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Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses in Early Islam
One of the most controversial episodes in the life of the Prophet Muhammad concerns an incident in which he allegedly mistook words suggested by Satan as divine revelation. Known as the Satanic verses, these praises to the pagan deities contradict the Islamic belief that Allah is one and absolute. Muslims today―of all sects―deny that the incident of the Satanic verses took place. But as Shahab Ahmed explains, Muslims did not always hold this view.
Before Orthodoxy wrestles with the question of how religions establish truth―especially religions such as Islam that lack a centralized authority to codify beliefs. Taking the now universally rejected incident of the Satanic verses as a case study in the formation of Islamic orthodoxy, Ahmed shows that early Muslims, circa 632 to 800 CE, held the exact opposite belief. For them, the Satanic verses were an established fact in the history of the Prophet. Ahmed offers a detailed account of the attitudes of Muslims to the Satanic verses in the first two centuries of Islam and traces the chains of transmission in the historical reports known as riwāyah .
Touching directly on the nature of Muhammad’s prophetic visions, the interpretation of the Satanic verses incident is a question of profound importance in Islam, one that plays a role in defining the limits of what Muslims may legitimately say and do―issues crucial to understanding the contemporary Islamic world.
Before Orthodoxy wrestles with the question of how religions establish truth―especially religions such as Islam that lack a centralized authority to codify beliefs. Taking the now universally rejected incident of the Satanic verses as a case study in the formation of Islamic orthodoxy, Ahmed shows that early Muslims, circa 632 to 800 CE, held the exact opposite belief. For them, the Satanic verses were an established fact in the history of the Prophet. Ahmed offers a detailed account of the attitudes of Muslims to the Satanic verses in the first two centuries of Islam and traces the chains of transmission in the historical reports known as riwāyah .
Touching directly on the nature of Muhammad’s prophetic visions, the interpretation of the Satanic verses incident is a question of profound importance in Islam, one that plays a role in defining the limits of what Muslims may legitimately say and do―issues crucial to understanding the contemporary Islamic world.
352 pages, Hardcover
Published April 24, 2017
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About the author
Shahab Ahmed
15 books35 followersShahab Ahmed was a Pakistani-American scholar of Islam at Harvard University. Professor Elias Muhanna of Brown University described Ahmed's posthumous work, What Is Islam?, as "a strange and brilliant work, encyclopedic in vision and tautly argued in the manner of logical proof, yet pervaded by the urgency of a political manifesto."
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 21, 2020
Modern scholarship has long recognized that the early Muslim historical memory material reflects the fact that the early Muslims perceived Muḥammad as human and fallible, and that it was only with the later development and spread of the doctrine of ‘iṣmat al-anbiyā’ that a superhuman image emerged of Muḥammad being immune to sin and error. That the Satanic verses incident is illustrative of this early concept of Prophetic fallibility has been noted In accepting the Satanic verses incident, early tafsīr and sīrahmaghāzī literature was directly expressive of the concept of Prophethood that was dominant among the early Muslims.
In rejecting the Satanic verses incident, the Ḥadīth project—emerging with increasing force and definition from the mid-second century onward—was disapprovingly at odds with the early understanding of Muḥammad’s Prophethood. The logic of the Ḥadīth project required an infallible Prophet whose words and deeds would lay down legal, praxial, and creedal norms for pious mimesis, as a definitive method by which to establish the veracity and authority of those prescribed norms.
The image of Muḥammad preserved in the early Muslim historical memory literature is thus one of a man whose Prophetic consciousness developed only gradually, who was affected by the pressures of his temporal circumstances, and who was ultimately susceptible to error even in the execution of his Divine mission... Thus, there are several reports that narrate how, when Muḥammad first receives Revelations, he is confused and fearful and even contemplates suicide...When the Prophet errs in these circumstances, he is corrected by God through a category of Divine Revelations that came to be called the āyāt al-‘itāb (verses of rebuke).
وفي نتائج هذا المعنى دلالة يقول فيها الإمام الماتريدي: "وفيه آية رسالة مُحَمَّد - صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيهِ وَسَلَّمَ - ودلالة نبوته، وأنه لم يختلق هذا الكتاب من عند نفسه؛ لأن من يتعاطى فعلا حقه الستر، فهو يستره على نفسه، ولا يهتك عليها الستر؛ لئلا يذم عليه، فلو لم يكن مأمورًا بتبليغ الرسالة لكان يجتهد في الستر على نفسه، ولا يبديه للخلائق، ولكنه كان رسولا لم يجد من تبليغه إلى الخلق بدًّا، فبلغه كما أمر".
