The Rushdie Fatwa, Thirty Years Later

Who among us would dare to predict what the world would look like thirty years from now?

February 14, 2019 Bruce Bawer 9

Thirty years ago today, the then ruler of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini, sent a valentine to Salman Rushdie in the form of a fatwa.

Rushdie, born in 1947 in Bombay (now Mumbai), had attended Cambridge, settled in Britain, and become famous with his second novel, Midnight’s Children (1981). His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), featured a storyline about Muhammed and the Koran that was deemed blasphemous throughout the Muslim world, leading the novel to be banned in over a dozen countries.

The fatwa condemned Rushdie, his publishers, and his editors to death, and called 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.”

Khomeini’s government announced that anyone who assassinated Rushdie would receive $6 million, if he survived, and instant martyrdom in Heaven, if he didn’t. The fact that Rushdie, an outspoken leftist, had joined many other cultural-elite types in supporting the overthrow of the Shah apparently didn’t impress Khomeini enough to keep him from ordering Rushdie’s murder.

At that time, the word fatwa was unfamiliar outside the Muslim world. Indeed, for most people in the West, the idea of the long arm of Islam reaching out from that primitive corner of the planet and into the civilized West was a relatively new idea – even though, in historical terms, it was a very old idea, dating back to Islam’s seventh-century founding. Even the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre was widely seen not as a strike against the Free World that was motivated by Islamic ideology but, rather, as an act of Palestinian Jew-hatred..............

...............the idea of some religious leader in Iran ordering the death of a prominent British subject struck many in the West as grotesque, absurd – a joke, even. But it soon became clear that this was no joke. Bookstores in the U.S. and Britain were bombed. Copies of the book were publicly burned in a number of British cities. Across the Muslim world, dozens died in anti-Rushdie riots. In 1991, the book’s Italian translator was beaten and stabbed and its Japanese translator murdered; in 1993, William Nygaard, its Norwegian publisher, was shot several times outside his home, but survived. (Nygaard would live to publish the 2004 memoirs of child-murdering terrorist Mullah Krekar and to host Krekar at a garden party.)..........The fatwa also exposed for the first time the readiness of many Western political leaders and cultural icons to appease Islamic bullies ...............To Read More....