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. The first use of the expression in English is attributed to Sir William Muir in 1858. The verses 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 Satanic Verses are words of 'satanic suggestion' which the Islamic prophet Muhammad is alleged to have mistaken for divine revelation. For other uses, see Satanic verses (disambiguation). For the novel by Salman Rushdie, see The Satanic Verses. The rest, as it goes, was history.This article is about the religious verses. But as the clamour against the book – and Rushdie – grew, a group of clerics read out sections of the book to Khomeini, including a portion featuring an imam in exile that was suspiciously like a caricature of him. Iran, though, initially, was not among the countries protesting the book. By the end of the year, the book was banned in a number of countries, including Bangladesh, South Africa, Sudan, Kenya.

In India, however, nine days after its publication, the book was banned by the Rajiv Gandhi government for hurting religious sentiments. On its release, the book received favourable reviews in the West, winning the 1988 Whitbread Award for novel of the year and becoming a 1988 Booker Prize finalist. Told through a framework of magic realism, The Satanic Verses tells the story of Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, actors of Indian Muslim origin, whose miraculous escape from, and transformation after, a plane crash forms the basis of the satire.

It’s a quarter of a million words.”īut the author had not bargained for the backlash his novel would bring. It’s very hard to be offended by The Satanic Verses - it requires a long period of intense reading. “If you don’t want to read a book, you don’t have to read it. In an interview to Channel 4 in 1989, soon after the publication of The Satanic Verses, Rushdie had responded to the rising criticism of the book by making a case for freedom of expression.

The senetic verses