From The Guardian:
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.
More here.