Introduction

On February 14, 1989, listeners to Tehran Radio heard a voice they had not expected to hear again. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had not spoken publicly for weeks and was widely believed to be on his deathbed, delivered a brief statement that would echo around the world:

“I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of The Satanic Verses book—which is against Islam, the Prophet, and the Qur’an—and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death. I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly, wherever they find them, so that no one will dare to insult the Muslim sanctities again. Whoever is killed in this path will be regarded as a martyr, God willing.”

With those words, Khomeini transformed a literary controversy into an international crisis. The fatwa—a legal opinion or edict in Islamic terminology—sent Salman Rushdie, a British novelist of Indian Muslim origin, into hiding for nearly a decade. It poisoned Iran’s relations with the European Union for years. It triggered protests, bookshop bombings, and the murder of translators and publishers in multiple countries. And it raised fundamental questions about the relationship between religious authority, free expression, and state power in the modern world.

More than three decades later, the Rushdie fatwa remains one of the most consequential acts of Khomeini’s final months. It revealed the Islamic RepublicIslamic Republic Short Description (Excerpt):The unique form of government established after the revolution. It is a hybrid system combining elements of a modern parliamentary democracy (elections, president, parliament) with a theocratic guardianship (Supreme Leader, Guardian Council). Full Description:The Islamic Republic was the outcome of the referendum in 1979. While it has the trappings of a republic, ultimate power resides with the unelected religious leadership. The constitution explicitly subordinates the will of the people to the principles of Islam as interpreted by the Supreme Leader. Critical Perspective:This dual structure creates a permanent institutional conflict. The tension between the “republican” mandate (popular sovereignty) and the “Islamic” mandate (divine sovereignty) results in a system where elected officials are often powerless to implement change if it contradicts the interests of the clerical elite. It represents an experiment in “religious democracy” that critics argue is inherently contradictory.
Read more’s commitment to projecting religious authority beyond its borders. It demonstrated Khomeini’s willingness to use global provocation to consolidate revolutionary legitimacy. And it left a legacy that continues to shape debates about Islam, blasphemy, and freedom in the twenty-first century.

This article examines the Rushdie affair from multiple angles: the book that provoked it, the fatwa itself, the global response, and the enduring consequences for Iran, for Rushdie, and for the relationship between Islam and the West.

The Book: What Was The Satanic Verses?

Rushdie’s Project

Salman Rushdie was not an obscure figure when The Satanic Verses appeared in September 1988. His second novel, Midnight’s Children, had won the Booker Prize in 1981 and established him as one of the most important writers of his generation. A magical realist exploration of India’s transition from colonialism to independence, the book was celebrated for its linguistic inventiveness, political engagement, and imaginative power .

The Satanic Verses continued Rushdie’s exploration of migration, identity, and belief, but with a darker, more provocative tone. The novel tells two parallel stories: that of Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, Indian actors who survive a terrorist hijacking and fall to earth transformed—one into an angelic figure, the other into a devil. Interspersed with their stories are dream sequences in which Gibreel imagines the birth of a religion suspiciously similar to Islam in a city resembling Mecca .

These dream sequences contained passages that Muslims found deeply offensive. Rushdie named the prophet of this fictional religion “Mahound”—a medieval Christian slur for Muhammad. He depicted the prophet receiving a revelation that permits the worship of three pre-Islamic goddesses, a reference to a disputed incident in early Islamic history known as the “satanic verses” incident. He portrayed the prophet’s companions as skeptical, his wives as promiscuous, and his followers as prostitutes in a brothel named after them .

The Offense

For believing Muslims, these depictions were not merely disrespectful; they were blasphemous. The Prophet Muhammad, in Islamic tradition, is the perfect exemplar of human conduct, protected from sin and error. His wives are revered as the “Mothers of the Believers.” The Qur’an is the literal word of God, revealed through the angel Gabriel, and any suggestion that it could be contaminated by satanic influence is theological anathema .

Rushdie later insisted that his intentions were artistic, not polemical. He was exploring, he said, the nature of revelation, the psychology of prophecy, the experience of migration and cultural displacement. The dream sequences were not historical claims but imaginative constructs, filtered through a character’s troubled psyche. He had not expected, he claimed, the depth of offense the book would cause.

