But he [Ruhollah Khomeini] held to his dream of an Islamic republic and retained his Islamic fervor -scuttling a tentative economic and political opening to the West in with his call for the killing of a British author, Salman Rushdie, whose novel ‘‘The Satanic Verses’’ was deemed to have blasphemed the faith.
The future of technology is not pre-determined, and we must resist the temptation of technological utopianism — the notion that technology has a momentum or will of its own, that it will guarantee a more free future, and therefore that we can ignore the terrible arc of the political in our world.
A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)
In early 1989, Khomeini issued a fatwā (juristic ruling) calling for the assassination of Salman Rushdie, an India-born British author. Rushdie’s book, The Satanic Verses, published in 1988, was alleged to commit blasphemy against Islam. Khomeini’s fatwā required not only Rushdie’s execution, but of “all those involved in the publication” of the book.