Iran Corps Renews Edict Against Author Rushdie

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has renewed a call to kill British author Salman Rushdie, whom Iran condemned to death 14 years ago for allegedly insulting Islam in a prizewinning novel.

The hard-line corps, an elite fighting force separate from the army, said in a statement that a 1989 fatwa -- or Islamic edict -- issued against Rushdie by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s late supreme leader, was “irrevocable,” the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported late Friday.

The Revolutionary Guards answer directly to the current supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Khomeini, the father of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, condemned Rushdie to death Feb. 14, 1989, for alleged blasphemy against Islam in his novel “The Satanic Verses.”

In 1998, Iran declared that it would not support the fatwa, but at the same time the government said it could not rescind the edict because, under Islamic law, that could be done only by the person who had issued it. Khomeini died in June 1989. Iran and Britain agreed in 1998 to normalize relations after Tehran pledged to distance itself from efforts to kill the author.

Iran’s moderate elected president, Mohammad Khatami, said in 2001 that the death sentence against Rushdie should be seen as closed.

Reformist and independent newspapers ignored the 14th anniversary of the death sentence last week, but a few hard-line papers gave it prominent coverage.

The Jomhuri Islami paper ran a 16-page supplement Saturday with a front-page cartoon of a dead Rushdie being carried in a coffin draped with U.S., British and Israeli flags.

Khomeini’s fatwa sent Rushdie into hiding under police protection, but it didn’t stop him from writing novels. In 1990, he published an apology and reiterated his respect for Islam. The author’s spokeswoman said Saturday that Rushdie was unreachable for comment.