The Book That Brought a Fatwa

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Salman Rushdie's fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, was published in September 1988 and drew immediate controversy for passages many Muslims considered blasphemous toward Islam. On February 14, 1989, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie's death and offering a bounty to anyone who carried it out, forcing Rushdie into years of police protection under an assumed identity in Britain. The Iranian government publicly distanced itself from actively enforcing the fatwa in a 1998 agreement with the United Kingdom, though the bounty and the underlying religious edict were never formally withdrawn by religious authorities in Iran.