ABSTRACT
For Westerners, the term fatwa is irrevocably linked with the death sentence pronounced on purportedly blasphemous novelist Salman Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini, then the spiritual leader of Iran’s Islamic revolutionary regime, a few months before his death in 1989. Yet a fatwa is nothing more or less than an opinion on a legal matter, the response to a question put to a mufti, or respondent.
