Political Thought and Legacy of Ruhollah Khomeini - Muslim and Non-Muslim World - Neither East Nor West - in The West

In The West

While the Eastern or Soviet bloc no longer exists, Khomeini's legacy lives on in the Western world. From the beginning of the Iranian revolution to the time of his death Khomeini's "glowering visage became the virtual face of Islam in Western popular culture" and "inculcated fear and distrust towards Islam." He is said to have made the word `Ayatollah` "a synonym for a dangerous madman ... in popular parlance."His fatwa calling for the death of secular Musilm author Salman Rushdie in particular was seen by some as a deft attempt to create a wedge issue that would prevent Muslims from imitating the West by "dividing Muslims from Westerners along the default lines of culture." The fatwa was greeted with headlines such as one in the popular British newspaper the Daily Mirror referring to Khomeini as "that Mad Mullah", observations in a British magazine that the Ayatollah seemed "a familiar ghost from the past - one of those villainous Muslim clerics, a Faqir of Ipi or a mad Mullah, who used to be portrayed, larger than life, in popular histories of the British Empire", and laments that Khomeini fed the Western stereotype of "the backward, cruel, rigid Muslim, burning books and threatening to kill the blasphemer."

This was particularly the case in the largest nation of the Western bloc—the United States (or "Great Satan")—where Khomeini and the Islamic Republic are remembered for the American embassy hostage taking and accused of sponsoring hostage-taking and terrorist attacks—especially using the Lebanese Shi'a Islamic group Hezbollah—and which continues to apply economic sanctions against Iran. Popular feeling during the hostage-taking was so high in the United States that some Iranians complained that they felt the need to hide their Iranian identity for fear of physical attack even at universities.