The Satanic Verses, The Verse on Stoning

[TimCallahan]

In Surah 53, "The Star" (Surah Al-Najm), verses 19 - 23a now read:

Consider al-Lat and al-Uzza and the third one, Manat - are you to have male and he the female? That would be a most unjust distribution! These are nothing but names you have invented yourselves, you and your forefathers.

However, according to Muslim tradition, they originally read:

Consider al-Lat and al-Uzza and the third one, Manat. These are high flying cranes whose intercession is to be hoped for.

According to the story, Muhammad, distressed about his alienation from his tribe, the Qaraysh, wrote the verses about three goddesses worshipped in Mecca. When this homage to the goddesses of Mecca did not have the effect of mending his relations with his tribe, Muhammad realized that Satan had interfered with the transmission of the actual message from God, which was the the three goddesses amounted to nothing but names. God told the Prophet that Satan was always trying to mislead God's prophets.

These, then, became the satanic verses. Since the story is related in the hadiths, which were probably written after the time of Muhammad, there is one school of thought in Islam that entirely rejects the story.

However, this isn't the only change that was made in the Qur'an. There is also the verse on stoning, which I will get to in my next post.

 

[TimCallahan]

In much of the literature of the Hadiths there is reference to a verse saying the adulterers should be stoned to death, that was removed from he final version of the Qur'an. Here are a few of them:

Abu 'Ubaid quotes a tradition coming down from ibn Jaish, saying: 'Ubai said, "How many verses is the Suratu-'l-Ahzab (xxxiii)? " I said, "Seventy-two or seventy-three." He said, "It was as long as the Stiratu'l-Baqara (ii) and we used to read in it the Verse of Stoning." I said, "And what was the Verse of Stoning?" He said, "The married man and the married woman when they commit adultery, they stone without doubt[3] as a punishment from God."'

In the 'Kitabu'l-Burhan', 'Umar said, 'Were I not afraid lest people should say that I have added to the Qur'an I would have recorded it (i.e. the Verse of Stoning).'

Another tradition is traced back to Abu Imama ibn Sahal to the effect that his aunt said: 'The Prophet . . . read to us the Verse of Stoning, saying, "If an old man and an old woman commit adultery stone them both for the pleasure they have sought."'

In the 'Itqan' (on Fada'ilu'l-Qur'an) ibn Durais cites a tradition ascribed to ibn Aslam to the effect that 'Umar once addressed a large audience and said: 'Doubt not concerning stoning, for it is lawful. I would have written the Verse of Stoning in the Qur'an, but Ubai ibn Ka'b said to me, "Dost thou not remember when thou once camest unto me while I was asking the Prophet to recite the verse to me, and he pushed me in my chest? And thou saidst unto me, 'Dost thou ask the Prophet to recite the verse to you when people are committing adultery like beasts?"'

So, the question is this. Did Muhammad originally include the verse on stoning among his revelations, only to later discard it, or was it a thought he had, which he eventually decided wasn't dictated to him by God?

 

[Craig B]

In much of the literature of the Hadiths there is reference to a verse saying the adulterers should be stoned to death, that was removed from he final version of the Qur'an. <snip> So, the question is this. Did Muhammad originally include the verse on stoning among his revelations, only to later discard it, or was it a thought he had, which he eventually decided wasn't dictated to him by God?

Or was it simply not picked up by the redactors? What else, indeed, was lost by them? Two things have been stated: that the early Caliphs applied such a punishment, verse or no verse; and that Ayesha reported that the Prophet had had such a revelation - although Muhammad might have been particularly concerned to "reveal" such a divine commandment to his teenage bride.

But it may later have simply been copied from the Torah, as suggested in the Hadiths: Bukhari 6:60:79.

 

[A'isha]

So, the question is this. Did Muhammad originally include the verse on stoning among his revelations, only to later discard it, or was it a thought he had, which he eventually decided wasn't dictated to him by God?

John Burton has an extensive discussion about this in his book The Sources of Islamic Law: Islamic Theories of Abrogation, where he describes how the later scholars who established the principles of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) were puzzled at the absence in the Qur'an of this (and other) apparent commands described in the sunna. It evolved into what he calls the "third mode" of naskh (or abrogation) among some scholars: naskh al-tilawa duna 'l-hukm, the withdrawal of the wording of a verse from the Qur'an, without withdrawing its ruling.

