A shocking fatwa from Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi targeting Donald Trump challenges America’s security strategy and calls for decisive action.
At a Glance
- Iranian Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi has issued a fatwa calling for “severe punishment” against President Donald Trump.
- The religious edict, amplified by state media, brands Trump as an enemy of Islam and is being interpreted as an incitement to violence.
- The threat echoes the 1989 fatwa against author Salman Rushdie, who was nearly killed in an attack in 2022.
- National security experts are calling for a “maximum pressure” response to counter the threat from Tehran.
A Dire Threat from Tehran
In a major escalation of its hostile rhetoric, a top Iranian cleric has issued a fatwa, or religious edict, calling for violence against U.S. President Donald Trump. The fatwa, from Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi, one of the most senior clerics in Iran, brands Trump as an enemy of Islam and declares that Muslims must respond with “severe punishment,” according to a translation reported by the Daily Wire.
The decree, which has been amplified by Iranian state media and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), is being seen as a direct and state-sanctioned call for the assassination of a U.S. president.
A Global Call to Violence
National security experts are warning that the threat must be taken with the utmost seriousness. Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), analyzed the danger posed by the edict.
“With this fatwa, which contains some blatant invitations to violence as a religious commandment, Tehran aims to inspire everyone from its transnational terror cadres to lone-wolf radicals to attack Trump,” Taleblu wrote. He added that the fatwa also serves as a warning to domestic dissidents in Iran that the regime will increasingly use violence to crush any opposition.
The Long Shadow of the Rushdie Fatwa
The new decree carries chilling echoes of the 1989 fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini against author Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses. That edict made Rushdie a target for decades, culminating in a near-fatal assassination attempt in New York in 2022.
As detailed by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the attack on Rushdie proved that the Iranian regime’s threats are not merely rhetorical and can inspire violence long after they are issued. The new fatwa against Trump has now placed him and other U.S. officials under a similar, credible, and long-term threat from the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. The situation demands a robust and sustained “maximum pressure” campaign from the United States to counter Iran’s aggression.
