Satanic Verses

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 tafsir of al-Tabari, Muhammad was manipulated by Satan (Iblis) to praise the three chief pagan Meccan goddesses – al-Lat, al-'Uzza, and Manat – while 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 ismat al-anbiya (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.