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This book was conceived as the first volume of a history of Muslim attitudes to the Satanic verses incident, covering the fourteen hundred years from the beginning of Islam down to the present day. The “Satanic verses incident” is the name given in Western scholarship to what is known in the Islamic tradition as qiṣṣat algharānīq, “The Story of the Cranes” or “The Story of the Maidens,” which narrates the occasion on which the Prophet Muḥammad is reported to have mistaken words suggested to him by Satan as being Divine Communication—that is, as being part of the Qur’ān. These Satanic verses praise the pagan deities of the Prophet’s tribe and acknowledge their power to intercede with the supreme God. By uttering the Satanic verses, Muḥammad thus committed the error of compromising the fundamental theological principle of the Divine Message of which he was Messenger—namely, the absolute and exclusive unicity (tawḥīd) of the One God, Allāh. The facticity and historicity of the Satanic verses incident are today (with a few maverick exceptions) universally rejected by Muslims of all sects and interpretative movements—Sunnī, Twelver Shī‘ī, Ismā‘īlī Shī‘ī, Aḥmadī, Ibāḍī, Ḥanafī, Shāfi‘ī, Mālikī, Ḥanbalī, Wahhābī, Salafī, Deobandī, Barelvī, and so forth—routinely on pain of heresy (kufr)—that is, on pain of being deemed not a Muslim. The Satanic verses incident is understood as calling into question the integrity of the process of Divine Communication to Muḥammad— and thus the integrity of the Text of the Qur’ān. The universal rejection of the Satanic verses incident constitutes an instance of contemporary Islamic orthodoxy—that is to say, it is the only truth that a Muslim qua Muslim may legitimately hold on the matter. For the last two hundred years, to be a Muslim, one should believe that the Satanic verses incident did not take place—that is, the contemporary Muslim should not believe that the Prophet Muḥammad recited verses of Satanic suggestion as Divine inspiration. In other words, for modern Muslims, the Satanic verses incident is something entirely unthinkable. The reason for my writing this book is that, as a straightforward matter of historical fact, this Islamic orthodoxy of the rejection of the facticity of the Satanic verses incident has not always obtained. The fundamental finding of the present volume is that in the first two centuries of Islam, Muslim attitudes to the Satanic verses incident were effectively the direct opposite of what they are today.2 This volume studies no less than fifty historical reports that narrate the Satanic verses incident and that were transmitted by the first generations of Muslims. This study of the Satanic verses incident in the historical memory of the early Muslim community will demonstrate in detail that the incident constituted an absolutely standard element in the memory of early Muslims of the life of their Prophet. In other words, the early Muslim community believed almost universally that the Satanic verses incident was a true historical fact. As far as the overwhelming majority of the Muslim community in the first two hundred years was concerned, the Messenger of God did indeed, on at least one occasion, mistake words of Satanic suggestion as being of Divine inspiration. For the early Muslims, the Satanic verses incident was something entirely thinkable.