Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses is banned in Iran, yet widely known. The fatwa still echoes—reaching remote corners of the country and into exile.
by: Omid Rezaee
This article was first published in German on ZEIT.
In 1989, just a few months after the publication of The Satanic Verses, another book appeared in Iran: a pamphlet titled A Critique of the Satanic Verses Conspiracy, written by one of Ayatollah Khomeini’s cultural advisors. My father owned a copy of it—though I very much doubt he ever read it.
In the 1990s, during my childhood, the book became the subject of a running gag in our household. My father had covered the first part of the title—A Critique of the Conspiracy—as well as the author’s name with a white sticker, and proudly displayed the book, now seemingly titled only The Satanic Verses, to his friends. He claimed to own an original copy of Rushdie’s novel—and to have read it. When his friends begged him to lend it to them, he declined with a wave of the hand: “Too dangerous,” he would say. No one in our remote little town, tucked away behind the mountains, asked the obvious question: had The Satanic Verses even been translated into Persian?
And yet, the desire to possess the book—cursed by Khomeini, and whose author, translators, publishers, and distributors were sentenced to death—had already reached even the furthest corners of the country.
The 2022 attack on Rushdie brought those memories back with an intensity I had never felt before. Neither the 10,000 kilometers between that stage in New York, where Khomeini’s fatwa seemed on the verge of being carried out, and that small town in the nowhere of my childhood, nor the two or three decades between the family joke and the actual attack, could dull the feeling of fear and rage. The same fear and rage my father once cloaked in irony.
News of the stabbing spread at unusual speed—not only through Iranian state media but also across private family and friendship chat groups among Iranians. Headlines from regime-aligned newspapers left no doubt: the hatred had never subsided. One newspaper close to the Supreme Leader declared, “Salman Rushdie—Struck by God’s Wrath.” Another spoke of a “Divine Invisible Arrow.” What exactly had been invisible about the knife wielded by the then 24-year-old assailant, Hadi Matar, remained unclear. One paper, aligned with the Revolutionary Guard, wrote with barely veiled satisfaction: “The Knife at Rushdie’s Throat.” Several state-aligned dailies ran the same cynical headline, referring to the eye Rushdie lost in the attack: “The Devil’s Eye Has Gone Blind.”
For many Iranians, Rushdie’s condition became the central topic of discussion in digital spaces—those quietly pulsating chat groups that serve as loosely woven bridges between times and places. For those of us driven into exile over the past five decades—since the Islamic Revolution of 1979—the nightmare of Khomeini has never entirely faded. Not in sleep. Not in waking hours. The attack on Rushdie reminded us—and the world—with brutal clarity: Khomeini’s ghost haunts far more than just Iran.
A Book as Pose – and as Risk
By the mid-2000s, when the internet had reached even the most remote valleys of Iran, PDF files of The Satanic Verses began to circulate—both the English original and Persian translations printed in exile in Germany and Denmark. Some of my former teachers, with whom I had built a relationship of trust, told me how, back in the early 1990s—then still students or young teachers—they had paid large sums to have a smuggled copy of the book brought into the country. Their eyes would light up when they whispered Penguin—a code word for Rushdie and his novel. The Penguin publishing house, which had released the book in the UK, had become synonymous with the forbidden.
In that hidden culture of reading—in a place where few people could even hold a basic conversation in English—no one asked how Rushdie’s dense, allegorical prose was to be understood. It was never about understanding. It was about possession. About touching the forbidden fruit.
Iran is the land of banned books. Since the advent of the printing press, two forces have dictated what may and may not be read: the state and the clergy. Under the Islamic Republic, which merged the two, the catalogue of censorship grew even longer. Before the 1979 revolution, censorship primarily targeted revolutionary and Marxist literature; afterwards, it expanded to include topics like sexuality, alcohol, and above all, alternative interpretations of Islam.
