Ruhollah Khomeini religious duty and that the result is a marginal issue?" In an interview with Gareth Porter, Mohsen Rafighdoost, the eight-year war time minister of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, disclosed how Khomeini had opposed his proposal for beginning working on both nuclear and chemical weapons by a fatwa which had never been made public in details of when and how it was issued. In early 1989, Khomeini issued a fatwā calling for the assassination of Salman Rushdie, an India-born British author. Rushdie's book, "The Satanic Verses", published in 1988, was alleged to commit blasphemy against Islam and Khomeini's juristic ruling
Political thought and legacy of Ruhollah Khomeini Rushdie in particular was seen by some as a deft attempt to create a wedge issue that would prevent Muslims from imitating the West by "dividing Muslims from Westerners along the default lines of culture." The fatwa was greeted with headlines such as one in the popular British newspaper the "Daily Mirror" referring to Khomeini as "that Mad Mullah", observations in a British magazine that the Ayatollah seemed "a familiar ghost from the past - one of those villainous Muslim clerics, a Faqir of Ipi or a mad Mullah, who used to be portrayed, larger than life, in popular histories