Karen Armstrong - A History of God--The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam

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Then the magic of the Arabic did its work: 'When I heard the Koran, my heart was softened and I wept and Islam entered
into me.' {19} It was the Koran which prevented God from being a mighty reality 'out there' and brought him into the mind,
heart and being of each believer.
The experience of Umar and the other Muslims who were converted by the Koran can perhaps be compared to the
experience of art described by George Steiner in his book Real Presences: Is there any thing in what we say? He speaks of
what he calls 'the indiscretion of serious art, literature and music' which 'queries the last privacies of our existence'. It is an
invasion or an annunciation, which breaks into 'the small house of our cautionary being' and commands us imperatively:
'change your life!' After such a summons, the house 'is no longer habitable in quite the same way as it was before'. {20}
Muslims like Umar seem to have experienced a similar unsettling of sensibility, an awakening and a disturbing sense of
significance which enabled them to make the painful break with the traditional past. Even those Qurayshis who refused to
accept Islam were disturbed by the Koran and found that it lay outside all their familiar categories: it was nothing like the
inspiration of the kahin or the poet; nor was it like the incantations of a magician. Some stories show powerful Qurayshis
who remained steadfastly with the opposition being visibly shaken when they listened to a sura. It is as though Muhammad
had created an entirely new literary form that some people were not ready for but which thrilled others. Without this
experience of the Koran, it is extremely unlikely that Islam would have taken root. We have seen that it took the ancient
Israelites some seven hundred years to break with their old religious allegiances and accept monotheism but Muhammad
managed to help the Arabs achieve this difficult transition in a mere twenty-three years. Muhammad as poet and prophet
and the Koran as text and theophany is surely an unusually striking instance of the deep congruence that exists between art
and religion.
During the first years of his mission, Muhammad attracted many converts from the younger generation, who were becoming
disillusioned with the capitalistic ethos of Mecca, as well as from underprivileged and marginalised groups, which included
women, slaves and members of the weaker clans. At one point, the early sources tell us, it seemed as though the whole of
Mecca would accept Muhammad's reformed religion of al-Lah. The richer establishment, who were more than happy with
the status quo, understandably held aloof but there was no formal rupture with the leading Qurayshis until Muhammad
forbade the Muslims to worship the pagan gods. For the first three years of his mission it seems that Muhammad did not
emphasise the monotheistic content of his message and people probably imagined that they could go on worshipping the
traditional deities of Arabia alongside al-Lah, the High God, as they always had. But when he condemned these ancient
cults as idolatrous, he lost most of his followers overnight and Islam became a despised and persecuted minority. We have
seen that the belief in only one God demands a painful change of consciousness. Like the early Christians, the first Muslims
were accused of an 'atheism' which was deeply threatening to society. In Mecca where urban civilisation was so novel and
must have seemed a fragile achievement for all the proud self-sufficiency of the Quraysh, many seem to have felt the same
sinking dread and dismay as those citizens of Rome who had clamoured for Christian blood.
The Quraysh seem to have found a rupture with the ancestral gods profoundly threatening and it would not be long before
Muhammad's own life was imperiled. Western scholars have usually dated this rupture with the Quraysh to the possibly
apocryphal incident of the Satanic Verses, which has become notorious since the tragic Salman Rushdie affair. Three of the
Arabian deities were particularly dear to the Arabs of the Hijaz: al-Lat (whose name simply meant 'the Goddess') and
al-Uzza (the Mighty One), who had shrines at Taif and Nakhlah respectively, to the south-east of Mecca, and Manat, the
Fateful One, who had her shrine at Qudayd on the Red Sea coast. These deities were not fully personalised like Juno or
Pallas Athene. They were often called the banat al-Lah, the Daughters of God, but this does not necessarily imply a
fully-developed pantheon. The Arabs used such kinship terms to denote an abstract relationship: thus banat al-dahr (literally,
'daughters of fate') simply meant misfortunes or vicissitudes. The term banat al-Lah may simply have signified 'divine beings'.
These deities were not represented by realistic statues in their shrines but by large standing stones, similar to those in use
among the ancient Canaanites, which the Arabs worshipped not in any crudely simplistic way but as a focus of divinity. Like
Mecca with its Kabah, the shrines at Taif, Nakhlah and Qudayd had become essential spiritual landmarks in the emotional
landscape of the Arabs. Their forefathers had worshipped there from time immemorial and this gave a healing sense of
continuity.
The story of the Satanic Verses is not mentioned in either the Koran or in any of the early oral or written sources. It is not
included in Ibn Ishaq's Sira, the most authoritative biography of the Prophet, but only in the work of the tenth-century
historian Abu Jafar at-Tabari (d.923). He tells us that Muhammad was distressed by the rift that had developed between
him and most of his tribe after he had forbidden the cult of the goddesses and so, inspired by 'Satan', he uttered some rogue
verses which allowed the banat al-Lah to be venerated as intercessors, like the angels. In these so-called 'Satanic' verses,
the three goddesses were not on a par with al-Lah but were lesser spiritual beings who could intercede with him on behalf