Whenever we publish anything at The Free Press, we ask ourselves one question: Can the reader—can you—get this perspective, this reporting, this analysis, this style anywhere else? Your time is precious. Our work should merit it.
We strive daily to meet that high bar. The essay below far surpasses it.
Longtime readers of The Free Press and “Honestly” listeners will know the name of its author, Jonathan Rosen, and, we hope, will have read his astonishing book, “The Best Minds.”
It’s days like today that we wish we had a printing press, given the importance and length of this particular piece. But we did the next best thing: Scroll down to find the link for a made-to-be-printed PDF version of this essay.
— Bari, Adam, and Oliver
Thirty-seven years ago, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader and founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, sentenced Salman Rushdie to death on Valentine’s Day for writing a novel.
It is hard to write that sentence without feeling it is a parody of the opening line of Franz Kafka’s The Trial: “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.” Nevertheless, that is what happened. And as Rushdie told Ezra Klein in spring of 2024, “We live in Kafka’s world.”
I remember reading about the fatwa—a word everyone suddenly knew—in the newspaper at the time. I had recently dropped out of graduate school and was trying to become a writer myself, and it seemed absurd that a best-selling novelist born in India, living in London, and famous around the world might be murdered because the octogenarian ruler of an Islamist theocracy thousands of miles away had called for his death, like the Red Queen shouting “Off with their heads!” in Alice in Wonderland.
The ayatollah died four months later, but it soon became apparent that Rushdie’s 1988 novel was no match for a few sentences read over the radio calling on “all valiant Muslims wherever they may be” to kill the author of The Satanic Verses and anyone else who helped bring his blasphemous book into the world.
Ever since, the fatwa has hovered over the West it was designed to destroy, waxing and waning like a moon. Sometimes it is a pale crescent, barely there; sometimes, as now, a round blood moon full of portent. But a portent of what?
It is a few sentences read aloud on Radio Tehran—mere breath—that will remain the Islamic Republic’s most dangerous weapon.
The question remains urgent even after the joint American and Israeli strikes on the early morning of February 28 marked a new phase in the long war waged by the Islamic Republic of Iran, which came into the world chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.” I have been thinking a great deal about the fatwa now that the murderous regime the ayatollah founded in 1979 is teetering on the bloody brink. Because it may yet be that of all the proxies nurtured over the years by the Islamic Republic for its apocalyptic showdown with the Jewish state and the West, and after all the billions spent on Islamist militias, ballistic missiles, and global terrorism— plus half a trillion dollars on its nuclear weapons program in pursuit of its endlessly repeated aim of “wiping Israel off the map”—it is a few sentences read aloud on Radio Tehran, mere breath, that will remain its most successful method of exporting the Islamist revolution, even after the murderous regime it created goes down.
