The Salman Rushdie affair: Thirty years and a novelist later | Iran | Al Jazeera - 0 views
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Thirty years ago, on Valentine's Day, February 14, 1989, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, then the supreme leader of Iran, issued a religious decree, a fatwa, condemning the British Indian novelist Salman Rushdie to death.
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What had triggered the Ayatollah's ire, and indeed the fury of many other Muslims, particularly in Pakistan, was Rushdie's novel called Satanic Verses which had just come out. The book was written and published in English. The ayatollah did not read English. He was reacting to the reaction of others who had not read the novel either. It was all a comedy of terrors.
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in February 1989, the Iranian supreme leader was very much preoccupied with guaranteeing the continuation of the Islamic Republic he had established. He needed to order a redrafting of the constitution in a way to allow his devoted follower Ali Khamenei (the current supreme leader of Iran), who had nowhere near the qualifications of Montazeri, to succeed him. He needed yet another smokescreen, just like the American Hostage Crisis of 1979-1981, which had allowed him to consolidate power by wiping out his political rivals. Rushdie's Satanic Verses showed up at an opportune time. It had come out of nowhere and the ayatollah would take it somewhere else.
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