This was not universal, however. Malik and Tabari (and Bukhari, as Craig B notes), for instance, interpreted "the Book of God" (referenced as where the instruction to stone was located) as part of the overall revelation of God - in this case, the Torah. That is, stoning was part of God's divine dictates to his people, but it was in the earlier revelation given to the Jews, and not part of the later revelation given to Muhammad, which is why it does not appear in the Qur'an.

Shafi'i, on the other hand, thought it actually was part of the Qur'an, but the verse itself somehow was not included in the mushaf assembled by 'Uthman after Muhammad's death. Since the sunna described Muhammad as stoning as a punishment for adultery, but the Qur'an didn't mention stoning as a punishment for adultery, that led him to develop the doctrine of naskh al-tilawa duna 'l-hukm to explain the discrepancy he perceived.

Basically, it boiled down to a doctrinal dispute between groups that both accepted stoning as a penalty for adultery, but which differed on whether the sunna could override the Qur'an or not. Those that said it could accepted the idea that the Qur'an punishment of flogging and banishment was overriden by the hadith which described Muhammad implementing the Torah penalty instead, and those who said it could not came up with the idea that a later verse of the Qur'an mandating stoning overrode the earlier verse mandating flogging and banishment, but that the text of the later verse was lost even though its mandate was not changed.

 

[A'isha]

Or was it simply not picked up by the redactors? What else, indeed, was lost by them?

Burton recounts a hadith from Ai'sha, in ibn Kutayba's Mukhtalif al-Hadith, which says

The stoning-verse and the ten-suckling verse were both revealed. Both were recorded on a sheet which was placed under my bedding for safe-keeping. They were still there at the time the Prophet died, but as we were pre-occupied in his sick-room, a beast got in from the yard and gobbled up the sheet.

Burton notes that in response to the mocking of the above by the Mu'tazila, ibn Kutayba basically retorted "God works in mysterious ways".

 

[Craig B]

Burton recounts a hadith from Ai'sha, in ibn Kutayba's Mukhtalif al-Hadith, which says

Burton notes that in response to the mocking of the above by the Mu'tazila, ibn Kutayba basically retorted "God works in mysterious ways".

Thanks for that. I had heard of Ai'sha's report of the revelation, as I noted above, but only now do I learn of the "gobbled by a beast" explanation of its subsequent disappearance. A fascinating detail. No wonder the redactors missed this revelation. They'd have needed to pump a goat's stomach!

Religion is weird. At every level at which one studies it, it is weird!

 

[Andrew Wiggin]

This reminds me of places I've worked, where there was always someone who remembered what the policy USED to be, and demanded that it be implemented the way it was, even though whatever policy had changed years ago. People take things like seniority and vacation time quite seriously. I remember a human resources guy going on about how vacation time wouldn't be granted over holidays because it had once been a policy, and even though the new policy said it was OK, the old one that was no longer in the contract took precedence. It took about two seconds to turn a conference room full of people into two separate factions depending on who would benefit most from each version of the truth. I was in the 'I don't care, I'm not taking sides because I take my vacation in the summer, but I don't like working under written policy while being subject to unwritten rules that override it' faction.

 

[FireGarden]

The attitude of the writers of the Koran to stoning can be seen in six verses which mention stoning, all of which follow the pattern: stoning is something the pagans do to devout Muslims.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/isl/quran/01108.htm
11:91 Shu'aib, sent to the Madyan people, tells them of God, etc. He is told by them that the only reason they don't stone him is because of his family.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/isl/quran/01803.htm
18:20 Sleepers in the cave. They are warned that if the people in the village find them they will stone them or force them to return to their cult.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/isl/quran/01903.htm
19:46 Abraham's father tells Abraham to stop preaching or he will stone him.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/isl/quran/02606.htm
26:116 Noah told to stop or be stoned

http://www.sacred-texts.com/isl/quran/03602.htm
36:18 Don't know which city, but again the guy with a message about God is told to desist or be stoned.

44:20
I have to use comparative translations, because Yusuf Ali doesn't use the word stone
http://www.internetmosque.net/read/english_translation_of_the_quran_meaning/44/20/index.htm

Pharaoh is told:
Yusuf Ali: "For me, I have sought safety with my Lord and your Lord, against your injuring me."
Pickthal: "And lo! I have sought refuge in my Lord and your Lord lest ye stone me to death."