In rejecting the Satanic verses incident, the Ḥadīth project—emerging with increasing force and definition from the mid-second century onward—was disapprovingly at odds with the early understanding of Muḥammad’s Prophethood. The logic of the Ḥadīth project required an infallible Prophet whose words and deeds would lay down legal, praxial, and creedal norms for pious mimesis, as a definitive method by which to establish the veracity and authority of those prescribed norms.
The image of Muḥammad preserved in the early Muslim historical memory literature is thus one of a man whose Prophetic consciousness developed only gradually, who was affected by the pressures of his temporal circumstances, and who was ultimately susceptible to error even in the execution of his Divine mission... Thus, there are several reports that narrate how, when Muḥammad first receives Revelations, he is confused and fearful and even contemplates suicide...When the Prophet errs in these circumstances, he is corrected by God through a category of Divine Revelations that came to be called the āyāt al-‘itāb (verses of rebuke).
وفي نتائج هذا المعنى دلالة يقول فيها الإمام الماتريدي: "وفيه آية رسالة مُحَمَّد - صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيهِ وَسَلَّمَ - ودلالة نبوته، وأنه لم يختلق هذا الكتاب من عند نفسه؛ لأن من يتعاطى فعلا حقه الستر، فهو يستره على نفسه، ولا يهتك عليها الستر؛ لئلا يذم عليه، فلو لم يكن مأمورًا بتبليغ الرسالة لكان يجتهد في الستر على نفسه، ولا يبديه للخلائق، ولكنه كان رسولا لم يجد من تبليغه إلى الخلق بدًّا، فبلغه كما أمر".
November 6, 2017
Meticulous. Probably the first book in English that illustrates how Hadith criticism is carried out. Allah Yarhamhu
February 17, 2021
Excellent
This is an excellent overview of the theology and events pertaining to the Satanic Verses - not the Rushdie controversy but the original controversy. It’s key focus is to answer whether the controversy actually happened. And for that question, the answer is rigorously and meticulously engaged
This is an excellent overview of the theology and events pertaining to the Satanic Verses - not the Rushdie controversy but the original controversy. It’s key focus is to answer whether the controversy actually happened. And for that question, the answer is rigorously and meticulously engaged
September 4, 2022
An amazing and erudite scholarly work tackling a historical episode whose controversial nature pops up as a subject of intense debate every now and then.
The book starts off with trying to understand how the early Muslim community came to accept the Satanic Verses incident as a part of their historical memory, by asking several sets of questions relating to transmission of the narratives, its contents and the interplay between them. It emerges that different truth-projects whose task it was to present the historical memory of the Prophet operated under different epistemologies: while the Ahl al Hadīth "aimed at defining the normative legal, praxial, and creedal content of Islam" (p.21), the sīrah-maghāzī and tafsīr scholars sought to present a historical moral-epic of the Prophet’s community on the one hand and interpreting Divine Revelation in light of historical circumstances on the other. These opposing cultural discourses would be most eloquently illustrated in the narrative of the “qiṣṣat al-gharāniq”(story of the cranes/maidens), something which Hadīth folk would criticize for not conforming to the theological dogma of “‘iṣmat al-anbiyā’” (protection of the prophets) and lack of good isnāds, two epistemological concepts that both sīrah-maghāzī and tafsīr camps would not take into consideration. Subsequently, over the course of the book the author analyses 50 riwāyahs which deal with the Satanic verses in one way or another, with different hermeneutical elaborations in some compared to others (e.g. from the Prophet pronouncing the problematic phrases due to external pressure from Quraysh, to him being drowsy enough to fall into Satanic temptation and not realizing his error), most of them being of sīrah-maghāzī and tafsīr origin with a minor presence of Hadīth literature. This all culminates in the final chapter in which we find the answer to the initial question: Why did the early Muslim community accept the Satanic Verses incident as Truth? A large part has to do with the different epistemologies which undergirded the various truth-projects (i.e. interplay between Hadīth and sīrah-maghāzī and tafsīr corpuses) as well as the understanding of prophethood which was consonant with that of pre-Islamic Arabs (especially in relation to the kāhin and shā’ir), characterized by the similarities and differences between Divine Inspiration on the one hand and Satanic Inspiration on the other (even down to the linguistic level).
