The Satanic Verses are words of "Satanic suggestion", which the Islamic prophet Muhammad by some accounts mistook for divine revelation in an alleged incident. The first use of the expression in English is attributed to Sir William Muir in 1858. Whether the incident ever actually occurred is highly debated and many reject it as apocryphal.
According to early prophetic biographies of Muhammad by al-Waqidi, Ibn Sa'd and the of al-Tabari, Muhammad was manipulated by Satan (Iblis) to praise the three chief pagan Meccan goddessesal-Lat, al-'Uzza, and Manatwhile preaching Islam to an audience in Mecca. Religious authorities recorded the story for the first two centuries of the Islamic era. The words of praise for the pagan deities allegedly elicited by Satanic temptation are known as the Satanic Verses. A version of this episode, in which Muhammad does not issue the purported verses, takes place in surah 53 of the Quran.
Strong objections to the historicity of the Satanic Verses incident were raised as early as the 10th century. By the 13th century, most Islamic scholars (ulama) started to reject it as inconsistent with the theological principle of (impeccability of the prophets); they also asserted that the isnads (chains of transmitters) of the accounts of the incident were inadequate according to the methodology of hadith criticism. According to some Islamic traditions, God sent Satan as a tempter to test the audience. Others categorically deny that this incident ever happened.
Some modern scholars of Islam accept the incident as historical, citing the implausibility of early Muslim biographers fabricating a story so unflattering to their prophet. Alford T. Welch considers this argument insufficient, but does not dismiss the possibility that the story has some historical basis. He proposes that the story may reflect a longer period of Muhammad's acceptance of the Meccan goddesses, known by his contemporaries and later condensed into a story that limits his acceptance of the Meccan goddesses' intercession to a single incident and assigns blame for this departure from strict monotheism to Satan. Carl W. Ernst writes that the existence of later insertions in early Meccan surahs indicates that the Quran was revised in dialogue with its first audience, who recited these surahs frequently in worship services and asked questions about difficult passages. A reading of surah 53 with this in mind leads Ernst to conclude that the Satanic Verses likely never existed as part of the Quran. He argues that the surah is heavily focused on the rejection of polytheism, which makes the inclusion of the verses unrealistic. Its absence from the canonical hadith collections supports his claim.
Others have suggested that the story may have been fabricated for theological reasons.
Basic narrative
There are some accounts of the incident that differ in the construction and detail of the narrative, but they may be broadly collated to produce a basic account. The different versions of the story are recorded in early (Quranic commentaries) and biographies of the Prophet, such as Ibn Ishaq's. In its essential form, the story reports that Muhammad longed to convert his kinsmen and neighbors of Mecca to Islam. It then reports that as he was reciting these verses of surah 53,(Q.53) considered a revelation from the angel Gabriel:
Satan tempted him to utter the following line which does not appear in the Quran:
Al-Lat, al-'Uzza, and Manat were three pre-Islamic Arabian goddesses worshipped by the Meccans. Discerning the precise meaning of the word has proven difficult, as it has multiple appropriate meanings. Commentators have written that it means 'cranes'. In other contexts, the Arabic word does mean a craneappearing in the singular as and , and the word has cousin forms in other words for birds, including 'raven', 'crow' and 'eagle'. Taken as a segment, "exalted " has been translated by Orientalist William Muir to mean 'exalted women', while contemporary academic Muhammad Manazir Ahsan has translated the same segment as 'high-soaring ones (deities)'. Thus, whether the phrase had intended to attribute a divine nature to the three idols is a matter of dispute. In either case, scholars generally agree on the meaning of the second half of the verse, "whose intercession is hoped for".
Tabari's account
An extensive account of the incident is found in al-Tabari's history, the Tarikh (Vol. VI, ):
Reception in Muslim exegesis
Early Islam Shahab Ahmed, author of a book on the Satanic Verses in early Islam, observed that in the era of early and sirah (maghazi) literature, the incident was near-universally accepted by the early Muslim community and illustrative of a concept of prophethood involving an ongoing struggle. Later, it was rejected when the logic of the era of hadith collections and subsequent orthodoxy was based on two epistemological principles: the theological principle of (impeccability of the prophets) and the hadith methodological principle of assaying reports by their isnads.
Ibn Hazm considered the story to be fabricated, saying: "The hadith which includes the phrase, 'Indeed, they are the lofty Gharaniq, and their intercession is hoped for,' is an absolute lie. It is neither valid in terms of transmission nor worthy of being engaged with, as fabricating lies is within anyone's capacity."
According to Ibn Taymiyyah, there are two opinions in regard to this. It was transmitted that the early Islamic scholars (Salaf) believed the story, while later scholars (Khalaf) say that the transmission of the account is not established as reliable.
Ibn Kathir rejected the narration, saying: "The core of the story is from the authentic narration, but the Gharaniq story is disconnected and its chain of transmission is not authentic."Ibn Kathir. Tafsir Ibn Kathir Archive.org. The Interpretation of Ibn Kathir. Darussalam This was a reference to the narration recorded by scholars such as Al-Bukhari and Al-Muslim who mentioned the recitation of the current verses of Chapter 53 and the prostration of the Muslims and the disbelievers upon their recitation, but not the intervention of Satan.
