Jonathan Rosen’s recent essay in The Free Press, “The World the Fatwa Made,” deserves to be read not simply as a reflection on Salman Rushdie, but as a warning about the Islamic Republic’s most enduring success. Rosen’s central insight is both elegant and chilling: Iran’s most dangerous weapon was never only its missiles, militias or nuclear ambitions. It was language — words turned into permission, slogans turned into doctrine, incitement turned into murder.
Rosen takes readers back to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Rushdie, a decree that outlived the ayatollah himself and reached across continents. It did more than threaten a novelist. It created a world in which a writer could be transformed into a cosmic criminal, in which publishers, translators, booksellers and defenders of free expression could all become targets, and in which violence could be cast not as crime but as righteousness. That is Rosen’s point: The fatwa was not just a death sentence. It was a governing theory.
He argues that this theory blurred the line between speech and action, between grievance and license, between political passion and holy murder. A few sentences broadcast from Tehran became a template for transnational intimidation, for the demonization of “Zionists,” for the idea that whole categories of people can be marked as deserving harm. In Rosen’s telling, the fatwa did not remain fixed in 1989. It metastasized. It helped shape the intellectual and moral disorder in which chants, myths and conspiracies now do work once done by armies.
That is why his essay matters so much now.
Even if the current campaign against Iran succeeds beyond expectation — even if its nuclear infrastructure is shattered, its regional proxies broken and its ruling order politically ruined — the war of ideas the regime launched may continue long after the regime itself is crippled. A military victory can destroy centrifuges. It cannot by itself destroy the habits of thought the Islamic Republic spent decades exporting.
Those habits are now visible far from Tehran. They appear wherever slogans erase moral distinctions, wherever “resistance” is used to sanctify atrocity, wherever Jews are reclassified as symbols of evil, wherever free expression is treated as a provocation that forfeits protection. They survive in campuses, cultural institutions, activist circles and online ecosystems that did not invent Khomeini’s worldview but have, at times, echoed its absolutes.
That is the deeper danger Rosen identifies. The Islamic Republic may fall. But the world it helped make — a world in which incitement masquerades as justice, intimidation as moral clarity, and eliminationist fantasy as politics — can outlast the men who built it.
Winning the military war against Iran would matter enormously. It could spare Israel, the region and the world from catastrophic violence. But it will not be enough if the West imagines that toppling a regime also topples the ideas it normalized.
The missiles may be stopped. The fatwa may remain. And unless democratic societies relearn how to defend free speech, moral clarity and the equal humanity of their targets, Iran’s most lasting victory may survive its defeat.
