Salman RushdieWho: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran
What: A fatwa is simply a religious ruling in Islam—most often, it seems, fatwas are about sexual matters—but Westerners usually associate the term with the notorious 1989 death sentence against British author Salman Rushdie. At the time, Khomeini was seeking to distract his followers from the pointless slaughter of the recently ended Iran-Iraq war, during which hundreds of thousands of Iranians were killed and wounded. Rushdie had just authored The Satanic Verses, an edgy novel about the origins of the Koran, and thus proved the perfect foil for Khomeini’s designs. Thousands of irate Muslims around the world protested the book as an insult to Islam. For a decade, Rushdie lived in hiding, fearing assassination for his “apostasy.” More recently, when Queen Elizabeth II knighted the author for his literary achievements, al Qaeda called for retaliation against Britain. And Khomeini’s successor, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khomeini, reversed his earlier position and said that the original 1989 fatwa remains in force.