A jury in a federal court in the U.S. found “Hadi Matar,” the perpetrator of the knife attack on Salman Rushdie, the British-American writer, guilty on all terrorism-related charges. U.S. prosecutors said the motivation for the attack was Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwa to kill Salman Rushdie— a fatwa that, more than three decades after it was issued, has continued, according to prosecutors, to inspire this action.

“Reza Alijani,” a political activist and journalist, says in this interview with IranWire Television that Khomeini was, in fact, the last cleric who took a stance against Salman Rushdie’s novel, but that he “jumped ahead” first with this hardline position. By emphasizing that Salman Rushdie is a writer and that what should have been met with him was ultimately another written work, she discusses the effects of Khomeini’s fatwa on “historical backwardness” and “violence for the modern person.”

She considers the process of putting Hadi Matar, the attacker of Mr. Rushdie, on trial a lesson for Iran’s past and future, and stresses the necessity of a fair trial process even for someone like Matar, who is accused of and found guilty of terrorism