An early story says that Muhammad (peace be upon him) once recited words praising three Meccan goddesses, then withdrew them when he was told they came from Satan. Critics cite the story, together with Quran 22:52, to argue that the Quran cannot be trusted.
Below are five facts about the report: where it appears, how its chains of transmission fare, what sura 53 itself shows, what 22:52 says, and where scholars still disagree. Each objection is stated at full strength first and then answered from the sources.
The story is no invention of modern critics. It is recorded in the history and the commentary (tafsir) of al-Tabari and in the Tabaqat of Ibn Saad, among other early works.[1] In outline, the Quraysh of Mecca pressed Muhammad to acknowledge their goddesses. While he was reciting sura 53, he is said to have spoken a line granting those goddesses a place of intercession. The Quraysh were pleased and prostrated with the Muslims. Gabriel then told him the line was not from God, and it was removed.
The critic adds that Quran 22:52 admits Satan can cast something into a prophet’s recitation, and that God’s cancelling of it is called a miracle. At its strongest, the objection is this: an early report, in respected books, matched by a verse that seems to describe the event. The first answer concedes that the report is old and widely repeated. Age alone does not make a report sound, which is why the scholars examined its chains.
Hadith scholars (the specialists in reports of the Prophet’s words and actions) grade a report by its isnād, the chain of narrators leading back to a witness. The story is absent from the Sahih collections of al-Bukhari and Muslim. Where it does appear, in works of commentary and biography, the chains generally stop at a Successor, a member of the generation after the Companions, who did not witness the event. Such a chain is called mursal, and the hadith scholars did not accept it as proof in matters of this weight. One route is attributed to Ibn Abbas, but on the usual dating of the event he had not yet been born.[2]
Qadi Iyad, in his book on the rights of the Prophet, said that no trustworthy narrator relates the story with a connected chain.[3] Ibn Kathir, who mentions the story in his commentary on 22:52, noted the same weakness in the routes.[4] In the twentieth century al-Albani wrote a full treatise refuting it.[5] The picture is not unanimous. Ibn Hajar judged that the number of routes gave the story some basis, while still holding that the Prophet was protected in conveying revelation.[6] Even the scholars most open to the report did not treat it as a sound hadith.
Quran 53:19-20 names al-Lat, al-Uzza and Manat. The next verse asks the idolaters: “Is the male for you and for Him the female?” and 53:23 calls the goddesses mere names for which God sent down no authority.[7] The passage is a sustained mockery of the idols. The reported line, which praised them and hoped for their intercession, would sit between 53:20 and 53:21, and 53:21 would no longer follow from what came before it.
The same sura says in 53:26 that the intercession of angels in heaven avails nothing unless God permits it, which leaves no room for goddesses to intercede.[8] A defender of the report can reply that the line was removed, so the final text is coherent by the story’s own account. That is true, and it shows the limit of this point. The point is narrower: the text as preserved holds together, and the alleged words contradict the sura they are said to have belonged to.
The verse says that God sent no messenger or prophet before Muhammad but that, when he tamannā, Satan cast something into his umniyya; God then removes what Satan casts and confirms His own verses.[9] Some commentators who accepted the report did tie the verse to it. That is a fair point for the critic. Yet the verb tamannā can mean “wished” and can also mean “recited”; the Sahih International translation renders it “spoke [or recited]”.[10] On the second reading the verse describes interference with the recitation of every prophet, and the Quran says elsewhere what that interference looked like: the disbelievers told each other, “Do not listen to this Qur’an and speak noisily during [the recitation of] it” (41:26).[11]
The verse addresses a pattern in the lives of all prophets, and the following verse says the cast words are a trial for those with sickness in their hearts (22:53).[12] Nothing in the text says Satan’s words became part of revelation, or that the removal is a miracle. In the verse, what Satan casts is cancelled and the verses of God stand confirmed.
Some Western scholars have judged the story early and probably historical. W. Montgomery Watt accepted it in his biography of Muhammad, and Shahab Ahmed argued in 1998 that early Muslim scholars took it seriously.[13] A reader should know that this view exists. Its strongest support is a report in al-Bukhari that, when the Prophet prostrated while reciting sura 53, the Muslims, the idolaters, the jinn and humankind prostrated with him.[14] Some scholars suggest that this event, which Muslim sources accept, was the seed from which the story grew as an explanation for the pagans’ prostration.
Suppose the incident did occur. The charge that the Quran cannot be trusted would still need an argument, since the story itself says the words were rejected before they entered the text. Quran 15:9 says God sent down the reminder and guards it, and the preserved text is carried by the continuous recitation of the community, not by any single report.[15]
The bottom line
The report is real in the sense that early books record it. As a hadith it lacks a sound connected chain, the standard collections leave it out, and the scholars who rejected it include Qadi Iyad and al-Albani. Sura 53 reads as a continuous attack on the idols, and 22:52 can be read without the story.
A scholar such as Ibn Hajar, or a historian such as Watt, may still give the story more weight, and that disagreement is honest. Yet on every reading, the words in question are absent from the Quran.
Notes
- Al-Tabari, Tarikh al-Rusul wa al-Muluk and his commentary on 22:52 and 53:19-23; Ibn Saad, al-Tabaqat al-Kubra.
- The status of the chains is discussed in the commentary literature on 22:52 and in Ibn Hajar, Fath al-Bari, Book of Commentary, on sura 53. Ibn Abbas is usually said to have been born about three years before the Hijra: Ibn Hajar, al-Isaba, vol. 4, p. 122, gives his age at the Prophet’s death as thirteen, and al-Dhahabi, Siyar Alam al-Nubala, vol. 3, p. 335, records a report of ten; compare Sahih al-Bukhari 6299.
- Qadi Iyad, al-Shifa bi Taʿrif Huquq al-Mustafa, chapter on the Prophet’s protection from error in conveying revelation.
- Ibn Kathir, Tafsir al-Quran al-Azim, commentary on 22:52.
- Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani, Nasb al-Majaniq li Nasf Qissat al-Gharaniq.
- Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari, Book of Commentary, on sura 53.
- Quran 53:19-23.
- Quran 53:26.
- Quran 22:52.
- Quran 22:52, in the translation of Sahih International.
- Quran 41:26.
- Quran 22:53.
- W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Mecca (1953); Shahab Ahmed, “Ibn Taymiyyah and the Satanic Verses”, Studia Islamica 87 (1998), pp. 67–124.
- Sahih al-Bukhari 1071, Book of Prostration During Recital of the Quran (Book 17, hadith 5). Checked on sunnah.com (report of Ibn Abbas, chapter “The prostration of Muslims along with the polytheists”); Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (Salafiyya edition), vol. 2, p. 553 (Shamela text).
- Quran 15:9.