"I consider Khomeini's position dangerous. He does not have the right to pass judgment-that is not the Islamic way"
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Mahfouz is doing something braver than it first appears: he’s disagreeing with Khomeini without granting him the religious pedestal that would make disagreement look like blasphemy. Calling Khomeini’s position “dangerous” isn’t just a political critique; it’s a warning about what happens when a revolutionary cleric claims the power to decide who belongs inside the moral community and who doesn’t. “Dangerous” here is elastic, implying not only violence but contagion: a model of authority that can spread, normalize, and harden into habit.
The sharpest move is the pivot to legitimacy. “He does not have the right to pass judgment” is less an argument about doctrine than about jurisdiction. Mahfouz is staking out a boundary between personal faith and institutionalized condemnation, between Islam as a lived ethic and Islam as a tribunal. The phrase “that is not the Islamic way” is strategic subtext: he refuses the Western-friendly framing of Islam versus modernity and instead frames the conflict as Islam versus a particular kind of Islamist power.
Context matters. Mahfouz spoke as an Arab public intellectual who had watched nationalist projects, state censorship, and religious movements all attempt to monopolize the story of the people. After Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie, “passing judgment” wasn’t rhetorical; it was an invitation to transnational punishment. Mahfouz, later attacked for his own writing, understood that once a leader claims divine authority to sentence art, the knife doesn’t stay pointed at one book. It becomes a method.
The sharpest move is the pivot to legitimacy. “He does not have the right to pass judgment” is less an argument about doctrine than about jurisdiction. Mahfouz is staking out a boundary between personal faith and institutionalized condemnation, between Islam as a lived ethic and Islam as a tribunal. The phrase “that is not the Islamic way” is strategic subtext: he refuses the Western-friendly framing of Islam versus modernity and instead frames the conflict as Islam versus a particular kind of Islamist power.
Context matters. Mahfouz spoke as an Arab public intellectual who had watched nationalist projects, state censorship, and religious movements all attempt to monopolize the story of the people. After Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie, “passing judgment” wasn’t rhetorical; it was an invitation to transnational punishment. Mahfouz, later attacked for his own writing, understood that once a leader claims divine authority to sentence art, the knife doesn’t stay pointed at one book. It becomes a method.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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