If you’ve paid attention to the news anytime in the past few days, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve heard or read someone use the Arabic word fatwā (the plural form of which in Arabic is fatāwā). This word properly refers to a formal opinion or piece of advice that a qualified expert in Islamic religious law gives, generally in response to a specific question that an individual Muslim or group of Muslims asks.
Unfortunately, most non-Muslim people in the western world incorrectly believe that this word refers to a death warrant, and this is how many people have been using it in the past few days. In this post, I will explain in greater detail what the word fatwā really means and how so many people came to have this egregious misconception about the word’s meaning.
What a fatwā really is
Explaining what a fatwā is requires a little bit of background information first. Islamic religious law is known as sharīʿa. Contrary to popular western belief, sharīʿa does not mean totalitarian rule by a theocratic Islamic state. In fact, in most cases, the term does not even refer to a state-imposed legal system, but rather to laws that Muslims are supposed to obey on a voluntary, private basis.
Instead of thinking of sharīʿa as a state-imposed legal system, it is usually more accurate to think of it as the Islamic equivalent of the halakha that observant Jews are supposed to follow, the teachings of the church that observant Roman Catholics are supposed to follow, or the rules of “Biblical morality” that some Protestants are supposed to follow.
There is no single, definitive book that states exactly what sharīʿa is. Instead, information about sharīʿa is derived mainly from four different sources: the Quran itself, sunnah (i.e., the body of authentic accounts of the Prophet Muhammad), qiyās (i.e., deductive analogy which seeks to determine how sharīʿa might apply to new circumstances based on comparison to circumstances described in the Quran or in the sunnah), and ʾijmāʿ (i.e., the consensus of Islamic scholars).
Islamic legal scholars carefully distinguish between sharīʿa, which they regard as God’s infallible, immutable law, which he has revealed to humans through his various prophets, and fiqh, which refers to interpretations of sharīʿa that human scholars and jurists have made. An expert in fiqh is known as a faqīh. A faqīh who is considered to possess a sufficient degree of religious knowledge and piety to issue formal legal opinions is known as a muftī (the plural form of which in Arabic is muftin).
This brings us back to the word fatwā, which, as I partially explained earlier, refers to a formal opinion or piece of advice about fiqh that a qualified muftī gives, generally in response to a specific question posed by an individual Muslim or group of Muslims. It’s basically the Islamic religious equivalent of a piece of formal advice that a lawyer might give to a client about a specific legal matter.
ABOVE: Illustration from an Ottoman manuscript dating to 1721 (Walters manuscript W.666) depicting a muftī giving advice
All fatāwā are considered legally non-binding, meaning that even the person to whom a fatwā is given is not required to follow it if they think it is incorrect. Nonetheless, a fatwā is considered authoritative and the kind of advice that a person should generally want to follow, since it comes from an expert.
In the same way that, if a person doesn’t think the advice they’ve been given by their lawyer is correct, they can seek out further advice from a different lawyer, a Muslim who has received a fatwā from a certain muftī can seek out a different muftī to receive another fatwā on the same subject.
In the same way that there are many drastically different interpretations of halakha in Judaism or the Bible in Christianity, there are also many drastically different interpretations of sharīʿa in Islam. Individual muftin routinely disagree with each other and often issue fatāwā that contradict those issued by other muftin. Muslims generally believe that only one interpretation of sharīʿa is correct, but they do recognize that many different interpretations exist.
ABOVE: Photograph of a page from a seventeenth-century compilation of various fatāwā from Safavid Persia
Why so many people incorrectly think fatwā means “death warrant”
Given that the actual meaning of the word fatwā is relatively innocuous, some people may wonder how on earth so many came to think that it means “death warrant.” The answer is that it almost entirely comes down to one particular incident.
In 1988, the Indian-born British novelist Salman Rushdie, an ex-Muslim atheist, published his magical realist novel The Satanic Verses, which immediately sparked widespread backlash and controversy. Many conservative Muslims interpreted the book as blasphemous against Islam and intended to promote unbelief. All over the world, people held protests and demonstrations, both in opposition to and in support of the novel.
Although some Islamophobes have tried to present the conservative Muslim backlash against The Satanic Verses as evidence that Islam is a uniquely intolerant religion, this argument does not really hold up. The early backlash against the novel consisted mostly of conservative Muslims angrily contacting the publisher and booksellers, trying to ban the book, holding peaceful protests, and publicly burning copies of the novel.