Overall, a decent monograph on a much talked about topic which unfortunately hasn’t received as much attention in scholarly works as one would hope, evidently overshadowed by the media attention it occasionally receives (as was recently witnessed). The way in which Shahab Ahmed weaves through his arguments with the brilliant erudition as seen in his magnum opus "What is Islam?" (whose review I’ve recently completed) is definitely testament to his worthy ability as a scholar tackling with great topics such as the formation of historical orthodoxy (lest we forget this was initially conceived of as a multi-volume study). One noticeable drawback is the absence of Shi’ite material which would potentially problematize Ahmed’s thesis of a general acceptance on the part of tafsīr scholars of the Satanic verses incident, not to mention the various ways in which scholars of that religious tradition conceptualized it differently (for more, see Sean Anthony’s excellent study "The Satanic Verses in Early Shiʿite Literature: A Minority Report on Shahab Ahmed’s Before Orthodoxy").
The book starts off with trying to understand how the early Muslim community came to accept the Satanic Verses incident as a part of their historical memory, by asking several sets of questions relating to transmission of the narratives, its contents and the interplay between them. It emerges that different truth-projects whose task it was to present the historical memory of the Prophet operated under different epistemologies: while the Ahl al Hadīth "aimed at defining the normative legal, praxial, and creedal content of Islam" (p.21), the sīrah-maghāzī and tafsīr scholars sought to present a historical moral-epic of the Prophet’s community on the one hand and interpreting Divine Revelation in light of historical circumstances on the other. These opposing cultural discourses would be most eloquently illustrated in the narrative of the “qiṣṣat al-gharāniq”(story of the cranes/maidens), something which Hadīth folk would criticize for not conforming to the theological dogma of “‘iṣmat al-anbiyā’” (protection of the prophets) and lack of good isnāds, two epistemological concepts that both sīrah-maghāzī and tafsīr camps would not take into consideration. Subsequently, over the course of the book the author analyses 50 riwāyahs which deal with the Satanic verses in one way or another, with different hermeneutical elaborations in some compared to others (e.g. from the Prophet pronouncing the problematic phrases due to external pressure from Quraysh, to him being drowsy enough to fall into Satanic temptation and not realizing his error), most of them being of sīrah-maghāzī and tafsīr origin with a minor presence of Hadīth literature. This all culminates in the final chapter in which we find the answer to the initial question: Why did the early Muslim community accept the Satanic Verses incident as Truth? A large part has to do with the different epistemologies which undergirded the various truth-projects (i.e. interplay between Hadīth and sīrah-maghāzī and tafsīr corpuses) as well as the understanding of prophethood which was consonant with that of pre-Islamic Arabs (especially in relation to the kāhin and shā’ir), characterized by the similarities and differences between Divine Inspiration on the one hand and Satanic Inspiration on the other (even down to the linguistic level).
Overall, a decent monograph on a much talked about topic which unfortunately hasn’t received as much attention in scholarly works as one would hope, evidently overshadowed by the media attention it occasionally receives (as was recently witnessed). The way in which Shahab Ahmed weaves through his arguments with the brilliant erudition as seen in his magnum opus "What is Islam?" (whose review I’ve recently completed) is definitely testament to his worthy ability as a scholar tackling with great topics such as the formation of historical orthodoxy (lest we forget this was initially conceived of as a multi-volume study). One noticeable drawback is the absence of Shi’ite material which would potentially problematize Ahmed’s thesis of a general acceptance on the part of tafsīr scholars of the Satanic verses incident, not to mention the various ways in which scholars of that religious tradition conceptualized it differently (for more, see Sean Anthony’s excellent study "The Satanic Verses in Early Shiʿite Literature: A Minority Report on Shahab Ahmed’s Before Orthodoxy").
October 4, 2017
Truly splendid research bringing together what history has on record.
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November 11, 2025That was informative, not that I understood 99% of what the book was talking about. But that is okay.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews