The fatwa against Salman Rushdie has a precedent

The shockwaves following the attempted murder of the writer Salman Rushdie are still rippling through public discourse. The Iranian ayatollahs would have approved, although it is thought that the would-be assassin, 24-year old Hadi Matar, was radicalised on social media. The mouthpieces of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and Iranian-backed Shi’a militias in the Arabic-speaking world have been open in their support for him.

In stabbing Rushdie, Hadi Matar had intended to carry out a fatwa pronounced 33 years ago by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s Supreme Leader. Khomeini’s fatwa, or legal ruling, condemned Rushdie to death for insulting Islam with his novel The Satanic Verses. Rushdie was perhaps more surprised than anyone that the fatwa was still in force in 2022. In recent years he had let down his guard and no longer travelled with a security detail.

Although Khomeini died later in 1989,  his successor, Ayatollah Sayyid Khamenei, has been in power ever since. Khamenei’s influence, and the ideology motivating him to support the fatwa,  has been inexplicably overlooked.

According to Abbas Milani, a Stanford professor, Khamenei only ever had four books translated from Arabic into Persian: all were works by Sayyid Qutb, the most important ideologue of the (Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood. The link between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian clerics transcends the enmity between Sunni and Shi’a. The Iranians have shown themselves willing and able to support Sunni terrorist groups, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, if they serve Iran’s purposes.

Sayyid Qutb provided the intellectual underpinning for the Muslim Brotherhood, a movement founded in Egypt in 1928 to challenge western modernity and restore an authentic caliphate based on sharia law. The movement was virulently anti-Semitic. It absorbed Western conspiracy theories that the Jews wished to control the world. It advocated violence, not just against infidels, but states which purported to be Muslim: they were just cyphers for Western imperialism. Qutb was jailed by Egypt’s President Nasser for 15 years and ultimately hanged.

It is scarcely known, however,  that the fatwa against Rushdie was not the first of its kind. A similar fatwa was issued 76 years ago by Khamenei’s mentor, a cleric named Navvab Safavi, against a writer called Ahmad Kasravi.  Safavi founded the Fedayeen of Islam. This group was responsible for a string of assassinations in the 1950s, including three Iranian Prime Ministers. Safavi also visited Qutb in Egypt in 1951 and may have been responsible for introducing Khomeini to the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Ahmad Kasravi had begun his career as a Shi’a cleric. A prolific writer, linguist and historian, Kasravi had turned against Islam and advocated a secular society. In response, Safavi imposed his fatwa on Kasravi: “We won’t allow loose tongues to criticise Islam.”

In 1946, Fedayeen of Islam followers burst into the Tehran courtroom where Kasravi had been summoned to answer charges that he had slandered Islam. The assailants savagely stabbed and murdered Kasravi and his assistant.

Kasravi had written: “Our words have deep, strong roots and will never be eradicated with a pistol.” Salman Rushdie echoes his words of defiance: “If somebody’s trying to shut you up, sing louder, and if possible, better.”

But ideology also has strong roots. One must never discount its power to persuade, amplified by poorly policed social media. The ideas of Qutb, Safavi and Khomeini are still being propagated today by the Islamic Republic of Iran under its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Salman Rushdie is not the first writer to fall victim to their ideology and he is unlikely to be the last.

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