httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SwHKql3dKc

News report on the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini

Our thread on fundamentalism continues. Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini died on this date in 1989 (born 1900).

From The Double Vision:

I am, of course, isolating only one element in Christianity, but cruelty, terror, intolerance, and hatred within any religion always means that God has been replaced by the devil, and such things are always accompanied by a false kind of liberalism. At present some other religions, notably Islam, are even less reassuring than our own. As Marxist and American imperialisms decline, the Moslem world is emerging as the chief threat to world peace, and the spark-plug of its intransigence, so to speak, is its fundamentalism or false literalism of belief. The same principle of demonic perversion applies here: when Khomeini gave order to have Salman Rushdie murdered, he was turning the whole of the Koran into Satanic verses. In our own culture, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale depicts a future New England in which a reactionary religious movement has brought back the hysteria, bigotry, and sexual sadism of seventeenth century Puritanism. Such a development may seem unlikely just now, but the potential is still there. (CW 4, 177-78)