“Have you thought of al-Lat and al-‘Uzza and Manat the third, the other?” . . . . “These are the exalted gharaniq, whose intercession is hoped for . . .” And these are the infamous Satanic Verses, passages in an Islamic tradition that most Muslims have rejected, but that an early source claims were lines that Muhammad was alleged to have said or been tempted to say by Satan. They were supposed to have referred to ancient Goddesses (“Gharaniq” might have meant “cranes,” a collective term for these deities) from the seventh-century Arabian Peninsula – the context is that these Goddesses might have been subservient to Allah. But the passage is deeply problematic for the strident monotheism of Islam, which rejected every other deity, even ones that recognized the superiority of Allah.
