August 25, 2022 | The Wall Street Journal
How the Salman Rushdie Fatwa Changed the World
Khomeini’s decree stoked Muslim anger and paralyzed the West’s response to Islamic fundamentalism.
August 25, 2022 | The Wall Street Journal
How the Salman Rushdie Fatwa Changed the World
Khomeini’s decree stoked Muslim anger and paralyzed the West’s response to Islamic fundamentalism.
Excerpt
Apart from Iran’s Islamic revolution, for which Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini could claim only partial credit, his most momentous achievement was the February 1989 fatwa against author Salman Rushdie. Pronounced in response to Mr. Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses,” Khomeini’s edict was the first time a Muslim militant had the audacity to apply an Islamic punishment deep inside the West. Khomeini applied jujitsu to the West’s claim that it stood for “universal values,” obliging it to take note of Muslim sensibilities about the sacred and the profane. Muslim reaction to Khomeini’s decree varied, but it elicited considerable sympathy among Sunni as well as Shiite believers.
Mr. Rushdie’s recondite book was an odd choice for such ire. Islamic scholars and jurists had long debated Surah 53, the segment of the Quran on which “The Satanic Verses” is based. It concerns Muhammad’s efforts to convert the powerful pagans of Mecca to Islam. The canonical interpretation held that the devil intruded into the prophet’s inspirations, producing what appeared to be a temporary and tactically astute toleration of paganism. Possibly excepting the slaughter of the male members of the Jewish Banu Qurayza tribe, no action has caused more heartburn among Islamic commentators.
Mr. Rushdie built his provocative fantasy on well-trodden ground. Unfortunately for him, his Muslim background, coupled with Khomeini’s need for a new cause after Iran’s defeat a year earlier in its war with Iraq, catapulted the author into a tumultuous intra-Muslim struggle. If John Wansbrough—author of a 1977 book arguing that the Quran couldn’t have been the work of one man in the early seventh century—had written Mr. Rushdie’s book, neither Khomeini nor the clerics in Britain and India who first expressed their dismay about his writing would have cared. The same is true of Wansbrough’s students Michael Cook and Patricia Crone, who suggested that early Islam might have been a Jewish messianic movement.
Mr. Gerecht, a former Iranian-targets officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.