March 15, 2019
Valentine’s Day was the 30th anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s “death fatva” issued against author Salman Rushdie. Although most Iranian officials have preferred to forget all about it, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi this year surprisingly chose to use the anniversary to re-authorize the death sentence.
“Imam Khomeini’s verdict regarding Salman Rushdie is based on divine verses and just like divine verses, it is solid and irrevocable,” Khamenehi tweeted in toto Valentine’s Day in English.
The hardline media in Iran did not make a major event of this year’s 30th anniversary, though most years a few dailies rehash the history of how Khomeini said Rushdie must die for writing an English-language novel, “The Satanic Verses,” that Khomeini ruled blasphemous, although he could not have read it.
The book was published 1-1/2 years earlier and Iran made no issue of it until bands of Pakistanis went on riotous sprees condemning the novel. Khomeini apparently only heard of it as a result of those protests.
There was an immense uproar in the West against Khomeini for saying that any Muslim who killed not only Rushdie but anyone associated with the book would be honored in heaven. Rushdie was put under 24-hour guard by Britain and was never attacked, but three people involved in translating his book into other languages were attacked and one, the Japanese translator, killed.
Khamenehi, who was Iran’s president at the time of the death sentence, tried to play it down by saying it wasn’t really a death sentence. Khomeini reportedly called Khamenehi in and disciplined him for doing so.
Why Khamenehi decided this year to resurrect the death threat was a mystery. Traditionally the death sentence has been used within Iran by people who wanted to show they were tough and staunchly anti-Western. But Khamenehi re-issued the threat in English, where few hardliners would know what he was doing, but Westerners would.
Twitter noticed, also, and suspended Khamenehi’s account for violating its rule against threatening violence. It was the Twitter suspension that gave widespread publicity in the West to what Khamenehi had said.
In 1989, the United Kingdom broke relations with Iran over the original threat. It took almost a decade for the Islamic Republic to appease London and for relations to be resumed. Britain said that the Iranian government had resolved the feud by saying that, while a fatva could only be altered or rescinded by its author and Khomeini was long since dead, the fatva was only a religious edict and did not apply to the government of the Islamic Republic which would take no action against Rushdie.
However, this was exactly what Iranian officials had been saying since days after Khomeini issued the fatva. What was even odder—and not questioned by hardliners—was the illogic that a government that claimed to be based on religion would not be required to adhere to the religious decrees of its very founder.
Rushdie started appearing in public and traveling widely after a decade. He later moved to New York where he has lived for two decades. But all is not normal. On the 30th anniversary, he was in Paris where he gave an interview to a reporter for Agence France Presse (AFP) at the office of his French publisher. The reporter noted that armed guards were stationed outside the room where the interview was held and were posted in the building’s courtyard.
“The Satanic Verses” was Rushdie’s fifth book. He has now written his 18th and is a very wealthy author.
In the AFP interview, he played down any suggestion of continuing trouble. “Things are fine now,” he said, adding that he lives “a completely normal life…. I take the subway.”
Asked if he should have written the book, Rushdie replied, “I take the Edith Piaf position—Je ne regrette rien. [I regret nothing],” citing the French singer’s anthem of defiance.
This is the full text of Khomeini’s fatva: “Inna Lillahi wa inna ilaihi raji’un. We are from Allah and to Allah we shall return. I am informing all brave Muslims of the world that the author of The Satanic Verses, a text written, edited, and published against Islam, the Prophet of Islam, and the Qoran, along with all the editors and publishers aware of its contents, are condemned to death. I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth. And whoever is killed in this cause will be a martyr, Allah willing. Meanwhile, if someone has access to the author of the book but is incapable of carrying out the execution, he should inform the people so that [Rushdie] is punished for his actions.”
The book was published by Viking Penguin, which said in 2012 that the novel was the firm’s best seller of all time, although it had only limited sales before the fatva.
