The nuclear fatwa that wasn’t—how Iran sold the world a false narrative
“The idea struck me to introduce the concept of a fatwa [during the 2004 nuclear] negotiations. There was no coordination [in advance],” Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator at the time recounted eight years after the incident. This was nothing short of a stroke of genius in shaping a false narrative about the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, which was delivered by a cleric who eventually rose in the ranks and became a two-term president (2013–2021): Hassan Rouhani.