But intentions matter less than effects. For millions of Muslims, the book was a direct assault on the most sacred figures and texts of their faith. And in the politicized atmosphere of the late 1980s—with Islam perceived as under attack from Western secularism, and with revolutionary Islamism on the rise—that assault could not go unanswered.

The Gathering Storm: From Protests to Fatwa

Early Reactions

The book’s publication in September 1988 was followed by months of relative calm. Reviews appeared, sales were modest, and the literary world treated it as another ambitious Rushdie novel. But in October, the book was banned in India—the first country to do so. South Africa followed in November. Saudi Arabia and Egypt banned it in December .

The protests began in January 1989. In Bradford, England, a center of British Muslim population, community leaders organized a public burning of the book—an act that generated widespread media coverage and horrified the literary establishment. The image of burning books, so redolent of Nazi Germany, created a powerful visual symbol that would define the controversy in Western minds .

Protests spread across the Muslim world. In Islamabad, police fired on demonstrators attacking the American Cultural Center, killing five people. In Bombay, twelve died in rioting. Bookshops stocking the novel were firebombed in multiple cities. The death toll would eventually reach more than twenty .

Iran’s Intervention

Iran’s role in the early protests was limited. The Islamic Republic, exhausted by eight years of war with Iraq and focused on postwar reconstructionReconstruction Full Description:The period immediately following the Civil War (1865–1877) when the federal government attempted to integrate formerly enslaved people into society. Its premature end and the subsequent rollback of rights necessitated the Civil Rights Movement a century later. Reconstruction saw the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and the election of Black politicians across the South. However, it ended with the withdrawal of federal troops and the rise of Jim Crow. The Civil Rights Movement is often described as the “Second Reconstruction,” an attempt to finish the work that was abandoned in 1877. Critical Perspective:Understanding Reconstruction is essential to understanding the Civil Rights Movement. It provides the historical lesson that legal rights are fragile and temporary without federal enforcement. The “failure” of Reconstruction was not due to Black incapacity, but to a lack of national political will to defend Black rights against white violence—a dynamic that activists in the 1960s were determined not to repeat.
Read more, had not initially engaged with the Rushdie affair. But as the controversy grew, factions within the regime saw opportunity.

For radicals, Rushdie represented everything the revolution opposed: Western cultural imperialism, secular arrogance, the reduction of religion to private belief. Attacking Rushdie was a way to reassert revolutionary authenticity, to demonstrate that Iran remained the vanguard of Islamic resistance even as it rebuilt relations with Europe and the Gulf states .

For Khomeini personally, the affair offered a chance to shape his legacy. By early 1989, the 86-year-old Ayatollah was dying. His final months were consumed by factional struggles, succession planning, and the aftermath of the devastating war with Iraq. A dramatic intervention on behalf of global Islam would remind the world—and his own people—of his unique authority .

On February 12, Iran’s Supreme Cultural Revolution Council declared Rushdie an apostate. Two days later, Khomeini issued his fatwa.

The Fatwa: Text, Context, and Consequences

The Text

Khomeini’s statement was brief but devastating. It declared Rushdie’s novel “against Islam, the Prophet, and the Qur’an.” It sentenced Rushdie and his publishers “to death.” It called on “all zealous Muslims” to execute the sentence wherever they found him. And it promised martyrdom to anyone who died in the attempt .

The fatwa was unprecedented in several respects. First, it was issued by a head of state against a foreign citizen living in a Western country—an extraordinary assertion of extraterritorial jurisdiction. Second, it offered no opportunity for repentance or recantation; Rushdie’s death was demanded regardless of any subsequent actions. Third, it applied to anyone involved in the book’s publication, effectively declaring open season on translators, editors, and publishers worldwide .

The Legal Status

The term “fatwa” requires clarification. In Sunni Islam, a fatwa is a non-binding legal opinion issued by a qualified scholar at the request of an individual or institution. It carries no force of law and can be contradicted by other scholars. In Twelver Shi’ism, the tradition to which Iran’s clerics belong, a fatwa issued by a senior jurist (marja al-taqlid) carries greater authority, binding on that jurist’s followers .

Khomeini’s edict thus bound his followers—millions of Shi’ites worldwide—to attempt Rushdie’s killing. But it had no authority over Sunni Muslims, who comprised the vast majority of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims. And it had no standing in international law, which prohibits states from ordering the assassination of foreign nationals .