And I think I see 'rajm' on this page:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/isl/quran/04401.htm
but my Arabic is not going to be as good as Yusuf Ali's.

I think those 6 references are the only references to stoning in the Quran. All of them associate stoning with the bad guys wanting to do it to the good guys. So not a flattering depiction of the act.

Plus, we have a different penalty for fornication explicitly given in the Quran.

Plus, 56:78
http://www.sacred-texts.com/isl/quran/05603.htm
which states that the Quran is 'well-guarded'. Which some take to mean that God will not allow it to be corrupted in the way previous texts were. So how could he allow a verse to go missing? An animal got past the guards and ate it?

Wouldn't it be simpler to say the Hadith were written by different people than the ones who wrote the Quran?

 

[Craig B]

... Wouldn't it be simpler to say the Hadith were written by different people than the ones who wrote the Quran?

It would certainly be true to say that! The Hadith are accounts of what Muhammad is alleged to have said and done, which circulated orally in the decades and centuries following his death. These were collected about 200 years after his lifetime, by various writers. Significantly, these collectors rejected as inauthentic the vast bulk of the material they encountered. It may well be asked, whether in these circumstances any of their Hadith may be regarded as dependable.

Of two of the major collectors of Hadith, it is reported that:

Bukhari included 7,275 hadith in his Sahih, many of which were variants of others with different chains of transmission. Of these, 2,712 were not duplicates. It was reported that he had originally collected 600,000 hadith before subjecting them to his critical method. Muslim included 9,200 hadith, of which 4,000 were not duplicated. Originally, he had collected 300,000 hadith; so out of these 300,000, 9,200 met his criteria of authenticity.

http://islam.uga.edu/hadith.html.

 

[A'isha]

It would certainly be true to say that! The Hadith are accounts of what Muhammad is alleged to have said and done, which circulated orally in the decades and centuries following his death. These were collected about 200 years after his lifetime, by various writers. Significantly, these collectors rejected as inauthentic the vast bulk of the material they encountered. It may well be asked, whether in these circumstances any of their Hadith may be regarded as dependable.

Or even what "dependable" meant to them - it was not unusual for hadith determined by scholars to be completely unreliable in both matn and isnad to be accepted and used in even their own legal reasoning.

Jonathan Brown, in his Hadith: Muhammad's Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World (which I highly, highly recommend if you have even the slightest interest in the history, usage, and often-contradictory complexities of ahadith) that in the period immediately after the deaths of the Companions, hadith forgery exploded (for reasons ranging from inter-sect and inter-school polemics to pious frauds to simply people mistakenly attributing common regional sayings to Muhammad himself). By the time a formalized system of hadith criticism was established, it was too late to really act as anything more than a way for the various sects and schools justify their own positions and attack their opponents positions - that is, whether any given scholar considered any given hadith to be reliable was based primarily on whether that hadith supported the things he wanted to support. This is why the Sunni and Shia hadith canons differ so greatly from each other. This is not to say that these hadiths thus were all inherently unreliable from a modern historical perspective, just that the traditional Muslim methods of hadith criticism used when the canons were being established aren't really much help to modern historians when trying to sort out their objective historical accuracy. Strangely, Brown notes, the later Sunni hadith scholarship (in the 1300's) was actually more lax when it came to accepting "weak" hadiths that earlier critics had rejected (he calls this the "Big Tent" of the Late Sunni Tradition).

His book also has a chapter discussing the difficulty of untangling the reliability of hadiths from a Western historiographical perspective. I started rereading for this post so I could quote a nice summarizing chunk of it, but I think that I'll just recommend reading the whole thing for yourself. The Kindle and paperback versions of the book are pretty inexpensive, especially considering both the breadth and detail of the subject covered in the book (and the extremely helpful lists of addition works in the Suggested Reading sections at the end of every chapter).

 

[FireGarden]

It would certainly be true to say that! The Hadith are accounts of what Muhammad is alleged to have said and done, which circulated orally in the decades and centuries following his death. These were collected about 200 years after his lifetime, by various writers.

Of course.
But what I meant to highlight was the idea that the writers/compilers of Hadith seem to have had a very different attitude to stoning than the writers of the Quran.

6 references in the latter, all of them pretty much the same.
Who was supposed to be the role model: Abraham or his father?

 

[Craig B]

Of course.
But what I meant to highlight was the idea that the writers/compilers of Hadith seem to have had a very different attitude to stoning than the writers of the Quran.

