Abdullah al-Ahdal Abdullah al-Ahdal Abdullah bin Muhammad al-Ahdal, a native of Saudi Arabia, was the great Imam of Belgium. He died in 1989 in Brussels. On March 29, 1989, while he was rector of the Great Mosque of Brussels, a gunman entered and shot him. The Lebanese terrorist organization Soldiers of the Right claimed credit for the murders Belgian authorities and the news media linked the killings to "The Satanic Verses" controversy: the previous month Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had issued a fatwā ordering Muslims to kill novelist Salman Rushdie because of their objections to the publication of his book "The Satanic
Knighthood of Salman Rushdie and decrepit government of Great Britain should know that the era of their empire is over and today they are a valet in the service of the United States." While in 1998 the Iranian government (under British diplomatic pressure) declared it would "neither support nor hinder assassination operations on Rushdie," many clerics like Khatami rejected the move. Even soon after the government's disavowel, the Iranian press reported three clerics calling on their followers to kill Rushdie, stating that the "fatwa" was irrevocable. As late as January 2005 Khomeini's successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei announced that "he still believed the British novelist