On February 14, 1989, on the eve of the withdrawal of the Red Army of Afghanistan, Ayatollah Khomeyni, supreme guide of the Islamic Republic of Iran, emitted the fatwa condemning to death Salman Rushdie, on the grounds that his Roman The Satanic Verses would have blasphemed the Prophet. The date chosen by the Shiite leader was intended to obsess the expected victory of his Sunni rivals, supported by the CIA and financed by Saudi Arabia and the petromonarchies in the eyes of the Muslim world and the petromonarchies, which were going to fall outside the land of Afghan Islam The forces of communist atheism which had invaded him a decade earlier.
In the immediate future, the global scandal triggered by the Fatwa – an Iranian Ayatollah condemning to death a British citizen on the very soil of the United Kingdom, of the unheard of at the time – had the expected effect: Khomeyni had pulled the carpet under the feet of Sunni Islamism which expected to claim Soviet defeat to appear as the herald and the hero of “humiliated and offended” Muslims through the planet. Not many people noticed on the moment the Soviet defeat, which would have decisive geopolitical consequences – resulting in November 9 following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the death of communism.
Ayatollah had won the media war, and it was to regain control in the face of this rivalry in hegemony over revolutionary Islamism that Ayman al-Zawahiri (who has just been killed at the end of July by a missile American in Kabul where the Taliban returned after the withdrawal of the United States, this time, a year ago) had theorized, in its 1996 cavalryman’s manifesto under the banner of the Prophet, the need to hit the great blow of Sunni jihadism that would be “the double raid blessed” of September 11, 2001. which would allow Al-Qaida to monopolize the news at the expense of the rivals of Tehran by sowing death in the West, in Washington and New York.
However, the fatwa continued its devastating effects after the death of Khomeyni, which occurred in June following it: it would even be taken up and prolonged by its Sunni rivals, with their death sentence of Danish caricaturists who published drawings deemed blasphemous of the Prophet in a daily newspaper in September 2005, later taken up by Charlie Hebdo, which would lead to the massacre of January 7, 2015 perpetrated by the Kouachi brothers, cornerstone of Daesh in Europe, and beginning of the starting movement of thousands of young French Muslims for the cham – the Islamic appellation of the Levant.
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