Ln February 14, 1989, on the eve of the withdrawal of the Red Army from Afghanistan, Ayatollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, issued the fatwa condemning Salman Rushdie to death, on the grounds that his novel The Satanic Verses would have blasphemed the Prophet. The date chosen by the Shiite leader was intended to obsess in the eyes of the Muslim world the expected victory of his Sunni rivals, supported by the CIA and financed by Saudi Arabia and the petro-monarchies, who were going to kick out of the land of Afghan Islam the forces of communist atheism that had invaded it a decade earlier.
In the immediate term, the global scandal triggered by the fatwa – an Iranian ayatollah sentencing a British citizen to death on the very soil of the United Kingdom, unheard of at the time – had the desired effect: Khomeini had drawn the carpet under the feet of Sunni Islamism which expected to take advantage of the Soviet defeat to appear as the herald and the hero of the Muslims “humiliated and offended” across the planet. Not many noticed the Soviet defeat at the time, which would have decisive geopolitical consequences – leading to the November 9 following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the death of communism.
The ayatollah had won the media war, and it was to regain control in the face of this rivalry in hegemony over revolutionary Islamism that Ayman Al-Zawahiri (who had just been killed at the end of July by an American missile in Kabul where the Taliban returned after the United States withdrew, this time a year ago) had theorized, in its 1996 manifesto Riders under the banner of the Prophet, the need to strike the great blow of Sunni jihadism that would be “the blessed double raid” of September 11, 2001. Which would allow Al-Qaeda to monopolize the news to the detriment of Tehran’s rivals by sowing death in the West, in Washington and New York.
However, the fatwa continued its devastating effects after the death of Khomeini, which occurred in June following this one: it would even be taken up and extended by his Sunni rivals, with their death sentence on Danish cartoonists who published drawings deemed blasphemous of the Prophet in a daily newspaper in September 2005, later taken over by Charlie Hebdo, which would culminate in the January 7, 2015 massacre perpetrated by the Kouachi brothers, the cornerstone of Daesh in Europe, and the beginning of the departure movement of thousands of young French Muslims for Cham – the Islamic name of the Levant.
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