President Obama has repeatedly denied that terrorists have anything to do with the real Islam. But what would Obama say about the fatwa that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s leading political and religious authority from 1979 to 1989, issued condemning author Salman Rushdie to death for writing a book deemed blasphemous to Islam? Khomeini was about as “real Islam” as it gets.
The parallels to contemporary terrorism are very clear. Terrorists murdered the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists for what the killers considered the cartoonists’ blasphemy in mocking Muhammad, and the same motivation seems to have inspired the attack by terrorist Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein at the free speech event in Copenhagen. Rushdie’s 1988 book The Satanic Verses had sparked protest demonstrations by Muslims, particularly in Pakistan, because it was considered blasphemous, and shortly thereafter Ayatollah Khomeini issued his 1989 fatwa ordering ordinary Muslims to try to murder Rushdie and all those who were knowingly involved in the publication of the book. How can Obama deny that Khomeini’s fatwa was state-sanctioned and Islam-sanctioned terrorism?
The fatwa Khomeini issued makes chilling reading even today. Here’s a translation:
Nothing to do with Islam? I would remind Obama, as he ponders that question, that at the time of the Rushdie fatwa Khomeini had not only been “Supreme Leader” of Iran — a country that has the seventh-largest Muslim population in the world — for almost a decade, but he also had long been considered an expert in Islamic law and had written many books on the subject.
Then in 1991, when Rushdie’s book’s Japanese translator was stabbed to death in Tokyo, and when in 1993 his Italian translator was attacked in Milan but survived, and when the same thing happened to his Norwegian publisher in Oslo, did those murders and attempted murders have nothing to do with Islam?
The Iranian government officially supported the Rushdie fatwa for almost ten more years, until 1998, but that year did not mark the end of the trouble for Rushdie emanating from Iran. In 2012 a state-linked religious foundation increased the bounty that was still on Rushdie’s head. The reward for killing Rushdie now stands at a cool $3.3 million, and the leader of the foundation involved in the bounty money, Hassan Sanei, is also the group’s representative to the current Supreme Leader of Iran, Khomeini’s successor Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
When in 1998 the Iranian government (although tellingly, not Khamenei himself) backtracked on the Rushdie threat, assuring the West it was no longer operative, their seeming reversal was an act that prompted Britain to renew its diplomatic relations with Iran after having broken off relations over the original Rushdie fatwa. However, subsequent events and the upping of the bounty proved this to have been a strategic effort on the part of the Iranian government to wear a kindler gentler public mask in order to curry favor with the west. The fatwa itself remained in place:
It is unlikely that Ayatollah Sanei, personal representative of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on the 15th Khordad Foundation, was acting without higher approval. In 2005, Ayatollah Khamenei himself reaffirmed the fatwa while addressing pilgrims preparing to visit Mecca.
When President Obama’s press secretary Josh Earnest recently expounded on the administration’s views about terrorists and Islam, he said:
…what they did was they tried to invoke their own distorted deviant view of Islam to try to justify them. And I think that is completely illegitimate. And what we should do is we should call it what it is. And it’s an act of terror, and it’s one that we roundly condemn. It’s an act of terror that was roundly condemned by Muslim leaders across the globe.
So President Obama, if the terrorists have a “distorted, deviant” view of Islam that is “completely illegitimate,” would you also describe Supreme Leader Khomeini and his successor Supreme Leader Khamenei that way? Because we all missed the part where Khamenei himself condemned the terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo and in Copenhagen, or where he withdrew the Rushdie fatwa.
Not only has Khamenei apparently kept an understandable public silence on the subject in light of the fact that he still supports the Rushdie fatwa that so closely resembles it, but Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham has offered an interestingly nuanced public spin on the matter. She said:
But Afkham also said that “making use of freedom of expression…to humiliate the monotheistic religions and their values and symbols is unacceptable.”
Note the use of the qualifying phrase “innocent people,” followed by the condemnation of the acts of the cartoonists. In the eyes of Iran’s religious leaders, were the cartoonists innocent or not? They certainly don’t consider Salman Rushdie to be innocent, if the bounty on his head and their 2005 reiteration of the fatwa calling for his death are any indication. Why would the cartoonists be any different?
Iran’s religious leaders probably have learned to be a bit more discreet about these things now that Khomeini’s long gone, but they haven’t changed their tune. What’s more, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards under Khomeini’s successor Khamenei confirmed the Rushdie fatwa and stated its conformance with Muslim thought throughout history:
“The day will come when they will punish the apostate Rushdie for his scandalous acts and insults against the Koran and the Prophet (Mohammed),” they said, two days before the anniversary of the order…
The guards’ statement comes a month after Ayatollah Khomeini’s successor Ayatollah Khamenei said he still believed the British novelist deserved to die.
So Mr. President, what do you have to say about all of this?
Jean Kaufman is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at neo-neocon.
