India, Rushdie’s country of birth, was the first to ban the book, in October, 1988. Tehran ignored “The Satanic Verses” for six months after publication, even as it was banned in other predominantly Muslim countries. Rushdie was also a pawn-and a coincidence of timing. After four hundred and forty-four days, the Ayatollah finally agreed to end the hostage crisis when it was politically and financially expedient for his regime.

Fifty-two American diplomats became pawns in Iranian politics. But Khomeini went on national radio and encouraged the students to stay there-indefinitely. decision to take in the ailing Shah for medical treatment. Three of the student leaders later told me that they had planned to hold the Embassy for three to five days to protest the U.S. (They also started killing one another.) The Embassy takeover provided a useful diversion. In the months after the Shah was ousted, the revolutionaries split over Iran’s political future, a new constitution, and the powers of the clergy. He had done the same thing after students took over the U.S. Khomeini often capitalized on issues that distracted public attention from the Revolution’s fissures and failures. Tehran offered a reward that eventually grew to more than three million dollars. Whoever is killed in this cause will be a martyr” and ascend instantly to heaven. He called on “all valiant Muslims wherever they may be” to go out and kill all of them-without delay-“so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth. Khomeini condemned Rushdie, as well as his editors and publishers in any language, to death. At the time, the young Islamic Republic was emerging from existential challenges: an eight-year war with Iraq that produced at least a million casualties widespread domestic discontent deepening political rifts among the clergy a flagging economy that had rationed basic food and fuel and a decade of diplomatic isolation. The book’s passages, which portrayed human weaknesses and undermined the Prophet’s credibility as a messenger of God, were blasphemous to some Muslims. The Iranian leader’s murderous 1989 fatwa against the British American writer was a political move to exploit the erupting fury in Pakistan, India, and beyond over a fictional dream sequence involving the Prophet Muhammad. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini never read Salman Rushdie’s book “ The Satanic Verses,” his son Ahmed told me in Tehran, in the early nineteen-nineties.

Hassan death dream