In 1989, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini, who led the Islamic revolution in Iran ten years earlier, issued a fatwa – a religious edict – calling for the death of author Salman Rushdie. More than three decades later, at a literary event in New York state, a man who was not yet born when the fatwa was decreed is accused of stabbing the author.
The bounty on Rushdie’s head never went away, though the Iranian government did temporarily retreat from it in 1998. Still, 33 years have passed since the original tumult. Few would have predicted that the fatwa would find a willing taker in 2022.
Yet the political legacy of the edict was significant. To understand that, it’s important to see the fatwa in its historical context.
