Word: ayatullah
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...from the beginning, been a story much stranger than fiction; if a novel had been so riddled with ironies, it would have been condemned for implausibility. In Salman Rushdie and Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, the world has two master plotters, celebrated controversialists both, with unusually lively imaginations, each of them now in his own embattled hideout while the War of the Words rages on. Yet even Jorge Luis Borges -- or Rushdie -- could scarcely have dreamed up a scene in which a Muhammadan cleric vows to kill Salman Rushdie for a book in which the Prophet condemns an apostate called Salman...
...story thus far: British-Indian author Salman Rushdie, 41, is in hiding somewhere in England. He lives under a death threat imposed by the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, who charges that Rushdie's new novel, The Satanic Verses, is blasphemous and an insult to Islam. For good measure, Iranians have offered a bounty of as much as $5.2 million to Rushdie's executioner. The world is stunned by the notion that the Iranian leader would issue a death threat against a British subject who has merely written a work of phantasmagoric fiction that, to be sure, occasionally deals with Islam...
Then, most astonishing of all, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, 88, spiritual ruler of fundamentalist, revolutionary Iran, announces that the author must be killed for the sin of insulting Islam, the Prophet and the holy Koran, and for good measure exonerates any Muslim who manages to perpetrate this deed and promises him the rewards of martyrdom. And not only the author, but anyone else involved in the publication of the book. A day later, another Iranian cleric announces that a bounty has been placed on the author's head: $2.6 million if the avenger is an Iranian, $1 million...
...observing that "to pay one man to kill another man is murder at a premium and not a religiously inspired act." This remarkable display of vacillation, played out in the dispatches from Tehran, suggested that pragmatists in Iran had begun a campaign to control the damage caused by the Ayatullah's earlier pronouncement...
...also Salman, seems to share the character's skepticism about the authenticity of God's revealed word. But the real-life author will be lucky if he enjoys the same clemency as his fictional counterpart. His literary twisting of the Koran is the central transgression for which the Ayatullah Khomeini has condemned him to death. Explains Indian- born writer Mihir Bose: "Every Muslim, whether fundamentalist or liberal, believes the Koran is literally the very word of God, preserved in heaven and transmitted by the angel Gabriel through Muhammad." The Prophet himself, although not considered divine, is revered by Muslims...