The Satanic Verses

The Satanic Verses are words of "satanic suggestion" that Muhammad is alleged to have mistaken for divine revelation.

The words praise the three pagan Meccan goddesses: al-Lāt, al-'Uzzá, and Manāt, and can be read in early prophetic biographies of Muhammad by al-Wāqidī, Ibn Sa'd and the tafsir of al-Tabarī. The first use of the expression in English is attributed to Sir William Muir in 1858.

The phrase Arab historians and later Muslims used to describe the incident of the withdrawn verses was not "Satanic verses", but the gharaniq verses; the phrase "Satanic verses" was unknown to Muslims, and was coined by Orientalist Western academics specialising in the study of cultures considered eastern.

The story itself is not found in Shiite sources or the six Sahih of the Sunni, so much so that Muraghi, in his commentary, says: "These traditions are undoubtedly a fabrication of the heretics and foreign hands, and have not been found in any of the authentic books".

According to Daniel Pipes, when attention was drawn to a book with this title, "Muslims found [it] incredibly sacrilegious", and took it to imply that the book's author claimed that verses of the Qur'an were "the work of the Devil".

The incident is accepted as true by some modern scholars of Islamic studies under the criterion of embarrassment, citing the implausibility of early Muslim biographers fabricating a story so unflattering about their prophet.

Alford T. Welch, however, argues that this rationale alone is insufficient but does not rule out the possibility of some historical foundation to the story. He proposes that the story may be yet another instance of historical telescoping, i.e., a circumstance that Muhammad's contemporaries knew to have lasted for a long period later became condensed into a story that limits his acceptance of the Meccan goddesses’ intercession to a brief period and assigns blame for this departure from strict monotheism to Satan.

Religious authorities embraced the story for the first two centuries of the Islamic era. However, beginning in the 13th century, Islamic scholars (Ulama) started to reject it as being inconsistent with Muhammad's "perfection" ('isma), which meant that Muhammad was infallible and could not be fooled by Satan.

Basic narrative
The Arabian goddess Al-Lat, is flanked by goddesses Manat and al-Uzza.

There are some accounts of the incident, that differ in the construction and detail of the narrative, but they may be broadly collated to produce a basic account.

The different versions of the story are recorded in early tafsirs (Quranic commentaries) and biographies of the Prophet, such as Ibn Ishaq's.

In its essential form, the story reports that Muhammad longed to convert his kinsmen and neighbors of Mecca to Islam. As he was reciting these verses of Sūrat an-Najm, considered a revelation from the angel Gabriel:

"Have you thought of al-Lāt and al-'Uzzá? And about the third one, Manāt?" ~Quran 53:19–20

Satan tempted him to utter the following line:
"These are the exalted gharāniq, whose intercession is hoped for."

Al-Lāt, al-'Uzzā, and Manāt were three pre-Islamic Arabian goddesses worshipped by the Meccans. Discerning the precise meaning of the word gharāniq has proven difficult, as it is a hapax legomenon (i.e. used only once in the text).

Commentators wrote that it meant "the cranes". The Arabic word does generally mean a "crane" – appearing in the singular as ghirnīq, ghurnūq, ghirnawq and ghurnayq, and the word has cousin forms in other words for birds, including "raven, a crow" and "eagle".

Taken as a segment, "exalted gharāniq" has been translated by Orientalist William Muir to mean "exalted women", while contemporary academic Muhammad Manazir Ahsan has translated the same segment as "high-soaring ones (deities)".

Thus, whether the phrase had intended to attribute a divine nature to the three "idols" is a matter of dispute.

In either case, scholars generally agree on the meaning of the second half of the verse, "whose intercession is hoped for".