It's that Caliphate idea again

The same friend who notified me about the Iranian dissident, also pointed me to a Wall Street Journal article about the dangerous isolationism affecting European Muslims (subscription only). The article is generally interesting, but she was particularly struck by this point:

religious awakening that started in the late 1980s and spread quickly among Europe's Muslims. A turning point was 1989. The Berlin Wall fell, ending the Cold War -- an event that many Muslims saw as due in part to the actions of Islamic holy warriors, the mujahedeen, who through the 1980s had fought the Soviet Union to a standstill in Afghanistan. That was also the year Iran's paramount leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a religious opinion, or fatwa, calling for the death of the British writer Salman Rushdie, whose novel "The Satanic Verses" in part criticized and satirized Islam. Fatwas are traditionally only valid in the Islamic world, so Khomeini's fatwa implied something profound: Europe was part of the Islamic world. It was a revolutionary change that now is accepted by many Islamic theologians and thinkers.