Among all the banned books, however, The Satanic Verses holds a special place. Few other titles have been so categorically condemned—and yet so passionately sought after. On Tehran’s Enghelab Street—“Revolution Street”—right next to the University of Tehran, the symbolic heart of Iranian cultural life, nearly every forbidden book is available. Nearly. The Satanic Verses remains absent. Even in the digital underground—in websites, Telegram channels, and Instagram accounts where banned literature is shared—Rushdie’s novel is hard to find. It is rarely highlighted, seldom advertised, often not listed at all. As if the book itself remains a risk—one best not touched, even in the age of the internet.
More than thirty years after the fatwa, in a country where nearly every household lives in quiet defiance—hiding bootleg wine, illegal music, satellite dishes and VPNs—having a copy of The Satanic Verses on the bookshelf is still not normal. For my father, who neither drank nor watched much television, merely pretending to own the book—even if it was only a disguised propaganda pamphlet—was a kind of intellectual sin. A pose of educated defiance. But for real intellectuals, the matter was far more serious.
Unlike my father or my teachers, the literary circles in Iran knew perfectly well that The Satanic Verses was not a theological tract, not a cheap provocation, and certainly not a vulgar insult to Islam. Salman Rushdie was no stranger to Iranian readers. His breakthrough novel Midnight’s Children had been translated into Persian in the 1980s and even awarded the official Book of the Year prize by the Islamic Republic—personally presented by then-president Ali Khamenei, who would later become the Supreme Leader. Another of his novels, Shame, had also been a bestseller in Iran. Faraj Sarkohi, a prominent intellectual and editor-in-chief of the influential literary magazine Adineh, had reviewed both books extensively. When The Satanic Verses was released, he had a copy sent to him from abroad and began reading it with the help of a friend fluent in English literature.
But he remained silent. Even a neutral literary critique of Rushdie’s novel would have been dangerous in the ideological climate of the 1980s and 1990s. The fatwa had transformed The Satanic Verses from a novel into a lethal symbol.
When Silence Became Speech
When a well-known Quran scholar publicly denounced the book as blasphemous in a state-run newspaper, Sarkohi hid his copy. Until then, the book had quietly circulated—discussed in private salons, passed around in intimate reading circles. But when Khomeini’s fatwa was broadcast on national television on February 14, 1989, a line was crossed:
“We are from Allah and to Allah we shall return.
I am informing all brave Muslims of the world that the author of The Satanic Verses, a text written, edited, and published against Islam, the Prophet of Islam, and the Qur’an, along with all the editors and publishers aware of its contents, are condemned to death. I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth. And whoever is killed in this cause will be a martyr, Allah willing. Meanwhile, if someone has access to the author of the book but is incapable of carrying out the execution, he should inform the people so that [Rushdie] is punished for his actions.”
A few days later, then-President Khamenei tried to contain the global outrage, suggesting that Rushdie might be forgiven if he apologized. Rushdie did apologize—and later called it the greatest mistake of his life. But Khomeini was unmoved. He insisted that the author must still be punished. He even went further: if a non-Muslim were to kill Rushdie, Muslims would be obliged to reward them accordingly.
After Khomeini’s death, the bounty on Rushdie’s head was raised to one million U.S. dollars. The fatwa was never revoked—religiously speaking, it still stands. Politically, it was softened: in the late 1990s, a reformist Iranian government seeking rapprochement with the West declared that it would not seek to enforce the death sentence. But under Shiite theology, only the cleric who issues a fatwa can annul it—and Khomeini died just months after declaring his verdict. His curse remains in place.
While an international committee of writers and intellectuals quickly formed in the West to defend Rushdie, Iran’s intellectual circles remained silent—not out of agreement, but out of necessity. Sarkohi tells me how the Ministry of Culture pressured him to write a “critique” of Rushdie’s novel. But any article that failed to mention the fatwa was considered incomplete—and any mention that didn’t condemn it was seen as implicit approval. A classic dilemma: speak and betray, or remain silent and resist.
