Qur'an, Hadith and Scholars:Muhammad and the Satanic Verses: Difference between revisions

According to orthodox Sunni Islam, the Qur'an as a whole was not the inspired word of a prophet channeling the holy spirit of Allah, but rather the very words of Allah coming out through the lips of his final apostle. As such, every word of the Qur'an, in Allah's own clear Arabic, is not simply divinely inspired, but is literally divine speech. Despite the lofty place of the text of the Qur'an in Islamic theology, according to the Islamic tradition at least one time the holy words of Allah were sullied by the whispers of Satan. In what is known as the Satanic verses incident, or also the [[Satanic Verses (Gharaniq Incident)|Gharaniq (cranes) incident]], according to all of the great biographers of the prophet, Satan whispered into the ear of Muhammad, corrupting a divine verse from Allah and turning it into an invitation to [[shirk]], in the form of the worship of the daughters of Allah, deities worshipped by the pagan Meccans in addition to Allah at their shrine, the [[Ka'bah]]. This verse endeared Muhammad to the pagan Meccans, who had been dismayed by Muhammad's attacks on their gods and his declarations that their ancestors were in [[Jahannam (Hell)|hell]]. Muhammad would later retract the verse, declaring it to be the work of Satan. Later commentators, theologians and scholars have questioned the incident. Nevertheless, the incident is well documented in the Islamic tradition, with attestation in [[Ibn Ishaq]], [[Tabari|al-Tabari]], and [[Sahih Bukhari]] inter alia. Modern academic scholars today also generally reject the story, at least in terms of detail, though most agree that an interpolation of verses has occured at almost the same point in the surah.

 

* [[Satanic Verses (Gharaniq Incident)]]