Salman Rushdie and a question of power

Whenever a terrorist attack occurs, like the recent attempted assassination of Salman Rushdie, our society falls into the usual platitudes. The attack gets condemned, by most people. The ideology behind the attack is fudged so that it becomes as non-specific as possible. What almost never gets any time in the discussion is the question of answers. It is easy to say ‘We must never give in to terror’ or ‘We must defend the right to free speech.’ But personally I like to get more specific than this. Imagine if you were the UK government, say, and had some power actually to do something about it.

That brings me to the matter of Sayed Ata’ollah Mohajerani.

Mohajerani was a radical student involved in the 1979 revolution in Iran that overthrew the Shah and ushered in the Islamic Revolutionary government that still benights the country today. In the 1980s he became an MP and by the late 1980s he achieved, among other positions, that of deputy prime minister. He held that position in 1988 when the Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the execution of left-wing prisoners in Iran’s jails. Hundreds were subsequently massacred. Just last month a court in Stockholm found a prison official – Hamid Noury – guilty of war crimes for his part in the massacre. But Mohajerani, who held a far senior position at the time, remains at large.

One of the other highlights of his career came a year later when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa calling on ‘Muslims of the world’ to ‘kill without delay’ both the author of The Satanic Verses and ‘all the editors and publishers aware of its contents’.

Everyone knows what happened next. Rushdie went into hiding for a decade, protected by the British state. But his Japanese translator was killed, his Norwegian publisher was shot, his Italian translator was stabbed, dozens were killed when a Turkish hotel was set on fire in an attempt to kill the Turkish translator, and numerous plots against the life of Rushdie were foiled.

Two weeks ago in New York an assassin who has said he admired Khomeini got as close as anyone has got to date to killing the novelist. The young assailant stabbed Rushdie in the throat, face, abdomen and more.

The Ayatollah who set all this in motion had not himself read the novel. Various Muslim leaders from Britain and other countries had told the regime of its ‘blasphemous’ contents. But after the fatwa was issued, the job of then explaining the fatwa and further justifying it was assigned. That job went to Ata’ollah Mohajerani, who over a feverish period both read the actual novel and at book-length explained how its ‘blasphemous’ contents justified the Ayatollah’s fatwa. The resulting book, Critique of the Satanic Verses Conspiracy, was published in multiple editions in 1989 by one of the Iranian government’s publishing houses. In it Mohajerani justifies the fatwa that encourages Muslims to murder Rushdie, along with the editors, translators and publishers of the book and all authors who have been willing to support Rushdie publicly.

Mohajerani uses not just the Ayatollah’s fatwa but also Islamic tradition, such as the founder of Islam’s request for the poet Kaab Bin Ashraf to be killed. Mohajerani writes: ‘When Kaab bin Ashraf, whose poetry when compared with the Satanic Verses is far more tolerable to Muslims, deserves to be killed, there can be no doubt about Salman Rushdie’s fate.’

He says that Rushdie is a ‘mortad’ and ‘kaffir’ (apostate and unbeliever) and therefore he is a legitimate target. ‘There is no dissent among the Islamic jurists on this matter… Such a person must be killed.’ He goes on to describe Rushdie’s book – which he sees as a western plot – as a rotten tooth needing to be smashed before it rots everything else. And he sees the efforts of authors such as Günter Grass to defend Rushdie as further evidence of a coordinated plot against Islam.

In the years after publication Mohajerani stuck by his book, even publishing a further short story in which he mocked the sufferings of Rushdie as a result of the fatwa.

Then in 2004 an unfortunate thing happened in the life of Mr Mohajerani. He fell out with the regime, apparently because of an affair that the Mullahs may not have looked on with favour. So where did he go? Why, he came to Britain, of course.

Today he resides in leafy Harrow. His wife works at a university in the capital. He came during the time when Jack Straw and others pushed the idea that there was a reformist wing within the Islamic revolution – a claim that was hardly vindicated when the Iranian authorities brutally snuffed out the 2009 Green revolution. Certainly Mohajerani has found Harrow an enormously conducive place to continue his work from.

He still defends his book, which officially justified the fatwa against Rushdie. Mohajerani has even continued to defend his book since this month’s attack. All he did was write a book, he said in one recent tweet in Farsi. Which may be true. But then that is all Rushdie did too – one difference being that Rushdie’s novel did not add up to a justification for killing people who do such a thing. Rushdie did not try to get people killed.

After the attack on Rushdie, Mohajerani boasted about the number of editions his own book had come through. Perhaps aware that there are lawyers now looking at him, he said that the assault on Rushdie was a ‘tragic incident’ but that if he survives to write another novel Rushdie must make sure that it does ‘not insult Mohammed’.

So here is a question for the new Home Secretary, the new government, the new officials who will claim that they are ‘tough on terror’. What is Mohajerani doing in our country? And why is he a free man?