So they chose silence. Writers, poets, translators met behind closed doors, debated—and decided, as Sarkohi puts it, to adopt the French tradition of resistance: le silence comme protestation. Silence as collective shield. A conscious act of saying nothing that spoke louder than any declaration. The intelligence services noticed. Rushdie was no longer the issue. What mattered now was the collective disobedience. The refusal to obey the narrative of power.
The Political Stage Behind a Literary Scandal
But why such frenzy over a British-Indian novelist? Why this almost mystical obsession with The Satanic Verses? What exactly was Khomeini trying to achieve?
Perhaps the answer lies in timing. 1989 was the year after the end of the Iran-Iraq war—a war Khomeini ultimately saw as lost. He had likened the ceasefire to “drinking from the poisoned chalice.” His vision of marching on to Jerusalem had collapsed. The fatwa against Rushdie was more than a religious decree. It was a display of power—domestic and global. A symbolic attempt to reassert authority. A message to the world, and to the Iranian people: no alternative reading of Islam would be tolerated. Not even in fiction.
Rushdie was not the first to pay for offering an alternative narrative. In 1946, the historian Ahmad Kasravi was murdered by Islamists—on the basis of a fatwa issued by Khomeini, then still an obscure cleric. The great novelist Sadegh Hedayat had also been labeled a heretic; his satirical writings on Islamic history were banned both under the Shah and under the Islamic Republic.
And yet, ironically, it was the fatwa itself that made Salman Rushdie a legend in Iran. From a writer known only in literary circles, he became the most famous forbidden name in the country. Even in my small, remote hometown, claiming to possess The Satanic Verses—even falsely—was an act of subversion.
Rushdie’s impact didn’t end there. As Faraj Sarkohi tells it, the collective silence in response to the fatwa marked the first coordinated act of intellectual resistance since the 1979 revolution. From those quiet meetings grew the 1994 declaration We Are Writers, signed by 134 authors, translators, and poets inside Iran—a manifesto against censorship. Sarkohi was arrested multiple times thereafter, and in 1996, while preparing to leave for Germany, was abducted at Tehran airport. Only an international outcry—including pressure from then-German foreign minister Klaus Kinkel—secured his release. Today, he lives in exile in Frankfurt. The very copy of The Satanic Verses he read in 1989 was later smuggled to him by friends.
In Iran, the struggle against censorship continued—and turned deadly. In the autumn of 1998, two writers, poets and translators, both prominent members of the Iranian Writers’ Association, were brutally murdered. Only after mounting public outrage did the reformist government admit what many had long suspected: the killings had been ordered and carried out by the Ministry of Intelligence, one of the country’s feared security agencies.
A Verdict That Still Echoes
Hadi Matar, the man who attacked Salman Rushdie in 2022, is said to have acted alone—without instruction from any state actor, though he openly cited Khomeini’s fatwa and is a devout Shia. In May 2024, the now 27-year-old was sentenced to 25 years in prison. In court, he invoked freedom of speech in his defense—a perverse irony that’s hard to stomach. He admitted he had read only a few pages of the reviled novel. His statement sparked once again a familiar question across Iranian social media: Had Khomeini ever read the book? We will likely never know for sure.
But what we do know—and must continue to live with—is that the verdict Khomeini once pronounced has never truly gone silent. Each attempt to carry it out tears open wounds that had long appeared to have healed. And every fresh pain is an echo of the old—a pain we Iranians have tried to bury for decades. With sarcasm. With silence. And, like my father, with bitter humor.
Neither he nor my teachers ever held a real printed copy of The Satanic Verses. And most likely, they never felt the need to download and read the complex, dense novel as an e-book. Too difficult. Too distant. Too dangerous.
For me, however—a child of those fatwa-darkened years, now in exile in Berlin—holding the printed book in my hands was a moment of quiet wonder. Tangible. Illicit. Forbidden.