President Barack Obama has frequently referred to a religious fatwa against nuclear weapons issued by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as evidence that his deal with Iran for a peaceful resolution of its alleged plans to acquire the bomb is not rooted in naivety, as the president’s opponents in America and beyond habitually claim.

However, a top Iranian analyst writing in the English edition of Al-Sharq Al-Awsat newspaper has thrown a spanner in the works that could prove highly embarrassing.

“The trouble is that no one has actually seen the fatwa, although many people comment on it. In a bizarre twist, some mullahs even quote Obama as the source that confirms the existence of the fatwa,” analyst, author, and columnist Amir Taheri said, according to MEMRI (The Middle East Media Research Institute) in a recent dispatch.

As evidence of the extraordinary notion that the source of the alleged fatwa may be Obama himself, Taheri quotes Ayatollah Mahmoud Yussefwand as telling the official Iranian news agency IRNA:

“Our Supreme Guide has issued a fatwa against the use of nuclear weapons, as confirmed by the President of the United States.’

MEMRI further quotes Taheri as saying:

“Presented as a ‘Theological Expert of the Scientific Center,’ the ayatollah was one of more than 100 mullahs and government officials who attended a two-day conference in Tehran on ‘A Theological View of Nuclear Weapons.’ None of the speakers claimed that he had seen the text of the fatwa. Nor did anyone suggest that the fatwa — if there were such a thing — was meant to stop the Islamic Republic from securing the means of making a bomb.”