Book Review: Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses in Early Islam

Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses in Early Islam is Shahab Ahmed’s study of early Muslim attitudes to the Satanic verses incident. The story of the Satanic verses narrates the occasion on which the Prophet Muhammed is alleged to have mistaken words suggested to him by Satan as being divine revelation. These Satanic verses praise the pagan goddess deities of Muhammed’s tribe and acknowledge their power to intercede with God. By uttering the Satanic verses, Muhammed thus committed the error of Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses in Early Islam is Shahab Ahmed’s study of early Muslim attitudes to the Satanic verses incident. The story of the Satanic verses narrates the occasion on which the Prophet Muhammed is alleged to have mistaken words suggested to him by Satan as being divine revelation. These Satanic verses praise the pagan goddess deities of Muhammed’s tribe and acknowledge their power to intercede with God. By uttering the Satanic verses, Muhammed thus committed the error of compromising the fundamental theological principle of tawḥīd, the exclusive unicity of God. The facticity of the Satanic verses incident is universally rejected by Muslims of all sects and schools. Ahmed’s study, however, demonstrates that the Satanic verses incident constituted an absolutely standard element in the memory of early Muslims in 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. Islamic orthodoxy came to reject the authenticity of the Satanic verses incident on the basis of two epistemological principles: the theological principle of ‫iṣmat al-anbīyā and the Hadith methodology principle of assessing reports by their isnāds. The principle of iṣmat al-anbīyā holds that Prophets are protected from the commission of error in the transmission of divine revelation- otherwise there would be no guarantee of the integrity of the Qur’anic text. The historiographical principle on the basis of which the Satanic verses incident is rejected is the fundamental principle of Hadith methodology. The basic principle of Hadith methodology is that the truth value of a narrative report is assessed on the basis of the reputation for veracity and reliability of the individuals in the chain of transmission. Further, the chain of transmission must go back in an unbroken chain to an actual eyewitness. This chain of transmitters is called the isnād. As regards the Satanic verses incident, all but one of the fifty reports that narrate the incident are carried by defective chains of transmission- that is by chain of transmitters that include unreliable transmitters or by chains that are incomplete and do not go back to an eye witness. A central part of Ahmed’s project is to show that the acceptance of the Satanic verses incident in the early Muslim community indicates that these two epistemological principles in later Islamic orthodoxy did not enjoy universal authority in the early Muslim community. ‬ In the second chapter of his book, Ahmed carries out a close textual anaylsis of the earliest narratives of the Satanic verses incident that are preserved in the Islamic ligature. Through his analysis of early narrative reports, Ahmed demonstrates that the Satanic verses incident constituted a standard, widely circulated and generally accepted element in the historical memory of the Muslim community on the life of Muhammed in the first two centuries. In other words, the almost universal contemporary rejection of the Satanic verses incident by Islamic orthodoxy represents, Ahmed argues, the rejection of something that was held to be true by early Muslims. Interestingly, Ahmed begins his last chapter of the book by quoting Tony K. Stewart, an important scholar of early Bengali Vaishnavism, known particularly well for his scholarship on biographical narratives in early Bengali Vaishnava literature. Stewart writes: “What the narratives do when they uniformly agree is to document the historical beliefs aimed at the biographical subject, beliefs which are held by the author, and perhaps the community that the author represents. The history is far more one of the authors, than of the subject”. Ahmed’s point here is to show that the historical memory of the Prophet in the early Muslim community was not monolithic but rather constructed and transmitted in three distinct discourses: sīrah-maghāzī, tafsir, and Hadith and that in the first few centuries of Islam these three genres were not merely distinct literary genres but distinct cultural projects with different goals, practitioners, materials, methods, forms and values. More importantly, and this is key, the identity of the Prophet as constituted by each of these discourses is directly related to the identities of the genres, projects and practitioners that remembered him. The differences between the three historical memory projects or discourses is dealt with early in the book. The aim of the scholars of the Hadith movement, as it took shape in the early centuries of Islam, was to define and establish legal and creedal norms through the authoritative documentation of the words and deeds of the Prophet as produced from the historical memory of the early Muslim community. Ahmed argues that the Hadith scholars were concerned with prescribing the specific content of Islam, and as a result, the project of Hadith fused with the authoritative and prescriptive project of the elaboration of Islamic law. The Hadith project’s appropriation of the historical memory of the Prophet for the purposes of prescribing Islamic norms required not only a particular method but also, and this is key, a particular type of Prophet suited to its authoritative and prescriptive purpose. Given the centrality of the authoritative persona of the Prophet to the logic of the Hadith movement, the idea of an infallible Prophet whose words and conduct might reliably be taken to establish a model for detailed pious imitation must have possessed a particular appeal for the early scholars of the Hadith movement. Coming back to the Satanic verses incident, the image of Muhammed contained in the incident, i.e. that of a Prophet who fell victim to Satan and erred in the transmission of Divine Revelation, was entirely inconsistent with and, indeed, constituted a normative challenge to the Hadith movement. It is for this reason that, despite its wide circulation in the first and second century genres of tafsir and sīrah-maghāzī, the Satanic verses incident was not included in any of the canonical Hadith collections. It follows that those responsible for remembering the Prophet in the first and second century project of sīrah-maghāzī were not primarily concerned with establishing norms of religious law and praxis for pious mimesis, but rather with constructing a narrative of the moral-historical epic of the life of Muhammed in his attempt to found the divine human community and set it on the path to salvation. Similarly, the Prophet of the tafsir, Ahmed argues, was the Prophet of the text of God’s allusions, and thus the heir to a long line of Prophets to whose histories of trial, sin and repentance God also alluded. The Qur’anic exegetes accepted the Satanic verses incident as another in this series of divine citations of Prophet-defining moments. More controversially, the Satanic verses incident was seen as illustrative of Muhammed’s ongoing struggle to comprehend the enormity of his Prophetic mission, and to retain a clear sense of its nature, as well as to perform that mission with clarity in the face of complex and difficult circumstances. In sum, the early Muslim community accepted the Satanic verses incident because, for them, there was simply nothing anomalous or problematic about it. It was entirely consistent with a number of other narratives which they took as explaining passages of the Qur’an that also appear to allude to Prophetic error.