Nevertheless, the fatwa’s effect was real. It created a climate of fear that forced Rushdie into hiding for nearly a decade. It inspired violent attacks on those associated with the book. And it signaled to the world that the Islamic Republic would use whatever means it possessed—state power, religious authority, transnational networks—to enforce its vision of Islamic orthodoxy .

The International Reaction

The Western response was swift and unified. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher expressed “revulsion.” European Community foreign ministers recalled their ambassadors from Tehran. The United States condemned the fatwa as “deeply offensive.” Rushdie himself, after a period of indecision, went into hiding under the protection of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch .

But the response was also complicated. Some Western intellectuals, while defending Rushdie’s right to publish, expressed sympathy for Muslim outrage. Others criticized Rushdie for recklessness, suggesting that he should have anticipated the reaction. The novelist John le Carré, in a widely criticized intervention, argued that “there is no absolute right to blaspheme” and that Rushdie bore some responsibility for the violence .

Within the Muslim world, reactions were mixed. Most governments condemned the fatwa as excessive and counterproductive. But popular sentiment was more divided. For many ordinary Muslims, Rushdie’s book was genuinely offensive, and the Western literary establishment’s defense of it seemed like another example of cultural imperialism—a refusal to take Muslim sensibilities seriously .

The Murder of Hitoshi Igarashi

The fatwa’s lethality became tragically clear in July 1991, when Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses, was stabbed to death on the campus of Tsukuba University. His killer was never identified, but the assassination was widely attributed to Iranian-backed operatives or freelance Islamists inspired by the fatwa .

Two other translators survived attacks. Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator, was stabbed in his Milan apartment but survived. William Nygaard, the Norwegian publisher, was shot three times outside his Oslo home in 1993 but also survived . Aziz Nesin, the Turkish translator of excerpts from the book, was the target of a massive arson attack on a hotel in Sivas where he was staying; thirty-seven people died, but Nesin escaped .

Rushdie himself survived multiple attempts on his life. He later learned that Iranian intelligence had actively sought to kill him, funding operatives and offering bounties. The fatwa, far from being a symbolic gesture, had operational consequences .

The Politics of the Fatwa: Iran’s Internal Dynamics

The Succession Crisis

The Rushdie fatwa was issued at a moment of profound uncertainty within the Islamic Republic. Khomeini was dying, and the question of succession was unresolved. The presumed heir, Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, had fallen from favor in March 1989, leaving the regime without a clear successor .

The fatwa served multiple purposes in this context. For Khomeini, it was a final assertion of revolutionary authority—a reminder that even on his deathbed, he remained the ultimate arbiter of Islamic truth. For the radicals who surrounded him, it was a way to lock the regime into a confrontational posture, making it difficult for successors to pursue rapprochement with the West. For the succession process itself, it demonstrated that the Islamic Republic remained committed to the revolution’s founding principles, even as its founder prepared to depart .

The Factional Struggle

The fatwa also reflected factional struggles within the regime. The radicals, who controlled much of the revolutionary apparatus, favored continued confrontation with the West as a way to maintain revolutionary mobilization. The pragmatists, led by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, sought reconstruction and normalization, including improved relations with Europe .

By issuing the fatwa, Khomeini empowered the radicals and constrained the pragmatists. Rafsanjani, who became president in August 1989, spent much of his first term trying to manage the fatwa’s consequences—reassuring European governments, containing its diplomatic damage, while unable to repudiate it openly .

The Financial Incentive

In 1998, the Iranian government added a new dimension to the fatwa: a bounty. The state-run 15 Khordad Foundation increased its reward for Rushdie’s killing to $2.5 million, later raising it to $3.3 million . While the foundation was technically a private charitable organization, its connections to the regime were well known, and the bounty served as a standing incentive for would-be assassins.

The bounty also served a political purpose. By keeping the fatwa alive through financial incentives, hardliners could maintain pressure on reformist governments, forcing them to demonstrate revolutionary credentials by reaffirming the death sentence. Even when the reformist president Mohammad Khatami sought rapprochement with Europe in the late 1990s, he could not formally repudiate the fatwa—it remained a red line that no Iranian politician dared cross .

