The Rushdie episode showed the ayatollah not just as an
extraordinarily militant Muslim leader, but as one seemingly
gripped by religious paranoia.The Satanic Verses, he told other
clerics, was part of a broad effort by Israel and Western countries
to “annihilate Islam.”^62
Perhaps he really believed it. Some have conjectured, though,
that the death sentence against Rushdie was a public relations
ploy. They suggested that Khomeini took this opportunity to
portray himself worldwide as the foremost defender of his faith.
He still hoped the revolution he had ignited might spread to
other Islamic countries.
But almost no time remained for Iran’s peerless leader. Little
had been seen of him in public during his declining years. How
much longer would the ayatollah be with his people? Even as
fanatical assassins searched the globe for Salman Rushdie,
that question was on the minds of many both inside and
outside Iran.
Death came by heart attack on June 3, 1989, after the ayatollah
underwent intestinal surgery. Tehran Radio somberly proclaimed,
“The lofty spirit of the leader of the Muslims and the leader of
the noble ones, His Eminence Imam Khomeini, has reached
the highest status, and a heart replete with love and God and
his true people, who have endured numerous hardships, has
stopped beating.”^63
A decade later, historians who scrutinized Iran’s revolutionary
experience on the whole were less reverent. Khomeini died
“a broken man after Iran’s failure to defeat Iraq in eight years
of war,” wrote Geneive Abdo in Answering Only to God,
“but his theological and political legacies continue to dominate
the country.”^64
Iranians sent him to his grave with the same hysterical idol-
ization they had shown when he arrived in Tehran from exile.
Ignoring a wilting summer heat wave, millions from across the
nation converged on Tehran to pay their respects as his corpse
lay in state. During his funeral procession, mourners rushed the
open casket to tear off fragments of his white burial cloth. As in
A Troubled Decade 79