The Quraysh of Mecca considered the cult of the Daughters of God [banat Allah] divine beings. When Muhammad forbade his converts to worship the Daughters of God, he lost most of his supporters overnight. The idea that there was only one God was an extraordinary innovation.
In Sura 53, Muhammad declared that the three goddesses [al-Lat, al-Uzza, and Manat] could be revered as intermediaries between God and man. The Quraysh were delighted with the new revelation, they believed that the Koran had placed them on the same level as God Himself. Thinking that Muhammad had accepted their goddesses as having equal status to Allah, the Quraysh no longer saw Islam as a sacrilegious threat.
However, Muhammad later received another revelation, which indicated that his apparent acceptance of the cult had been inspired by ‘Satan’. Consequently, the two verses were expunged from the Koran and new verses were sent down which dismissed the Daughters of God as ‘mere names’.
The Quraysh rebutted him with vehemence. Overnight, Islam became a despised minority sect.
Still Controversial
Western enemies of ‘Islam’ have seized upon this to illustrate Muhammad’s manifest insincerity; how could a man who changed the divine Word to suit himself be a true prophet? Surely a genuine prophet would be able to distinguish between a divine and a satanic inspiration? Would a man of God tamper with his revelation merely to attract more converts?
Since Salman Rushdies’s novel The Satanic Verses, the story has acquired a new significance. Muslims have protested that the novel presents a parody of Muhammad’s life: it repeats all the old western myths about the Prophet and makes him out to be an imposter, with purely political ambitions, a lecher who used his revelations as a license to take as many women as he wanted, and indicates that his first companions were worthless, inhumane people. Most painfully, Muslims claim, the book denigrates the integrity of the Koran. They feel that the incident with the Satanic Verses is used to show that the sacred book of the Muslims is unable to distinguish good from evil.
