Shahab Ahmed - Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses in Early Islam

In olden times, the earth was stationary, and the sun and the sky used to revolve around it. Poets used to say: By night and day the seven heavns revolve! And then a person by the name of Galileo came along and began to make the earth revolve around the sun. The priests were very angry that someone had put them in such a spin. By giving due punishment to Galileo, they put a stop to these sorts of movements, but even so they could not stop the world from rotating, and it still goes on moving in the same old way.

IBN-E INSH

This book was conceived as the first volume of a history of Muslim attitudes to the Satanic verses incident, covering the fourteen hundred years from the beginning of Islam down to the present day. The Satanic verses incident is the name given in Western scholarship to what is known in the Islamic tradition as qiat al-gharnq, The Story of the Cranes or The Story of the Maidens, which narrates the occasion on which the Prophet Muammad is reported to have mistaken words suggested to him by Satan as being Divine Communicationthat is, as being part of the Qurn. These Satanic verses praise the pagan deities of the Prophets tribe and acknowledge their power to intercede with the supreme God. By uttering the Satanic verses, Muammad thus committed the error of compromising the fundamental theological principle of the Divine Message of which he was Messengernamely, the absolute and exclusive unicity (tawd) of the One God, Allh.

The facticity and historicity of the Satanic verses incident are today (with a few maverick exceptions) universally rejected by Muslims of all sects and interpretative movementsSunn, Twelver Sh, Isml Sh, Amad, Ib, anaf, Shfi, Mlik, anbal, Wahhb, Salaf, Deoband, Barelv, and so forthroutinely on pain of heresy (kufr)that is, on pain of being deemed not a Muslim. The Satanic verses incident is understood as calling into question the integrity of the process of Divine Communication to Muammadand thus the integrity of the Text of the Qurn. The universal rejection of the Satanic verses incident constitutes an instance of contemporary Islamic orthodoxythat is to say, it is the only truth that a Muslim qua Muslim may legitimately hold on the matter. For the last two hundred years, to be a Muslim, one should believe that the Satanic verses incident did not take placethat is, the contemporary Muslim should not believe that the Prophet Muammad recited verses of Satanic suggestion as Divine inspiration. In other words, for modern Muslims, the Satanic verses incident is something entirely unthinkable.

The reason for my writing this book is that, as a straightforward matter of historical fact, this Islamic orthodoxy of the rejection of the facticity of the Satanic verses incident has not always obtained. The fundamental finding of the present volume is that in the first two centuries of Islam, Muslim attitudes to the Satanic verses incident were effectively the direct opposite of what they are today. This volume studies no less than fifty historical reports that narrate the Satanic verses incident and that were transmitted by the first generations of Muslims. This study of the Satanic verses incident in the historical memory of the early Muslim community will demonstrate in detail that the incident constituted an absolutely standard element in the memory of early Muslims of the life of their Prophet. In other words, the early Muslim community believed almost universally that the Satanic verses incident was a true historical fact. As far as the overwhelming majority of the Muslim community in the first two hundred years was concerned, the Messenger of God did indeed, on at least one occasion, mistake words of Satanic suggestion as being of Divine inspiration. For the early Muslims, the Satanic verses incident was something entirely thinkable.

The juxtaposition of these two realitiesthe fact that the Muslim community in the first two hundred years of Islam pretty much universally believed the Satanic verses incident to be true, while the Muslim community in the last two hundred years of Islam pretty much universally believes the Satanic verses incident to be untruecalls into being a number of simple but far-reaching historical questions. How was the Satanic verses incident transformed in Muslim consciousness from fact into anathema, from something entirely thinkable into something categorically unthinkable? How did the truth in the historical Muslim community go from being the one thing to the opposite thing? How did this happen? When did this happen? Where did this happen? Why did this happen? At whose hands did this happen? The history of Muslim attitudes to the Satanic verses incident is thus a case study in a larger question central to the history of all human societies: how does truth happen? These questions will not, however, be answered fully in the present volume, which presents the foundational historical data along with a detailed account of the attitudes of Muslims to the Satanic verses incident in the first two centuries of Islam. [Publishers note: Author Shahab Ahmed died before writing the anticipated second and third volumes of this work.]

The history of Muslim attitudes to the Satanic verses incident is a history of the formation of a unit of orthodoxy. By orthodoxy, I mean in the first instance any belief, or set of beliefs, including means for arriving at a belief, the proponents of which hold that it is the only valid and correct beliefthat is, the only truth, or means for arriving at truth, on that particular matter. However, if we were to stop our definition here, we would not yet have orthodoxy; rather, we have only a claim to orthodoxy from which people may yet dissent. For orthodoxy to obtain as a social factthat is: for a single truth-claim to establish and maintain itself in society as the sole and exclusive truthit is necessary, as a practical matter, for the proponents of that truth-claim to be in a position to impose sanction (which need not necessary be legal sanction) upon dissenters. Orthodoxy, in other words, is not merely an intellectual phenomenon: it is also social phenomenonit is, as Talal Asad has famously said, not a mere body of opinion, but a distinct relationshipa relationship of power.