Ayatollah Khomeini Issues the Rushdie Fatwa
- Date
- 1989
- Category
- Religion & ideology
- Region
- Middle East (Iran)
- Era
- Contemporary
- Significance
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on 14 February 1989 calling for the death of the British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie, whose book "The Satanic Verses" many Muslims condemned as blasphemous toward the Prophet Muhammad.
The edict, broadcast on Iranian radio, urged Muslims worldwide to kill Rushdie and his publishers and offered a bounty, forcing the author into hiding under police protection for nearly a decade. The controversy had already sparked protests and book-burnings from Britain to Pakistan, where demonstrators were killed, and the fatwa turned a literary dispute into a global confrontation over free expression, religious offence, and the reach of a state's authority across borders. It severed British-Iranian diplomatic relations, and in the years that followed the book's Japanese translator was murdered and its Italian and Norwegian associates were attacked. The affair became a defining test of liberal free-speech principles against demands for religious deference, reverberating through Western multiculturalism debates for decades and resurfacing when Rushdie was stabbed and gravely injured in 2022. It marked a watershed in the politics of blasphemy, art, and Islam in the modern world.
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Empires active in 1989
- Soviet Union1922 CE – 1991 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
- Yugoslavia1918 CE – 1992 CE
Related religion & ideology events
- Demolition Of The Babri Masjid1992
- The Second Vatican Council11 October 1962 – 8 December 1965
- Marx and Engels publish The Communist Manifesto21 February 1848
- Founding of the Muslim BrotherhoodMarch 1928
- Founding of the Tablighi Jamaatc. 1926
- The Azusa Street Revival and the Birth of Pentecostalism1906–1909
Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Religion
Accessible sweep of humanity's faiths and belief systems from prehistory to the present.
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