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
Salman Rushdie "an anti-religious novel. It is, however, an attempt to write about migration, its stresses and transformations." On 14 February 1989—Valentine's Day, and also the day of his close friend Bruce Chatwin's funeral—a "fatwā" ordering Rushdie's execution was proclaimed on Radio Tehran by Ayatollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran at the time, calling the book "blasphemous against Islam". (Chapter IV of the book depicts the character of an Imam in exile who returns to incite revolt from the people of his country with no regard for their safety.) A bounty was offered for Rushdie's death, and he was thus forced