On a February morning three decades ago, millions of Westerners woke up to read in the news about an unfamiliar concept: a “death fatwa” by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the Iranian Revolution and the founder of the Islamic Republic, against British author Salman Rushdie. The reports sent shockwaves throughout the West and made the term fatwa, which in Arabic merely means “legal opinion,” the chilling word that it is for many today.
Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, published a few months before United Kingdom, had angered Muslims around the world. But no reaction had yet been as radical as that of Khomeini, whose verdict, as announced on Tehran radio on February 14, 1989, read:
In the name of Him, the Highest. Them is only one God, to whom we shall all return.
I inform all zealous Muslims of the world that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses—which has been compiled, printed, and published in opposition to Islam, the Prophet, and the Qur'an—and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death.
I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly, wherever they may be found. so that no one else will dare to insult the Muslim sanctities. God willing, whoever is killed on this path is a martyr.
In addition, anyone who has access to the author of this book, but does not possess the power to execute him, should report him to the people so that he may be punished for his actions.
May peace and the mercy of God and His blessings be with you.[1]
To make the call more appealing, the Iranian Relief Agency also announced a bounty of a million dollars to a non-Iranian assassin, and 200 million Iran riyals (equaling $170,000) to an Iranian one. Rushdie, who heard the news first from the BBC World Service, soon went into hiding under the protection of the British police. He would spend the next decade and more under police protection and in secrecy.
Khomeini embraced this cause as an opportunity to make himself into the premier defender of the faith in the eyes of the world's over one billion Muslims. It was for the glory of the Iranian Revolution, a movement that he had spearheaded a decade earlier, which he envisioned as a model to be exported to other Muslim nations. This was a dream that had, in the years since the 1979 ouster of the shah of Iran, remained largely unfulfilled—not least due to the sectarian divide between the Shia Muslims of Iran and the world's far more numerous Sunni Muslims. Khomeini's Iran was, as it still is, also in competition with another Muslim power, Saudi Arabia, which was passionate to export its own brand of Islam called Wahhabism (a pietistic and literalist form of Sunni Islam).
Some commentators ascribe to Khomeini more mundane motives for the fatwa as well, mainly connected with his need to shore up political support among Iranians. The government had just concluded a humiliating armistice with Saddam Hussein's Iraq after eight devastating years of the Iran-Iraq war. Then, too, there were the embarrassing revelations of dealings with Washington in the Iran-Contra affair.
In any case, the Ayatollah Khomeini would not have been able to issue a death fatwa if such a harsh response to blasphemy had no precedent in Islam—and if The Satanic Versesdid not really look blasphemous in Muslim eyes.
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