Rushdie’s Life in Hiding

The Early Years

For Rushdie, the fatwa meant the end of normal life. From February 1989 until September 1998, he lived under constant police protection, moving between safe houses, never appearing in public without elaborate security. He could not see his son, Zafar, without Scotland Yard coordination. He could not attend book launches, literary festivals, or family gatherings. His marriage to the novelist Marianne Wiggins collapsed under the strain .

Rushdie later wrote about this period in his memoir Joseph Anton—the pseudonym he adopted, combining the first names of Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. The book describes the claustrophobia of protective custody, the psychological toll of constant threat, and the strange unreality of living a life that could end at any moment .

The Literary Response

Remarkably, Rushdie continued to write throughout his years in hiding. Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a children’s book dedicated to his son, appeared in 1990—a fable about storytelling and freedom that implicitly addressed his own situation. The Moor’s Last Sigh followed in 1995, and The Ground Beneath Her Feet in 1999 .

The quality of this work, produced under unimaginable pressure, testified to Rushdie’s resilience. But the fatwa also shaped the reception of his later books. Every novel was scrutinized for clues about his state of mind, his attitude toward Islam, his political views. He could not escape the shadow of that February morning in 1989 .

The Lifting (Sort Of)

In September 1998, the Iranian government under President Khatami announced that it would “neither support nor hinder” assassination operations against Rushdie. Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi told a press conference that “the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran has no intention, nor will it take any action, to threaten the life of the author of The Satanic Verses or anyone associated with his work” .

This was not a revocation of the fatwa—a legal impossibility, since only the issuer (Khomeini) could revoke it, and he was dead. But it was a signal that the state would no longer actively pursue Rushdie’s killing. Hardliners immediately protested, and the 15 Khordad Foundation reaffirmed its bounty. But for practical purposes, the threat diminished .

Rushdie emerged from hiding, appearing publicly for the first time in nearly a decade. He resumed a relatively normal life—traveling, teaching, attending literary events. But the fatwa never completely disappeared. It remained on the books, a standing threat that could be reactivated by political shifts.

The Long Shadow: 1998-2022

The Fatwa’s Persistence

Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, the fatwa remained a live issue. Hardliners periodically reaffirmed it. In 2005, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei declared that “the decree issued by Imam Khomeini is still valid” . In 2012, the 15 Khordad Foundation raised its bounty to $3.3 million . In 2016, Iranian state media marked the anniversary of the fatwa with statements reaffirming its continued validity .

These reaffirmations served multiple purposes. They signaled to domestic audiences that the Islamic Republic remained true to Khomeini’s legacy. They reminded the West of Iran’s capacity for transnational violence. And they kept pressure on reformist governments, forcing them to demonstrate revolutionary credentials .

For Rushdie, the continuing threat meant permanent vigilance. He traveled with security, avoided predictable routines, and remained aware that the fatwa had never been formally revoked. But he also rebuilt his life—new marriages, new books, new public engagements. The fatwa became background noise rather than foreground terror.

The Assassination Attempt on Rushdie

On August 12, 2022, the fatwa’s long shadow became terrifyingly real. Rushdie was preparing to deliver a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York when a man rushed the stage and stabbed him repeatedly. Rushdie was stabbed in the neck and torso, sustaining injuries that would cost him his sight in one eye and cause lasting damage to his liver and hands .

The attacker, Hadi Matar, was a 24-year-old Lebanese-American from New Jersey. Investigators found that he had been radicalized online, consuming extremist content that glorified Khomeini and the fatwa. While no evidence emerged of direct Iranian government involvement, the attack demonstrated the fatwa’s enduring power to inspire violence—more than three decades after Khomeini issued it .

The attack sent shockwaves through the literary world. For Rushdie’s friends and admirers, it was a nightmare realized—the threat that had shadowed him for thirty-three years, finally made flesh. For observers of Iran, it was a reminder that the fatwa had never really died, and that its effects would continue as long as it remained unrevoked.

The Diplomatic Legacy

The fatwa’s diplomatic consequences have been equally enduring. Iran’s relations with the United Kingdom were poisoned for years; full diplomatic relations were not restored until 1999, and the fatwa remained a source of tension long afterward. The European Union maintained critical dialogue with Iran throughout the 1990s, but the fatwa limited the depth of engagement .

In the nuclear negotiations of the 2000s and 2010s, the fatwa occasionally resurfaced as an issue. European negotiators pressed for its revocation; Iranian negotiators insisted they could not revoke a decree issued by the revolution’s founder. The fatwa became a symbol of the deeper obstacles to normalization—the ideological commitments that could not be compromised, the revolutionary legacy that could not be repudiated .