The earliest biography of Muhammad, Ibn Ishaq's (761–767) is lost but his collection of traditions survives mainly in two sources: Ibn Hisham (833) and al-Tabari (915). The story appears in al-Tabari, who includes Ibn Ishaq in the chain of transmission, but not in Ibn Hisham, where much that previous generations had recorded of the Prophet, he commented sternly, was either bogus, irrelevant, or sacrilegious. Ibn Sa'd and al-Waqidi, two other early biographers of Muhammad relate the story.
The doctrine of has been most forcefully and consistently upheld by the Shi'a, for whom it is a central tenet. It therefore appears that no Shi'ite of any school has ever accepted the Satanic Verses incident. Those Sunni scholars who did accept the incident had a slightly, but very significantly, different understanding of .
Paul Arno Eichler (1928) describes Muslims as believing that Satan's interference in divine revelation as a test sent by God. He explains this interpretation of Muslims by the fact that in Islamic thought, Satan himself is not the tempter, but merely the instrument through which God tests his subjects.Eichler, Paul Arno. "Die Dschinn, Teufel und Engel im Koran." (1928). pp. 43–44
Later medieval period Due to its controversial nature, the tradition of the Satanic Verses never made it into any of the canonical hadith compilations (though possible truncated versions of the incident did). The reference and exegesis about the Verses appear in early histories. In addition to appearing in Tabari's tafsir, it is used in the tafsirs of Muqatil, Abd al-Razzaq al-San'ani and Ibn Kathir, as well as the of Abu Ja'far an-Nahhas, the asbab collection of Wahidi and even the late-medieval as-Suyuti's compilation .
Objections to the incident were raised as early as the fourth Islamic century, such as in the work of an-Nahhās, and continued to be raised throughout later generations by scholars such as Abu Bakr ibn al-Arabi (), Fakhr ad-Din al-Razi (1220) as well as al-Qurtubi (1285). The most comprehensive argument presented against the factuality of the incident came in Qadi Iyad's . The incident was discounted on two main bases. The first was that the incident contradicted the doctrine of , divine protection of Muhammad from mistakes. The second was that the descriptions of the chain of transmission extant since that period are not complete, nor sound nor authentic ().
Al-Razi, commenting on Quran 22:52 in his Tafsir al-Kabir, stated that the "people of verification" declared the story as an outright fabrication, citing supporting arguments from the Quran, Sunnah and reason. He then reported that the preeminent Muhaddith, Ibn Khuzaymah, said "it is an invention of the heretics" when once asked about it. Al-Razi also recorded that al-Bayhaqi stated that the narration of the story was unreliable because its narrators were of questionable integrity.
Al-Shawkani stated that the story is not authentic, saying: "And nothing from this (Gharaniq story) is , nor is it proven [except for] its lack of authenticity and falsehood as the scholars of verification have said for it contradicts the Book of Allah the Exalted". He then cites other scholars who also deemed it to be inauthentic, such al-Bazzar, al-Bayhaqi, and Ibn Khuzaymah.
Those scholars who acknowledged the historicity of the incident apparently had a different method for the assessment of reports than that which has become standard Islamic methodology. For example, Ibn Taymiyyah took the position that since tafsir and reports were commonly transmitted by incomplete , these reports should not be assessed according to the completeness of the chains but rather on the basis of recurrent transmission of common meaning between reports.
Al-Qurtubi () dismisses all these variants in favor of the explanation that once surah 53 was safely revealed the basic events of the incident (or rumors of them) "were now permitted to occur to identify those of his followers who would accept Muhammad's explanation of the blasphemous imposture" (JSS 15, pp. 254–255).
Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani wrote:
Modern Islamic scholarship While the authors of the tafsir texts during the first two centuries of the Islamic era do not seem to have regarded the tradition as in any way inauspicious or unflattering to Muhammad, it seems to have been universally rejected by at least the 13th century, and most modern Muslims likewise see the tradition as problematic, in the sense that it is viewed as "profoundly heretical because, by allowing for the intercession of the three pagan female deities, they eroded the authority and omnipotence of Allah. But they also hold ... damaging implications in regard to the revelation as a whole, for Muhammad's revelation appears to have been based on his desire to soften the threat to the deities of the people." Acceptance of the story is often considered grounds for takfir (being declared an unbeliever). Different responses have developed concerning the account.
Many modern Muslim scholars have rejected the story. Arguments for rejection are found in Muhammad Abduh's article "Mas'alat al-gharānīq wa-tafsīr al-āyāt", Muhammad Husayn Haykal's Hayat Muhammad (1933), Sayyid Qutb's Fi Zilal al-Quran (1965), Abul Ala Maududi's Tafhim-ul-Quran (1972) and Muhammad Nasiruddin al-Albani's Nasb al-majānīq li-nasf al-gharānīq.