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recite. Naturally, he immediately believed he had lost his mind, and fled. He only returned to hear what the Angel had to say when his wife and close friends persuaded him that it might be worth a return trip up the mountain, just in case; that it was probably a good idea to check if God was really trying to get in touch.
It was easy to admire much of what followed as the merchant transformed himself into the Messenger of God; easy to sympathize with his persecution and eventual flight to Medina, and to respect his rapid evolution at the oasis community of Yathrib into respected lawgiver, able ruler and skilled military leader. It was also easy to see how the world into which the Qur’an was revealed, and the events in the life of the Messenger, directly influenced the revelation. When Muslim men were killed in battle, the Angel was prompt to encourage their brothers to marry their widows, in order that the bereavedwomen might not be lost to the faith by remarrying outside it. When the Prophet’s beloved Aisha was rumored to have behaved inappropriately while lost in the desert with a certain Safwan ibn Marwan, the Angel of the Lord came down in some haste to point out that no, in God’s opinion, the virtuous lady had not fooled around. And, more generally, it was evident that the ethos of the Qur’an, the value system it endorsed, was, in essence, the vanishing code of nomadic Arabs, the matriarchal, more caring society that did not leave orphans out in the cold; orphans like, for example, Muhammad himself, whose success as a merchant, he believed, entitled him to a place on the city’s ruling body, and who had been denied such preferment because he didn’t have a powerful family to fight for him.
Here was a fascinating paradox: that an essentially conservative theology, looking backward with affection toward a vanishing culture, became a revolutionary idea, because the people whom it attracted most strongly were those who had been marginalized by urbanization—the disaffected poor, the street mob. This, perhaps, was why Islam, the new idea, felt so threatening to the Meccan elite; why it was persecuted so viciously; and why its founder may—just may—have been offered an attractive deal, designed to buy him off.
The historical record was incomplete, but most of the major collections of
hadith
or traditions about the life of the Prophet—those compiled by Ibn Ishaq, Waqidi, Ibn Sád, Bukhari, and Tabari—told the story of an incident that afterward became known as the incident of the satanic verses. The Prophet came down from the mountain one day and recited the
sura
(number 53) called
an-Najm
, the Star. It contained these words: “Have you heard of al-Lat and al-Uzza, and al-Manat, the third, the other one? They are the exalted birds, and their intercession is greatly to be desired.” At a later point—Was it days later? Or weeks, or months?—he returned to the mountain and came down, abashed, to state that he had been deceived on his previous visit; the Devil had appeared to him in the guise of the Archangel, and the verses he had been given were therefore not divine, but Satanic, and should be expunged from the Qur’an at once. The Angel had, on this occasion, brought new verses from God, which were to replace the Satanic verses in the great book: “Have you heard of al-Lat and al-Uzza,and al-Manat, the third, the other one? They are but names that your forefathers invented, and there is no truth in them. Shall God have daughters while you have sons? That would be an unjust division.” And in this way the Recitation was purified of the Devil’s work. But the questions remained: Why did Muhammad initially accept the first, “false” revelation as true? And what happened in Mecca in the period between the two revelations, Satanic and angelic?
This much was known: Muhammad wanted to be accepted by the people of Mecca. “He longed,” Ibn Ishaq wrote, “for a way to attract them.” And when the
It was easy to admire much of what followed as the merchant transformed himself into the Messenger of God; easy to sympathize with his persecution and eventual flight to Medina, and to respect his rapid evolution at the oasis community of Yathrib into respected lawgiver, able ruler and skilled military leader. It was also easy to see how the world into which the Qur’an was revealed, and the events in the life of the Messenger, directly influenced the revelation. When Muslim men were killed in battle, the Angel was prompt to encourage their brothers to marry their widows, in order that the bereavedwomen might not be lost to the faith by remarrying outside it. When the Prophet’s beloved Aisha was rumored to have behaved inappropriately while lost in the desert with a certain Safwan ibn Marwan, the Angel of the Lord came down in some haste to point out that no, in God’s opinion, the virtuous lady had not fooled around. And, more generally, it was evident that the ethos of the Qur’an, the value system it endorsed, was, in essence, the vanishing code of nomadic Arabs, the matriarchal, more caring society that did not leave orphans out in the cold; orphans like, for example, Muhammad himself, whose success as a merchant, he believed, entitled him to a place on the city’s ruling body, and who had been denied such preferment because he didn’t have a powerful family to fight for him.
Here was a fascinating paradox: that an essentially conservative theology, looking backward with affection toward a vanishing culture, became a revolutionary idea, because the people whom it attracted most strongly were those who had been marginalized by urbanization—the disaffected poor, the street mob. This, perhaps, was why Islam, the new idea, felt so threatening to the Meccan elite; why it was persecuted so viciously; and why its founder may—just may—have been offered an attractive deal, designed to buy him off.
The historical record was incomplete, but most of the major collections of
hadith
or traditions about the life of the Prophet—those compiled by Ibn Ishaq, Waqidi, Ibn Sád, Bukhari, and Tabari—told the story of an incident that afterward became known as the incident of the satanic verses. The Prophet came down from the mountain one day and recited the
sura
(number 53) called
an-Najm
, the Star. It contained these words: “Have you heard of al-Lat and al-Uzza, and al-Manat, the third, the other one? They are the exalted birds, and their intercession is greatly to be desired.” At a later point—Was it days later? Or weeks, or months?—he returned to the mountain and came down, abashed, to state that he had been deceived on his previous visit; the Devil had appeared to him in the guise of the Archangel, and the verses he had been given were therefore not divine, but Satanic, and should be expunged from the Qur’an at once. The Angel had, on this occasion, brought new verses from God, which were to replace the Satanic verses in the great book: “Have you heard of al-Lat and al-Uzza,and al-Manat, the third, the other one? They are but names that your forefathers invented, and there is no truth in them. Shall God have daughters while you have sons? That would be an unjust division.” And in this way the Recitation was purified of the Devil’s work. But the questions remained: Why did Muhammad initially accept the first, “false” revelation as true? And what happened in Mecca in the period between the two revelations, Satanic and angelic?
This much was known: Muhammad wanted to be accepted by the people of Mecca. “He longed,” Ibn Ishaq wrote, “for a way to attract them.” And when the
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