The Fatwa in the Twenty-First Century

The Khamenei Reaffirmation

Following Rushdie’s survival of the 2022 attack, Iran’s official response was muted. The government denied any involvement and condemned the attack—a marked contrast to its historical position. But hardliners celebrated the attack, and the fatwa’s supporters within the regime made clear that they remained committed to Khomeini’s decree .

In 2024, on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the fatwa, Supreme Leader Khamenei issued a statement reaffirming its validity: “The decree of Imam Khomeini regarding the apostate Salman Rushdi is firm and irrevocable. The Islamic Republic will not hesitate to defend the sanctities of Islam by any means necessary.” The statement was widely interpreted as a signal to hardliners that the regime remained committed to revolutionary principles, even as it pursued tactical engagement with the West .

The Fatwa’s Place in Iranian Politics

The fatwa’s persistence reflects deeper dynamics within the Islamic Republic. For hardliners, it is a non-negotiable principle—a red line that cannot be crossed without abandoning the revolution itself. For pragmatists, it is an embarrassment and an obstacle—a relic of revolutionary excess that complicates Iran’s relations with the world. For the Supreme Leader, it is a tool—a way to balance factions, signal commitment, and maintain revolutionary legitimacy .

As long as the Islamic Republic exists, the fatwa will likely remain on the books. It has become too central to the regime’s identity, too embedded in its revolutionary narrative, to be repudiated. Even if it is never acted upon—even if no further attempts are made on Rushdie’s life—its symbolic power will endure .

Rushdie’s Resilience

Salman Rushdie, now in his late seventies, has survived the fatwa by more than three decades. He has written fourteen novels, a memoir, and numerous essays. He has been knighted by the Queen, honored by presidents, and celebrated by the literary world. The 2022 attack, horrific as it was, did not silence him. In 2023, he published Victory City, a novel completed before the attack, and he continues to write .

Rushdie’s survival is a testament to his resilience, but also to the support of the literary community, the protection of governments, and the simple luck that has kept him alive while others—Igarashi, the Sivas victims—have died. He has become, in his own way, a symbol of the power of art to resist intimidation, of the written word to outlast its enemies .

Conclusion: The Unrevoked Sentence

The Rushdie fatwa remains one of the most extraordinary acts of the late twentieth century—a head of state sentencing a foreign citizen to death for a work of fiction. It revealed the Islamic Republic’s willingness to project power beyond its borders, its commitment to defending Islamic sanctities by any means, and its capacity to mobilize transnational networks of violence.

More than three decades later, the fatwa has never been revoked. It sits on the books of the Islamic Republic, a standing threat to Rushdie and to anyone associated with his work. It has inspired violence, shaped diplomacy, and defined the boundaries of global debate about Islam, blasphemy, and freedom of expression.

For Iran, the fatwa was a moment of revolutionary self-assertion—a declaration that the Islamic Republic would not be bound by the norms of international relations, that it would defend Islam wherever and however it chose. For the West, it was a confrontation with the limits of its own values—the discovery that not everyone shared its commitment to free expression, that some offenses could not be mediated by appeals to artistic freedom.

And for Rushdie, it was a life sentence—thirty-three years of vigilance, of looking over his shoulder, of knowing that somewhere, someone might be coming. He survived. He continued to write. He refused to be silenced. But the fatwa shaped every moment of his adult life, from that February morning in 1989 to the August afternoon in 2022 when a young man with a knife finally found him.

The Rushdie affair has no tidy conclusion. The fatwa remains. The wounds—physical, psychological, political—remain. The questions it raised about religion, art, and violence remain unresolved. All that can be said with certainty is that on February 14, 1989, a dying man in Tehran changed the world, and the world has never quite changed back.

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Further Reading

· Pipes, Daniel. The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatollah, and the West. Transaction Publishers, 1990. A comprehensive account written shortly after the events.
· Rushdie, Salman. Joseph Anton: A Memoir. Random House, 2012. Rushdie’s own account of his years in hiding, essential reading.
· Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. Viking, 1988. The book itself, still in print and still controversial.
· Weatherby, W.J. Salman Rushdie: Sentenced to Death. Carroll & Graf, 1990. A biography focusing on the fatwa years.