When news broke on August 12, 2022, that the writer Salman Rushdie had been attacked, many people immediately recalled the fatwa, or edict, calling on all Muslims to take his life, issued in 1989 by the Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s Supreme Leader at the time. Khomeini accused Rushdie’s 1988 novel, “The Satanic Verses,” of insulting Islam and blaspheming against the Prophet Muhammad.
Violent riots and credible death threats sent Rushdie into hiding, and he spent the next nine years under British police protection. He did not emerge again until 1998, after Iran promised it would not enforce the fatwa, though it did not rescind it.
