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The Satanic Verses are to be found in al-Waqidi and al-Tabari's recension of Ibn Ishaq's biography of Prophet Muhammad, the Sirat Rashul Allah. The biography is said to have been written 120-130 years after Muhammad's death
Ibn Ishaq reports the following story: Muhammad was anxious to attract the people of Mecca, his tribesmen and neighbors, to Islam. As he was reciting to himself this verse of the Qur'an, as revealed to him by the angel Gabriel:
Satan tempted him to add the following line:
al-Lat, al-'Uzza and Manat were three goddesses worshipped by the inhabitants of Mecca. Gharaniq is a hapax legomenon, a word found only in this one place; commentators say that it means Numidian cranes, which fly at a great height. In effect, Muhammad was backing away from his uncompromising monotheism and saying that the goddesses were real and their intercession effective.
The story goes that Meccans were overjoyed to hear this and ceased to persecute Muhammad and his flock. The Muslims who had migrated to Ethiopia started returning to Mecca. However, sometime later, the Angel Gabriel came to Muhammad and scolded him for adding his purely human, erroneous invention to the divine scripture. Muhammed took back his words and the persecution resumed.
Almost all Muslim scholars have rejected the story as historically improbable (it would have taken a long time for news to travel to Ethiopia and refugees to return) and inconsistent with Muhammad's otherwise staunch monotheism. They argue that this story must have been a fabrication by the Meccans and other enemies of Muhammad. Ibn Ishaq, al-Tabari, and al-Waqidi only reported the fabrication truthfully as they heard it from others.
Critics would in turn argue that Muslim scholars reject the story only because it is so disturbing to their faith. As Muslims, they cannot bring themselves to believe that Muhammad would tamper with the words of the Qur'an, even temporarily.
However, other Muslim scholars, such as Fazlur Rahman, argue that if we are to trust Ibn Ishaq on other matters, we must trust him on this one. Since the Qur'an explicitly states that Muhammad is human and fallible, it is not surprising that he should make such an error.
The Satanic verses (thus called by the historian Sir William Muir), were once a mere footnote to the back-and-forth of Christian and Muslim debaters. They achieved great fame when Salman Rushdie's 1989 novel, The Satanic Verses, made headline news. Even though Rushdie's novel does not deal with the issue of the Satanic Verses per se, it does contain some unflattering allusions to Islamic history. Muslims around the world demonstrated against the book, and Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini called for Rushdie's death, saying that the book blasphemed Muhammad and his wives. See The Satanic Verses (novel).