6 references in the latter, all of them pretty much the same.
Who was supposed to be the role model: Abraham or his father?

Yes indeed. Bukhari derives the stoning from the Torah, where it appears twice, and it doesn't appear in that sort of context at all in the Quran, as you state. However, I was exploring this question: why is it absent? There are hints in the testimony of Ai'sha, as well as in the practice of the early Caliphs, that the idea of stoning for adultery may have indeed been present in the earliest levels of Muhammad's revelations, but was lost or omitted by later redactors, like those commissioned by Uthman. But I suppose it's a peripheral and unimportant point. True it is, that stoning as a punishment for adultery is not prescribed in the Quran.

 

[FireGarden]

Yes indeed. Bukhari derives the stoning from the Torah, where it appears twice, and it doesn't appear in that sort of context at all in the Quran, as you state. However, I was exploring this question: why is it absent? There are hints in the testimony of Ai'sha, as well as in the practice of the early Caliphs, that the idea of stoning for adultery may have indeed been present in the earliest levels of Muhammad's revelations, but was lost or omitted by later redactors, like those commissioned by Uthman. But I suppose it's a peripheral and unimportant point.

No, it's worth consideration.
But, as far as the Quran is concerned, it's not just the lack of reference to stoning as a punishment for adultery that needs to be explained. Stoning is portrayed in a negative light 6 times in the Quran -- and those are the only references I can find to stoning in the Quran.

 

[TimCallahan]

Thanks for that. I had heard of Ai'sha's report of the revelation, as I noted above, but only now do I learn of the "gobbled by a beast" explanation of its subsequent disappearance. A fascinating detail. No wonder the redactors missed this revelation. They'd have needed to pump a goat's stomach!

Religion is weird. At every level at which one studies it, it is weird!

This sounds a lot like, "The dog ate my homework."

Christianity's problem was that the earliest gospel relating his words and deeds, the Gospel of Mark, wasn't written until 40 years after his death. Islam's problem was that Muhammad either didn't write the surahs down, but dictated them to various people, giving this or that surah to a given follower; or, if he wrote them himself, they were written on bits of this and that, everything from pieces of wood to the bases of palm fronds. It is in the collection of the Qur'an that problems began to arise.

It's interesting to note that, in the cases of both Christianity and Islam, the religion spread before there was an organized holy book. I can't remember off-hand which Caliph it was who ordered that all versions of the Qur'an be collected and burned, except for the version he approved, but I don't think it was the first Caliph.

 

[A'isha]

I can't remember off-hand which Caliph it was who ordered that all versions of the Qur'an be collected and burned, except for the version he approved, but I don't think it was the first Caliph.

'Uthman ibn Affan, the third khalif.

 

[Craig B]

'Uthman ibn Affan, the third khalif.

The first Khalif, Abu Bekr, commanded the sayings of the Prophet to be collected and assembled together. The scholar he commissioned to carry out this work was dismayed by the enormousness of the task, and explicitly states that this had not been done during the lifetime of Muhammad. The scholar indeed consulted "bits of this and that" as well as, very importantly, the memories of Muhammad's followers. So things could not have been set down with complete accuracy, and much material was surely missed, either by being devoured by Ai'sha's goat, or through some other accident of fate.

 

[TimCallahan]

What appears to be an affirmation of the satanic verses episode is found in Surah Al-Hajj i.e."The Pilgrimage," Surah 22 (Q22:52, 53):

We have never sent a messenger or prophet before you [Muhammad] into whose wishes Satan did not insinuate something, but God removes what Satan insinuates and then God affirms His message. God is all knowing and wise. Hw makes Satans' insinuations a temptation only for the sick at heart and those whose hearts are hardened - the evildoers are profoundly opposed [to the Truth].

Muhammad Ibn Ishaq, in his biography of the Prophet, written ca. 732 also relates the story, saying that Satan took advantage of Muhammad's desire to be reconciled with his tribe and insinuated the false message, taking advantage of the Prophet's tender feelings for his own people.

 

[A'isha]

What appears to be an affirmation of the satanic verses episode is found in Surah Al-Hajj i.e."The Pilgrimage," Surah 22 (Q22:52, 53):

We have never sent a messenger or prophet before you [Muhammad] into whose wishes Satan did not insinuate something, but God removes what Satan insinuates and then God affirms His message. God is all knowing and wise. Hw makes Satans' insinuations a temptation only for the sick at heart and those whose hearts are hardened - the evildoers are profoundly opposed [to the Truth].

