Was the first revelation demonic? 6 answers from the sources

The critique says the accounts in Bukhari, Muslim, Ibn Ishaq and al-Tabari contradict one another. They do differ. The report in Bukhari and Muslim comes from Aisha: the angel appears in the cave of Hira, says “Read,” presses the Prophet three times, and he goes home trembling to Khadija.^[1] Ibn Ishaq, as preserved by Ibn Hisham, and al-Tabari in his history add that the angel came with a cloth of brocade while he slept, and that he afterwards feared people would call him a poet or a man possessed.^[2]

Whether the first encounter came in sleep or waking is a real question. Aisha’s own report says revelation began with true dreams, and some scholars place the sleep-vision of Ibn Ishaq inside that stage, with the waking encounter in the cave after it.^[1] A contradiction needs two reports that cannot both be true. What these chains share is the setting at Hira, the command to recite, the fear, Khadija’s support and the visit to a learned relative. Reports from different transmitters that agree on that much are behaving as independent reports should.

The strongest form of the objection rests on the sources themselves. In the Bukhari chapter on the interpretation of dreams, an addition says that when revelation paused, the Prophet grieved so deeply that he went several times to mountain peaks to throw himself down, until Gabriel called to him that he was truly the messenger of God.^[3] Ibn Ishaq has a similar thought at the start. The report exists and should be conceded. Its grading is another matter. Aisha was not present at Hira, so she relays what the Prophet told her. And Ibn Hajar, in his commentary on Bukhari, notes that the mountain passage is attached to the narrator al-Zuhri as something that reached him, not as the words of Aisha, which is why scholars handle it with more caution than the main report.^[3]

The claim that he could not tell an angel from a devil reverses the story. In the accounts he asks exactly that question and receives evidence. Khadija names his character: he keeps ties of kinship, bears the burdens of the weak, honours the guest and helps in hardship. Waraqa ibn Nawfal, her cousin, who knew the earlier scriptures, says the visitor is the Namus, the angel who came to Moses.^[1] In Ibn Ishaq, Khadija tests the visitor by having him sit on her lap and then uncovering herself; the angel departs, and she concludes it is no devil.^[2] A man who invents a mission does not usually record his own terror.

The Quran names Gabriel (Jibril) in only three places: 2:97, 2:98 and 66:4, all from the Medinan period.^[4] The critique counts this as twelve years of silence, and the count is correct as far as the name goes. The question is whether the messenger was absent from the Meccan text.

He was not. Meccan passages speak of “the Trustworthy Spirit” who brought the Quran down upon the Prophet’s heart (26:193-194), of the Holy Spirit who brought it down from the Lord (16:102), and of a noble messenger, mighty in power, seen on the clear horizon (81:19-23; 53:5-6).^[5] Aisha asked the Prophet about the vision on the horizon and he answered that it was Gabriel.^[6] The Medinan verse 2:97 then names the same figure: “he brought it down upon your heart by God’s permission.” Naming a figure after describing him is a common way of speaking, and the later verse supplies no new character. For the witnesses to these events, see the site piece “Who saw Gabriel? 5 answers on witnesses to revelation.”

The critique lists the accusations: madness (15:6, 44:14, 68:2), sorcery and lying (38:4), poetry (21:5, 52:30) and forgery or copying (25:4-5, 16:103). All of them are in the Quran.^[7] It adds that those who knew him best saw through him. The first point is correct, and it is a strange feature for a forged book to preserve, since the text carries its opponents’ case against itself.

Verse 16:103 reports the charge that a human being teaches him, and replies that the tongue of the one they hint at is foreign while this is clear Arabic. The commentators name several candidates for the supposed teacher, among them a Christian craftsman or slave in Mecca called Jabr.^[8] No such man produced the Quran in rival form, and the Quran challenges its critics to bring a sura like it (10:38, 17:88). It also points out that the charges contradict each other: a man is called possessed, a poet and a sorcerer at once (17:47-48). As to the claim of eyewitnesses, the Quran has him say, “I have lived among you a lifetime before it” (10:16), and in the Bukhari report of Heraclius’s questions, Abu Sufyan, then an opponent, concedes that they had never known him to lie.^[9]

The critique says the divine name evolved from a nameless Lord to al-Rahman to Allah. Part of this has a basis. The earliest passages mostly say “your Lord,” and the Meccans reacted to al-Rahman: “What is al-Rahman?” (25:60). At Hudaybiyya, the envoy Suhayl objected to that name in the treaty text.^[10] But the Quran presents the two names together: “Call upon Allah or call upon al-Rahman” (17:110), and it says the Meccans already named Allah as the creator of the heavens and earth (29:61, 31:25).^[11] The text shows two names for one God used side by side. See “Who is Allah? 5 misunderstandings about the name itself” and “6 reasons why Allah of the Quran is the same God as the God of the Bible.”

The Lucifer claim meets a direct answer in the Quran. Satan (shaytan) is named as an enemy (35:6), and the believer is told to seek refuge in God from him before reciting (16:98). The Meccan text itself addresses the suggestion that the revelation came from a devil: “The devils did not bring it down” (26:210), and “it is the word of no accursed Satan” (81:25).^[12] The same charge was made in Mecca and answered there.

A modern form of the objection drops the demons and offers a diagnosis: the Prophet suffered from epilepsy, and his revelations were seizures. The evidence offered is the physical strain that the sources describe. A’isha reported that revelation sometimes came like the ringing of a bell, which he found the hardest form, and that she saw sweat running from his forehead on a very cold day once it had passed.^[13]

The same report describes him grasping and repeating what he heard, and, in another form, the angel speaking to him as a man.^[13] The episodes ended in coherent speech that his companions memorised and wrote down, across twenty-three years of public life.

W. Montgomery Watt, no apologist for Islam, dismissed the theory. He wrote that the symptoms described are not identical with those of epilepsy, since that disease leads to physical and mental degeneration, whereas Muhammad was in the fullest possession of his faculties to the very end. He added that even if the allegation were true, the argument would be unsound, since such physical accompaniments neither validate nor invalidate religious experience.^[14]