Word: iranian
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...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...
Absolutely not. The Ayatullah is made of sterner stuff than that. The very next day the Iranian revolutionary leader, 88, issued a statement rejecting Rushdie's apology and declaring flatly, "It is incumbent on every Muslim to do everything possible to send him to hell." Three days later, in a speech to a group of Iranian clerics, Khomeini added that nothing, not even Western economic sanctions, would "force us to retreat and forgo implementation of God's decree...
...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 if he is not. The following day, thanks to the generosity of still another Iranian philanthropist, the reward is doubled. Governments are angered, publishers intimidated, airlines subjected to bomb...
...Iranian news agency initially observed that the "Muslim heretic" had not repented. Later it said the apology might be accepted, and still later it dismissed the previous comment as the personal opinion of one of its employees. At the same time, the news agency reported that a local newspaper had denounced the offer of money to anyone who would kill Rushdie, 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...
...actual risk faced by Rushdie and his publishers if Khomeini sought to follow through on his threat was difficult to gauge. Of the roughly 25,000 Iranians in Britain, it is believed there may be as many as 1,000 radical extremists, including students on short-term visas. Tehran-backed groups have a history of violent mischief in London, mostly bombings aimed at Iranian dissidents. Says Ian Geldard, head of research at London's Institute for the Study of Terrorism: "In the Islamic world, a call from the Imam is a full command . . . The worst of it is that this...