Satanic Verses

[2] The words praise the three pagan Meccan goddesses: al-Lāt, al-'Uzzá, and Manāt and can be read in early prophetic biographies of Muhammad by al-Wāqidī, Ibn Sa'd and the tafsir of al-Tabarī.

The incident is accepted as true by some modern scholars of Islamic studies, citing the implausibility of early Muslim biographers fabricating a story so unflattering about their prophet.

He proposes that the story may be yet another instance of historical telescoping, i.e., a circumstance that Muhammad's contemporaries knew to have lasted for a long period of time later became condensed into a story that limits his acceptance of the Meccan goddesses’ intercession to a brief period of time and assigns blame for this departure from strict monotheism to Satan.

Application of this principle to Surah 53 (“The Star”) leads to the conclusion that the so-called “Satanic Verses” in all likelihood never existed as part of the Qurʾan.

Only al-Walīd bin al-Mughīra, who was an aged shaykh and could not make prostration, scooped up in his hand some of the soil from the valley of Mecca [and pressed it to his forehead].

Among those of them who came to Mecca at that time and remained there until emigrating to Medina and taking part in the battle of Badr alongside Muhammad there was, from the family of 'Abd Shams b. Abd Manāf b. Qussayy, 'Uthmān b.

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.

He explains this interpretation of Muslims by the fact that in Islamic thought, Satan (Iblīs) himself is not the tempter, but merely the instrument through which God tests his subjects.

[21] 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).

[9] Imam Fakhr al-Din 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 Qur'an, Sunnah and reason.

[27]While the authors of the tafsīr 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.

[22] Shahab Ahmed states that "Reports of the Satanic verses incident were recorded by virtually every compiler of a major biography of Muhammad in the first two centuries of Islam: 'Urwah b. al-Zubayr (23–94), Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri (51–124), Musa b.

[6] John Burton argued for its fictitiousness based upon a demonstration of its actual utility to certain elements of the Muslim community – namely, those legal exegetes seeking an "occasion of revelation" for eradicative modes of abrogation.

Hawting writes that the satanic verses incident would not serve to justify or exemplify a theory that God reveals something and later replaces it himself with another true revelation.

"[36] Maxime Rodinson finds that it may reasonably be accepted as true "because the makers of Muslim tradition would never have invented a story with such damaging implications for the revelation as a whole.

Rodinson writes that this concession, however, diminished the threat of the Last Judgment by enabling the three goddesses to intercede for sinners and save them from eternal damnation.

Further, it diminished Muhammad's own authority by giving the priests of Uzza, Manat, and Allat the ability to pronounce oracles contradicting his message.

[39] Since John Wansbrough's contributions to the field in the early 1970s, though, scholars have become much more attentive to the emergent nature of early Islam, and less willing to accept back-projected claims of continuity: To those who see the tradition as constantly evolving and supplying answers to question that it itself has raised, the argument that there would be no reason to develop and transmit material which seems derogatory of the Prophet or of Islam is too simple.

For another, material which we now find in the biography of the Prophet originated in various circumstances to meet various needs and one has to understand why material exists before one can make a judgment about its basis in fact... [40]In Rubin's recent contribution to the debate, questions of historicity are completely eschewed in favor of an examination of internal textual dynamics and what they reveal about early medieval Islam.

Rubin gives his attention to the narratological exigencies which may have shaped early sīra material, as opposed to the more commonly considered ones of dogma, sect, and political/dynastic faction.

Given the consensus that "the most archaic layer of the biography, [is] that of the stories of the kussās [i.e. popular story-tellers]" (Sīra, EI²), this may prove a fruitful line of inquiry.

[22] Building on Rubin's views, Sean Anthony has proposed that an early tradition attributed to ʿUrwa b. al-Zubayr about the mass conversion and prostration of the Meccans but which does not mention the satanic verses was at a later stage connected with Q.

Of relevance to the possibility of historical elements in the satanic verses story, Tesei notes that the interpolation (as he sees it) coincides exactly with the traditional account that an explanatory comment was inserted to rectify the identification of the pagan deities as divine intercessors.

81:19–20, 25) because for his immediate audience, the sources for the two categories of inspired individuals in society, poets and soothsayers, were shaytans and jinn, respectively, whereas Muhammad was a prophet.

One version, appearing in Tabarī's tafsīr[45] and attributed to Urwah ibn Zubayr (d. 713), preserves the basic narrative but with no mention of satanic temptation.

No compelling reason is provided for the caesura of persecution, though, unlike in the incident of the Satanic Verses, where it is the (temporary) fruit of Muhammad's accommodation to Meccan polytheism.

Another version attributed to 'Urwa has only one round of fitna, which begins after Muhammad has converted the entire population of Mecca, so that the Muslims are too numerous to perform ritual prostration (sūjud) all together.

The majority of traditions relating to prostration at the end of Sūra al-Najm solve this by either removing all mention of the mushrikūn, or else transforming the attempt of an old Meccan to participate (who, instead of bowing to the ground, puts dirt to his forehead proclaiming "This is sufficient for me") into an act of mockery.

And "traditions which originally related the dramatic story of temptation became a sterilized anecdote providing prophetic precedent for a ritual practice".