusing, and I love the sound of laughter — particularly in the theatre, and particularly when one of my plays is involved. But I want to combine that with some sort of seriousness. I’m not a comedian — I guess writers could be described as sit-down, rather than stand-up, comedians!

“The Black Album is a satire on a group of people who believe in something too much, you might say: they believe in it so much that it becomes absurd.

“There’s nothing blasphemous in the novel or the play: satire and being critical are not the same as being blasphemous. I don’t know The Koran well enough to be blasphemous, to be honest.”

Hanif Kureishi and I met in a café in London’s Shepherds Bush, very close to the site of one of the intended second round of London bombings. Four years on, I wondered if he still worried about what might be inside the bag carried by the passenger sitting next to him on the Tube?

“I think they’re wondering about me, to be honest, rather than me wondering about them. Lots of the actors in the play have been pulled up by the police, and searched.

“I’m very aware that they are being harassed and bothered, and made anxious by people staring at them when they get on the Tube with their rucksacks.

“The whole thing has created an atmosphere of paranoia on all sides.”

  • The Black Album is at the Oxford Playhouse from November 10 to 14. Tickets on 01865 305305 or at oxfordplayhouse.com