Iran Withdraws Support for Death Edict on Rushdie

WASHINGTON — The government of Iran, moving to resolve a long-standing source of friction between the Islamic nation and the West, on Thursday formally disavowed a decade-old death edict directed at “Satanic Verses” author Salman Rushdie.

The diplomatic breakthrough, in which Iran also distanced itself from a $2.5-million bounty offered by Islamic conservatives, was clinched during a meeting in New York between Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi and British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. Britain has been at the forefront of international efforts to resolve the impasse over the Indian-born British author.

“An extraordinary thing has been achieved,” Rushdie exulted in an interview with Sky Television in London, where he has been in hiding since the death edict was issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. “It means everything. It means freedom.”

Tehran’s action does not necessarily prevent individual Islamic extremists from acting on their own initiative against Rushdie, whose fictional portrayal of the prophet Muhammad in “The Satanic Verses” was regarded as blasphemous by many Muslims.

But officials in Britain and the United States--and Rushdie himself--expressed hope that Kharrazi’s proclamation would be sufficient to allow the author to emerge from hiding and resume something resembling a normal life.

“The government of the Islamic Republic of Iran has no intention, nor is it going to take any action whatsoever, to threaten the life of the author of ‘The Satanic Verses’ or anybody associated with his work, nor will it encourage or assist anybody to do so,” Kharrazi said in a statement after the meeting in New York, where he and Cook are attending the U.N. General Assembly.

Britain, in turn, announced that it plans to dispatch an ambassador to Tehran for the first time in a decade. Cook heralded the accord as “historic” and “the opening of a new chapter” in relations between the European Union and Iran.

In London, Rushdie said he regarded the agreement as definitive, even though the Iranian government lacks the authority to officially rescind the late Khomeini’s edict, or fatwa.

“It looks like it’s over,” Rushdie said. “All I can say is that it seems that this has been done in Iran with consensus. There doesn’t seem to be any opposition to it in Iran.”

But Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency claimed that Britain, not Iran, had backed down in the Rushdie dispute, going forward with ambassadorial relations while quietly “dropping its demand for the fatwa on Rushdie to be lifted.”

And the English-language Tehran Times said: “The Iranian government’s policy in respect of the fatwa is the same, and there is no change. . . . The fact is that Rushdie insulted religious values of Islam and hurt the feelings of over 1 billion Muslims. No such person should be left without punishment. How and who should punish such a person is not an issue here.”

In Tehran, Iranian essayist Mohammed Ghaed said he found it worrying that most hard-line newspapers were silent Thursday on the topic of the Rushdie affair. “[Iranian President Mohammad] Khatami’s position is quite reasonable, but the other side won’t allow it,” he predicted. “I suspect that they will kill Rushdie when he begins to appear in public without his bodyguards.”

Rushdie acknowledged that he may face some residual threat from individual extremists, but he seemed to regard that possibility as remote, saying: “There’s one or two self-styled hard-liners in England belonging to tin-pot organizations who are saying this and that, but they’re completely unimportant.”

The publication of “The Satanic Verses” a decade ago spawned protests by Muslims in Pakistan, India and Britain. Khomeini issued his edict as part of an attempt to expand his leadership of Iran to the wider Islamic world.

Under Islam, a fatwa issued by one cleric cannot be rescinded by others, and any Muslim is still free to carry it out. But in formally renouncing the edict, the Iranian government appears to have done as much as it can to counter its impact.

Times staff writers Marjorie Miller in London and John Daniszewski in Tehran contributed to this report.