AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI PERSONALLY ISSUED THE FATWA ON SALMAN RUSHDIE
PARIS 29 Apr. (IPS) The fatwa that condemned the Anglo-Indian author Salman
Rushdie to death for insulting Muslim’s prophet Mohammad and forced him to
spend nine years in hiding, was issued by Grand Ayatollah Roohollah Khomeini and
was not "fraudulent" nor "phoney", as claimed by an Iranian
writer quoted Sunday by "The New Scotsman".
The leader of the Islamic Revolution pronounced the fatwa, or religious mandatory order in 1989 on the ground that Mr. Rushdie’s controversial book, "The Satanic Verses" was sacrilegious and blasphematory to both Islam and its prophet and the authorities placed a bounty of £2.2m on the writer’s head.
According to Mr. Montazam, a former senior foreign ministry official, "politically ambitious clergymen in the Iranian government, eager to advertise their fundamentalist Islamic credentials as Khomeini’s death approached, invented the fatwa in Khomeini’s name".
Montazam says for the last eight months of his life, Ayatollah Khomeini was a "physical and mental wreck", having had a history of heart trouble and suffeing a grave deterioration in his health following several operations.
He links the contract to former president Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, then a powerful Speaker of the Majles, or the Iranian parliament, who, Mr. Montazam says, was behind most of the purges and mass executions that took place in Khomeini’s time.
"Mr. Montazam does not know what he is talking about", Mr. Abolhasan Banisadr, the Islamic Republic’s first elected president told Iran Press Service, reminding correctly that Mr. Khomeini had "publicly slapped" Ali Khameneh'i who, during a Friday sermon pronounced after the fatwa, had suggested the contract on Mr. Rushdie’s life could be removed if he demanded pardon and acknowledged that he had committed a sin.
"You better not involve in matters beyond your competence", Mr. Khomeini had told the then president. "The slap was so heavy, the rebuke so humiliating and blatant that, after being elected to replace the Master who had died in August 1989, Mr. Khameneh'i not only did not dared to remove the fatwa, but also he reconfirmed it", Mr. Banisadr added.
"Rafsanjani and other conservative clerics frequently used Khomeini’s name to eliminate anyone who stood in their way", Mr. Montazam claims, citing Grand Ayatollah Hoseinali Montazeri as one of his sources.
Actually, in his "Memoirs", the dissident senior cleric says it was the founder of the Islamic Republic who personally ordered the mass execution of political prisoners in the summer of 1987.
Mr. Khomeini dismissed Mr. Montazeri as Heir to the Islamic Republic after he opposed the execution of hundreds of political prisoners.
Because of his outspoken and open criticism of the present leader, Mr. Montazeri was placed under house arrest in October 1997, his offices and classes shut down.
The fatwa led to a spate of murderous attacks on people connected with Rushdie’s novel. In 1993 William Nygaard, the Norwegian publisher, whose firm translated "The Satanic Verses", was shot and seriously wounded outside his Oslo home, and the Japanese translator of the book, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death in 1991.
Rushdie lived incognito in Britain for nine years at 30 different locations guarded by Scotland Yard.
It was Mr. Hashemi Rafsanjani who helped Iran-Britain normalisation after he assured London that the Iranian government would not send terrorists to kill Mr. Rushdie, author of several best sellers who moved to New York two years ago ENDS RUSHDIE FATWA 29402