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Rushdie’s stabbing is unlikely to delay the Iran nuclear agreement

August 17, 2022 at 10:53 am

British author Salman Rushdie in Cheltenham, England on 12 October 2019 [David Levenson/Getty Images]

Novelist Salman Rushdie was stabbed during a literary event in New York State last week. The attack was carried out by a young man born in the US whose parents were from the Shia village of Yaroun in southern Lebanon.

The late leader of the Iranian revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa (legal opinion) in 1988 calling for Rushdie’s death after he wrote The Satanic Verses, a novel which the Iranian leader believed to be a serious insult to Islam, Prophet Muhammad and, indeed, Khomeini himself.

The police in America discovered that Hadi Matar, who carried out the attack on the writer, was using fake ID in the name of Hassan Mughniyeh. According to Lebanese media, this was taken after Imad Mughniyeh, the former military commander of Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, who was assassinated in Syria in 2015. Moreover, it was found that Matar had posted pictures of Khomeini and Ali Khamenei, the current Supreme Leader of the Iranian Republic, on his Facebook page, as well as a picture of the former commander of the Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, who was assassinated by the US in January 2020.

It is a known fact that the fatwa has had serious repercussions around the world, with anti-Rushdie demonstrations and acts of violence in the Muslim world, and social disturbances between Western authorities and Muslim citizens. It also led to attacks on publishing houses that printed or translated his book; the Japanese book translator was assassinated, for example.

With the passage of time, the Iranian authorities seemed to have overlooked the fatwa, but in response to a question on his official website in 2017 about whether it was is still in effect, Khamenei said, “The decree is as Imam Khomeini issued.”

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It is likely that Rushdie was close to believing that he was no longer in danger. In his last interview, he said that his life has become “very normal again” and that fears of an assassination “were a thing of the past.”

The stabbing by a man who was 10 years old when the fatwa was issued, and the admiration expressed for it in some newspapers and people in Iran and other countries, as well as Khamenei’s assertion about the fatwa, all make it clear that the matter “is not a thing of the past”. The incident came days after Ashura, the anniversary of the killing of Imam Hussein, the grandson of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). This indicates that the past, in Iran or anywhere else, cannot be disconnected from current events.

Rushdie’s stabbing happened at a critical time between the West and Iran, with the new nuclear agreement about to be announced, and the parties involved expected to exchange “friendly gestures”. There have been reports that the final European draft proposal submitted to Iran included easing Western pressure on Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Furthermore, the assassination attempt on Rushdie was preceded by the announcement of similar attempts on John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, former officials in the Trump administration, and the launch of the Iran-Russia Khayyam satellite. It also coincided with the start of drone training in Iran by Russian experts.

These developments, with the exception of the individual’s assassination attempt on Rushdie, can be read as Tehran counting on the West being in great need of the nuclear agreement, as much as Iran needs it, and that the most appropriate way to deal with the issue is to try to obtain the greatest gains during the negotiations of the agreement, while maintaining pressure on all fronts. Within this context, it seems that the nuclear agreement is a strategic issue for America and the West, and that other details, including the attempt to assassinate Salman Rushdie, will not have a significant impact on achieving this goal.

This article first appeared in Arabic in Al-Quds Al-Arabi on 14 August 2022

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.