This is the story of how love and hate got swapped on Valentine’s Day, twenty-six years ago this week.

On February 14, 1989, an angry, calculating Ayatollah Khomeini broke with Islamic tradition and changed the world by issuing a fatwa that put a bounty on a British, Booker Prize–winning novelist. Specifically, the ayatollah broadcast a message on Tehran Radio declaring: “I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that [Salman Rushdie] the author of the Satanic Verses book, which is against Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who are aware of its content, are sentenced to death.”

Prior to this moment, issuing a lethal fatwa against a citizen of a foreign, non-Muslim country would have been unthinkable for even the most senior Shiite cleric. That all changed with Ayatollah Khomeini’s broadcast, which was deliberately crafted to overshadow the end of the Cold War and the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan that February 15. The ayatollah knew exactly what he was doing in positioning himself on the world stage as the global spokesperson for Islam in this shocking way, and he used Rushdie to get there.

On Valentine’s Day 2015, which comes more than a month after French-born assassins committed mass murder in the Parisian offices of a cartooning magazine, such barbarism has become part of the geopolitical landscape. It is taken for granted that jihadists seek to kill all manner of writers, artists, and journalists who run afoul of their twisted versions of Islam. But that first fatwa caught Rushdie, and the intellectual world more generally, completely off guard. It was a new kind of threat.

The irony is that France, the most recent site of this spectacular, internationally dispatched form of Khomeini-style terrorism, granted the ayatollah asylum (after Saddam Hussein eventually expelled him from Iraq, where he spent the years between 1965 to 1978 in exile). It was from his French house in Neauphle-le-Château that the ayatollah plotted the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and no doubt, in the back of his mind, war on Iraq. ...