In the Shadow of the Sword (book) tale by the ears, conjuring the half-vanished past with such gusto that characters and places fairly bound from the page." Jones goes on to finish his review by asking, "Is this Satanic Verses territory?" Holland quotes Salman Rushdie at the very beginning of the book, acknowledging, wryly, another British author who ventured onto the sticky wicket of Islam’s origin myths." Ziauddin Sardar, writing for the "New Statesman", was highly critical of the book. He says "the real aim of the book is to examine the validity of 'Muslim sources' and to assess the extent of Muslim scholarship down the centuries.
The Satanic Verses controversy sources, so much so that Muraghi, in his commentary, says: "These traditions are undoubtedly a fabrication of the heretics and foreign hands, and have not been found in any of the authentic books" ... According to Daniel Pipes, when attention was drawn to a book with this title, "Muslims found [it] incredibly sacrilegious", and took it to imply that the book's author claimed that verses of the Qur'an were "the work of the Devil". According to McRoy (2007), other controversial elements included the use of the name Mahound, said to be a derogatory term for Muhammad used by the English