Overall, it was extremely similar to the fundamentalist Christian backlash against Dan Brown’s 2003 mystery thriller novel The Da Vinci Code and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series of children’s novels in the 2000s or the ongoing broadly right-wing backlash against works with queer characters and queer themes, such as Maia Kobabe’s 2019 graphic novel Gender Queer, which conservatives have been zealously trying to ban from bookstores and public libraries.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing Muslims burning copies of the novel The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie at a massive protest of roughly 5,000 Muslims in the Hague, Netherlands, on 3 March 1989
The one factor that changed all of this is the fact that, on 14 February 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, issued a proclamation in which he expressly called for “all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world” to assassinate Rushdie and all other people involved in the publication of The Satanic Verses, including publishers, editors, and translators, “without delay.”
The Ayatollah himself did not actually call his proclamation as a “fatwā” at the time he issued it, nor did he expressly cite any Quranic passages in it or invoke any specific legal reasoning whatsoever of the kind that might be generally expected in a fatwā. Nonetheless, western journalists and news outlets widely referred to the declaration as a “fatwā.” Consequently, many non-Muslim westerners who had previously never heard this word in any other context came to believe that it meant “death warrant.”
The Ayatollah’s proclamation also severely escalated the violence of the situation, turning what had previously been mostly a series of protests, book burnings, and book bannings into a life-endangering situation for the book’s author and publishers.
The U.K. government placed Rushdie under police custody for his own protection. Multiple attempts to assassinate him ensued. Thankfully, all these attempts were unsuccessful, but, tragically, on 12 July 1991, an unknown assassin did successfully murder Hitoshi Igarashi, the translator of the Japanese-language edition of The Satanic Verses, in his office at the University of Tsukuba in Japan.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, who notoriously issued a proclamation calling for Salman Rushdie’s assassination
Why the word fatwā is in the news again now
Just a few days ago, on 12 August 2022, as Rushdie himself was about to deliver a lecture at a large public amphitheater at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York, a twenty-four-year-old man named Hadi Matar (who, I should note, was born in the U.S., holds U.S. citizenship, and lived in Fairview, New Jersey) rushed onto the stage and stabbed the author with a knife at least ten times in what prosecutors are describing as a premeditated attack. Matar has been arrested and charged with second-degree attempted murder and assault with a weapon.
Rushdie, who is severely injured, was flown via helicopter to a hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he was given emergency surgery and placed on a ventilator. (By an absolutely bizarre coincidence, I happen to be in Erie, Pennsylvania, right now at this moment as I am writing this, even though it is a city I have never previously visited, because I am currently in the midst of moving from Indiana to Massachusetts and my family and I happened to stay at a hotel in Erie just on this particular night.) According to this article from the BBC, Rushdie has now been taken off the ventilator and is able to talk, but will most likely continue to face severe health complications and may lose an eye.
Predictably, news and media outlets have been carelessly and incorrectly throwing around the word fatwā as though it meant “death warrant.” For instance, an article by Jo Glanville published in The Guardian on 13 August begins with the following declaration, which seems to use the words “fatwā” and “death sentence” interchangeably without clarifying any distinction between the two terms:
“First there is shock and then despair at the news of the assault on Salman Rushdie. He had lived under the threat of the fatwa for decades. Even with the Iranian government’s retreat from the death sentence in 1998, he could never be sure that a lone individual would not attempt to kill him.”
Obviously, it is a tragedy that an author has been violently stabbed multiple times and severely injured for a novel that he wrote. The media misrepresentation of what a fatwā is, though, is also dangerous because it contributes to the inaccurate and bigoted impression of Islam as an inherently violent religion in every possible respect by taking a word for a concept in Islam that is actually fairly innocuous on its own and co-opting it to refer to something inherently violent.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the author Salman Rushdie at Hay Festival in 2016
It’s easy to generalize a group as violent based on a few extremists, I’m afraid.
This was enlightening, I did not know what a fatwa actually consisted of. Another tragedy that happened following Khomeini’s proclamation was the burning of a hotel where the Turkish translator of the book was staying. He survived, but many members of a religious minority who celebrated a festival there were killed in the fire
Thank you for sharing this information! I already knew that there were numerous incidents of violence and attempted violence against people involved in the book’s publication, but I had not heard about that specific incident.
