162 Book Reviews

Shahab Ahmed Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses in Early Islam. Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 2017. 348 pages. $49.95 cloth.

There is a gulf of two centuries between Muḥammad’s prophecy and the period of its history’s first recording in Arabic literature, a period which represents an epistemological gap between texts about, and the truth of, Muḥammad’s life. Shahab Ahmad’s Before Orthodoxy intervenes in this discussion with a meticulous examination of the extant textual traditions about one event in Muḥammad’s prophecy to test how faithfully third/ninth and fourth/tenth century books reflect the historical memories of earlier Muslim communities before the concerted recording of prophetic biography and Qur’anic exegesis began. His test case is the Satanic Verses: the alleged moment when Satan tricked Muḥammad into reciting complimentary verses about pre-Islamic deities al- Lāt, al-ʿUzza, and Manat worshiped by the pagan Quraysh, as if those verses were part of the Qur’an. Modern Muslims reject any possibility that Satan had such influence over Muḥammad, and a denial of the Satanic Verses is now a quintessential aspect of Muslim orthodoxy (2). Ahmed’s thesis is that early Muslims conversely believed that Muḥammad did succumb to Satan (or, according to some versions, one of his devil lieutenants, 216-20), and that he did, in fact, utter the verses confirming the intercessory powers of pagan deities. By the third/ninth century, hadith scholars (aṣḥāb al-ḥadīth) became averse to such implications of Muḥammad’s susceptibility to error; thus, they orchestrated an about-face, denying the incident. The progressive denial ever since has gradually yielded the new ‘orthodox’ absolute rejection of the event’s historicity. Ahmed intended to elaborate the thesis in three volumes, but his untimely death in 2015 means that this first Volume—a study of Satanic Verses narratives in Islam’s first two centuries before the aṣḥāb al-ḥadīth changed their tune—will also be the last. The narratives which Ahmed seeks to interrogate are ephemeral. Very few texts pre-date the aṣḥāb al-ḥadīth’s efforts to deny the Satanic Verses, and the textual evidence is scattered between early biographies of the Prophet, Qur’anic exegesis, and books by the hadith specialists themselves who cited the narratives in order to refute them. And since no extant Satanic Verses texts pre-date the late second/eighth century, the bulk of Ahmed’s analysis concerns narratives that do not, and may never have existed in written form. He pro- poses that the now missing early narratives can be conjured via the chain of authorities (isnād) of the later written versions, and herein is perhaps the main interest of Before Orthodoxy. While the story of the Satanic Verses is interesting

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/1570064x-12341364 Book Reviews 163 in itself, Ahmed’s argument that we can recover how Muslims in the late first/ seventh and second/eighth centuries remembered history challenges seminal debates about the authenticity of Muslim historiography, the nature of the so- called ‘Muslim tradition,’ and arguments over dating hadith. If readers judge him successful, Ahmed’s work has the potential to exonerate a wide swathe of Muslim historical writing, and bolster the authenticity of what the extant Arabic sources tell us about Muḥammad’s prophecy. Ahmed protests that his interest is not in positivistic questions of whether the Satanic Verses incident “really took place” (6), but the book’s intention is decidedly positivist: its overarching concern is to affirm that narratives about the event really did exist a century or more before they were written down. By arguing that the form of several extant Satanic Verses narratives originate in the early second/eighth century “at the latest” (94, 96, 108, 141, 158, 208, 244, 248), he intimates that the texts extant today are not fabrications back- ­projected into the mouths of first/seventh or early-second/eighth century scholars via spurious isnāds, but instead that they do, in actuality, recall narratives circulating within a short jump from the living memory of Muḥammad. This would mean that the basic outlines of stories connected to the Prophet’s biography were drawn early. To accept his conclusions, Ahmed invites readers to embrace some delicate assumptions. First, he aligns with Motzki’s view that isnāds represent actual and analysable pathways of narrative transmission (14, 203-4, 214). This is nec- essary, since Ahmed relies exclusively on the chains of transmission of stories recorded in the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries to identify who their earlier narrators were, and how those stories were transmitted over the centu- ries prior to their recording. Because Motzki’s important work is still debated, Ahmed may be critiqued for a too-trusting approach to isnād, but he parries this by joining the growing modern scholarly view that deconstructs what was long-held to be the “monolithic” nature of the early Muslim tradition (15). This enables Ahmed to propose that historical, exegetical and hadith material each constituted separate fields of scholarship in early Islam, and in turn, whilst historical and exegetical anecdotes may look like hadith in terms of their form, they played by their own rules (20-3). Thus, Ahmed concedes that hadith isnāds may be anachronistic fabrications, but because historical and exegetical works were separate fields of cultural production, he argues that they were largely shielded from the aṣḥāb al-ḥadīth’s efforts to counterfeit isnād. Accordingly, prejudices about hadith isnād ought not tar historical/exegetical isnāds: be- cause the Satanic Verses stories were transmitted by historians and exegetes, and not by hadith scholars, Ahmed deems their isnāds free from tampering, and therefore he reads them as essentially accurate (32-5).

Journal of Arabic Literature 49 (2018) 153-170