Khomeini’s murderous fatwa was primarily in response to the brilliant lampoon of him in.The Satanic Verses.
On Friday, the renowned author Salman Rushdie was attacked and repeatedly stabbed while on stage to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institute in New York State. A 24-year-old man named Hadi Matar has been arrested. Mr Rushdie appears to be recovering but his nerves and liver are damaged and he may lose an eye.
Little is known about the suspected assailant. But in 1989 the government of Iran cynically put a target on Mr Rushdie’s back and has kept it there.
After the publication of Mr Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses in September 1988, protests broke out in the largely South Asian English city of Bradford, and spread to India and Pakistan.
Few, if any, protesters had actually read the book, which they accused of being blasphemous. This is crucial, because the novel is not, in fact, blasphemous, depicting the wild fantasies of an insane character, Gibreel Farishta, who is under the delusion he has turned into the Archangel Gabriel.
These surrealistic – or rather magical-realist – fantasies include a fever dream inspired by the life and works of the prophet Mohammed, but no reader could come away with the idea that the novel was attempting to tell the tale of the birth of Islam or critique the religion.Although some Muslims may find the passages offensive, throughout the novel, the author was effectively reading his South Asian Muslim tradition, culture and experience through a magical-realist lens.
Of course, the protests were not really about the author or the book, but rather about strengthening the political clout of communal leaders, and an effort to make life difficult for local authorities. Protests about anything abstract or faraway are always really about very different targets much closer to home.
But Iran, still riding high on the revolutionary fervor of the 1980s, sought to place itself at the forefront of this latest iteration of highly manipulated “Muslim outrage” supposedly against the West. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s revolutionary supreme leader, issued a fatwa – or religious opinion which, in some Shiite traditions, can be considered effectively binding on followers – on February 14, 1989, calling for the author and anyone else involved in the publication of the book to be murdered.
Tehran subsequently offered a $6 million bounty for Mr Rushdie’s assassination. He was forced to live in hiding for years, and a wave of violence followed. Five bookstores in Britain were bombed. The Japanese translator of the book was stabbed and killed, and the Italian translator seriously injured. The Norwegian publisher was shot three times and badly wounded. The list of other violent incidents is long.
The Iranian government and various official institutions not only reiterated the validity of the bounty and the fatwa, but have added to the amount of money they say they’re willing to pay for this anti-civilizational terrorism.
All of this background to Friday’s attempted murder of Mr Rushdie is widely understood, but the deeper roots of Khomeini’s rage has been largely overlooked.
Chapter 11 of the novel paints a stinging and remarkably incisive caricature of Khomeini himself. It depicts a character called “The Imam” – a fanatical cleric forced to live in the West (just as Khomeini was when he was exiled to France after being expelled from Iraq by Saddam Hussein). Among the many absurdities of this madcap figure is that he wants to stop time, an obvious parody of Khomeini’s passionate hatred of progress and modernity.
“After the revolution there will be no clocks;” the Imam decrees, “we’ll smash the lot. The word clock will be expunged from our dictionaries. After the revolution there will be no birthdays. We shall all be born again, all of us the same unchanging age in the eye of Almighty God.”
This nightmarish character jumps on Gibreel Farishta, demanding the “angel” fly him to Jerusalem as he “slings his beard over his shoulder, hoists up his skirts to reveal two spindly legs with an almost monstrous covering of hair, and leaps high into the night air, twirls himself about, and settles on Gibreel’s shoulders, clutching on to him with fingernails that have grown into long, curved claws.”
Farishta realizes “he is a suicide soldier in the service of the cleric’s cause.” Eventually, the Imam has “grown monstrous, lying in the palace forecourt with his mouth yawning open at the gates; as the people march through the gates he swallows them whole… and now every clock in the capital city of Desh begins to chime, and goes on unceasingly, beyond twelve, beyond twenty-four, beyond one thousand and one, announcing the end of Time, the hour that is beyond measuring, the hour of the exile’s return, of the victory of water over wine, of the commencement of the Untime of the Imam.”
It’s hard to imagine a more precise and stinging lampoon of Khomeini and his malevolent mission. He and his followers were certainly well aware of it when they decided the author had to die. Of course, they claimed to be responding to an attack “against Islam, the Prophet of Islam, and the Qur’an.” But there is no doubt it was, above all, about the wounded ego of a man happy to anoint himself a “supreme leader.”
The reaction to the brutal attempted murder in Iran’s heavily-controlled media ranged from bland factual descriptions to joyous celebrations – and promises that Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo will be next – along with conspiratorial musings that it could really have been a Western “false flag” operation to derail nuclear negotiations.
But not a hint of concern, regret or objection. None.
That Khomeini and his followers recognized him and his murderous, fanatical regime in the character of the Imam — and then acted precisely according to monstrous type in 1989 and ever since — tells us everything we need to know about their ongoing addiction to violence and hostility to creativity and freedom of thought.
It’s bad enough they’ve never stopped encouraging extremists to kill Mr Rushdie to bolster their image among radical Muslims, especially since that powerfully stokes Western Islamophobia. That it is rooted in the wounded ego of a narcissistic tyrant is even worse.
Mr Matar is unlikely to see any of the promised millions. But Iranian gloating confirms who is responsible for this heinous attack, not just on a great artist, but on the essence of culture and civilization everywhere.