I’d know about this for a long time, but as you many don’t, so thanks for spreading the knowledge. Media outlets in Iran and Hezbollah members aren’t helping given they praised this of course.
I’m glad to hear that you appreciate my post!
Regarding Hezbollah and the Iranian state media, I wouldn’t expect anything better from them.
No, me neither. Apparently the suspect is a supporter of theirs too.
I’m not at all surprised.
Me neither again.
Spencer, how much Arabic do you know?
I must confess that I don’t personally know any Arabic whatsoever. I only know some Arabic-derived terms that are religiously important in Islam. I looked up the plural forms of those terms to make sure I got them correct.
You knew enough to feel confident writing this article, right?
Spencer, I really enjoy your blog, and although my primary interest is in the Classical world, I’m always interested when you take up other topics! So, thanks so much for this one. I too had always assumed that the Ayatollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa; interesting to learn that the word means something entirely different than what I had assumed.
On a completely unrelated note. . . would you consider writing about the ancient Minoan civilization? I have to admit, that culture absolutely fascinates me, primarily in the long millennia before it came into contact with Mycenaean or pre-Mycenaean culture. Thanks much for you numerous enlightening posts!
Thank you so much for the positive feedback! I am delighted to hear that you find my articles educational. I try to write about many diverse topics partly in order to keep things interesting.
The Minoan civilization is somewhat difficult to write about, since no one alive today is able to understand any of the surviving documents written in the Minoan language using the Linear A script, we don’t even know for certain which language family the Minoan language belongs to, there are very few ancient sources written in ancient languages that scholars can read that are contemporary with the Minoans that mention them, the vast majority of what scholars know about the Minoans comes from archaeological material evidence (which is not my expertise), extremely little is known about them with reasonable certainty, and much of what has been written and repeated about them is speculation unsupported by solid evidence.
That being said, I do actually discuss the Minoans at considerable length in this post I originally wrote in March 2019, in which I debunk the claim that the Minoan civilization was the real-life inspiration for the mythical Atlantis. I’ve also been planning to write a post for a very long time in which I will debunk the widely-repeated claim that the Minoan civilization was matriarchal and I’ve also been planning for a while to eventually write a post at some point about the Phaistos Disk.
Thanks for the response! Yeah, I realize very well that the Minoans still belong to the field of archaeology, rather than history. And, although I love reading history, is there anything more boring than reading archaeology? I mean. . . ‘and on level 4, we discovered our first rhytons. . . . ) And, although Linear B has been translated (I’m an old guy, and that was true when I was in college–Class of ’71), it appears to deal primarily with matters of accounting, and tallies. And, some progress has been made on Linear A, I understand, but it too seems to have been used mostly by tradespeople. So, no epics, no lyric poetry, not even a King List or two! Nonetheless, I’m very much looking forward to your writings on the Phaistos Disk, and your post on the absolute lack of evidence for a Minoan matriarchy. Thanks again!
I consider myself a historian, not an archaeologist. Nonetheless, I do not disparage archaeology. Archaeology is extremely important as a field in its own right and material evidence is every bit as vital to understanding the past as written sources.
I think y’all should check out the book, ‘The Dawn of Everything’ by Graeber and Wengro. It’s a fascinating new outlook on human civilization written by an archeologist and anthropologist. They also get into the Minoans, and while evidence of matriarchal systems isn’t 100% irrefutable, it certainly isn’t zero. They worked on the book for 10 years and did a lot of research, included modern evidence, and show their work – the Notes section could be a whole book in itself!
I have a couple of important points to note here. First is that neither David Graeber nor David Wengrow is a specialist in the Aegean Bronze Age and The Dawn of Everything is a work of popular archaeology intended for a lay, rather than scholarly, readership.
Second, I am well aware of the evidence that people try to use to argue that the Minoan civilization was a pacifistic matriarchy. I also know that the evidence is highly ambiguous at best, can be interpreted in many different ways, and people only continue interpreting it as evidence of pacifistic matriarchy because that’s how Sir Arthur Evans, the original excavator of Knossos, originally interpreted it. Contemporary people continue to find that vision appealing, so they often support it out of wishful thinking.
I’m not saying that there’s no evidence of any kind whatsoever; I’m saying that the evidence that people try to cite is extremely weak and uncompelling unless a person already wishes to believe that the pacifistic matriarchal hypothesis is correct.