Muhammad Ibn Ishaq, in his biography of the Prophet, written ca. 732 also relates the story, saying that Satan took advantage of Muhammad's desire to be reconciled with his tribe and insinuated the false message, taking advantage of the Prophet's tender feelings for his own people.

That was certainly Tabari's view. Burton quotes him as saying, regarding 22:52:

There is no doubt that by ayas is meant here the ayas of the revelation. We know that the Devil had insinuated into the revelations precisely what God declares that he has naskhed - brought to nought. Then God firmly establishes His own revelations by His naskh - by His nullification of the expressions insinuated by the Devil.

The tafisr will be: 'We have not sent before you a Messenger or prophet but that, when he recited the Book of God, or repeated it, or discoursed, or spoke, the Devil insinuated false matter into the Book of God which he was reciting, or repeating, or into his discourse as he spoke. God maintains His revelations by the naskh of what the Devil insinuates - God removes what the Devil cast onto the tongue of the prophet, brings it to nothing, and confirms His own ayas - God purifies the ayas of His own divine Book, ridding it of the vain falsehood which the Devil had insinuated into the speech of his prophet.

As a side aspect of Tabari's interpretation of this verse, he disclaimed the doctrine of abrogation, saying:

Some use this verse to prove the legitimacy of naskh as a phenomenon affecting the Kur'an texts. K.22:52, however, merely indicates God's naskh of what the Devil desires to insinuate into the Prophet's recital of the revelations. That does not indicate the naskh of what God reveals and imposes. There is here no proof of the legitimacy of the naskh of what God considers to be the Truth that He Himself revealed.

Of course, the view of Tabari and those like him regarding the "satanic verses" is no longer the "mainstream" one. The entry about it in the Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an (Volume 5) says:

Strong objections to the historicity of the satanic verses incident were, however, raised as early as the fourth⁄tenth century — as evidenced in al-Nāsikh wal-mānsūkh of Abū Ja’far al-Nahhās (d. 338⁄950) — and continued to be raised in subsequent centuries, to the point where the rejection of the historicity of the incident eventually became the only acceptable orthodox position (see ABROGATION; THEOLOGY AND THE QUR’AN). From among the many important Qur’ān commentators who rejected the historicity of the satanic verses incident, the respective opinions of Abū Bakr b. al-‘Arabī (d. 543⁄1148), Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606⁄1210), Abū ‘Abdallāh al-Qurtubī (d. 671⁄1273), Abū Hayyān al-Gharnātī (d. 744⁄1345) and ’Imād al-Dīn b. Kathīr (d. 773⁄1373) have been regularly invoked by their successors down to the present day. Probably the most authoritatively cited refutation of the incident, however, appears in the al-Shifā’ of al-Qādī ‘Iyād al-Yahsubī (d. 544⁄1149), a work written in demonstration of the superhuman qualities of Muhammad (see NAMES OF THE PROPHET; but see also MIRACLES; MARVELS).

The historicity of the incident is rejected on two bases. First, the satanic verses story portrays Muhammad as being (on at least one occasion) unable to distinguish between divine revelation and satanic suggestion. This was seen as calling into question the reliability of the revelatory process and thus the integrity of the text of the Qur’ān itself (see INIMITABILITY; CREATEDNESS OF THE QUR’AN). The incident was thus viewed as repugnant to the doctrine of ‘ismat al-anbiyā’, divine protection of the prophets from sin and⁄or error, as it developed from the third⁄ninth century onwards, all theological schools coming eventually to agree that God protected prophets from error in the transmission of divine revelation (see IMPECCABILITY). The satanic verses incident was conceived to be an especially egregious instance of error since the praise of the deities of Quraysh uttered by Muhammad in his recitation of the satanic verses would have been tantamount to the cardinal sin of shirk (associating divinity with an entity other than God; see POLYTHEISM AND ATHEISM). The claim that the Prophet could have committed shirk was denounced as kufr (unbelief ). The doctrine of ‘isma has been most forcefully and consistently upheld by the Shī’a (q.v.; see also SHI’ISM AND THE QUR’AN), for whom it is a central tenet. It therefore appears that no Shī’ī of any school has ever accepted the satanic verses incident.

That last bit there partly explains why it was the Shia Ayatollah Khomeini who issued the death fatwa on Salman Rushdie for his novel.