Islam. 175Mulla Sadra, Khomeini's spiritual mentor. When Khomeini
issued his fatwah against novelist Salman Rushdie on Feb-
ruary 14, 1989, for his allegedly blasphemous portrait of
Muhammad in The Satanic Verses, he also contravened Sadra's
impassioned defence of freedom of thought. The fatwah was
declared un-Islamic by the ulama of al-Azhar and Saudi Ara-
bia, and was condemned by forty-eight out of the forty-nine
member states of the Islamic Conference the following
month.
But it appears that the Islamic revolution may have
helped the Iranian people to come to modernity on their
own terms. Shortly before his death, Khomeini tried to pass
more power to the parliament, and, with his apparent bless-
ing, Hashami Rafsanjani, the Speaker of the Majlis, gave a
democratic interpretation of Velayat-i Faqih. The needs of
the modern state had convinced Shiis of the necessity of
democracy, but this time it came in an Islamic package that
made it acceptable to the majority of the people. This
seemed confirmed on May 23, 1997, when Hojjat 01-Islam
Seyyid Khatami was elected to the presidency in a landslide
victory. He immediately made it clear that he wanted to
build a more positive relationship with the West, and in
September 1998 he dissociated his government from the fat-
wah against Rushdie, a move which was later endorsed by Ay-
atollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Faqih of Iran. Khatami's
election signalled the strong desire of a large segment of the
population for greater pluralism, a gentler interpretation of
Islamic law, more democracy and a more progressive policy
for women. The battle is still not won. The conservative cler-
ics who opposed Khomeini and for whom he had little time
are still able to block many of Khatami's reforms, but the
struggle to create a viable Islamic state, true to the spirit of
the Quran and yet responsive to current conditions, is still a
major preoccupation of the Iranian people.