The fatwa’s timing served Iran’s internal radical power politics, not religion.

Evidence

A second question is why the ayatollah and some other Muslim leaders have waited until now to condemn the book and sentence its author to death by assassination. The Satanic Verses was published in England in September and was reviewed in an Iranian magazine a couple of months later. It is difficult to see a religious reason for the long delay, though the timing of the present response to coincide with the American publication of the book might suggest a political reason. There is an obvious and striking parallel with the seizure ten years ago of the American Embassy and diplomats, which stopped and reversed a movement in Iran to mend fences and restore relations with the United States, and which left the radicals in full control. The Rushdie affair has stopped a similar move to restore relations with Europe and will probably have a similar effect on the internal balance of forces in Iran. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1689

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to analyses of how the Rushdie affair functioned as intra-Iranian power struggle rather than religious necessity — relevant to the reader’s Said-adjacent cluster on how Islam becomes legible to Western audiences as political rather than religious phenomenon.