Satanic Verses Satanic Verses The Satanic Verses incident, known as "qissat al-gharaniq" ("Story of the Cranes"), is the name given to the occasion on which the Islamic Prophet Muhammad, is said to have mistaken the words of "satanic suggestion" for divine revelation. Narratives involving the alleged verses (or verse) can be read in, among other places, the biographies of Muhammad by al-Wāqidī, Ibn Sa'd (who was a scribe of Waqidi) and Ibn Ishaq (as reconstructed by Alfred Guillaume), as well as the tafsir of al-Tabarī. The majority of Muslim scholars have rejected the historicity of the incident on the basis of the
God Is Not Great the prayer meeting breaks up". He discusses the 1989 fatwa issued on author and friend Salman Rushdie by the Ayatollah Khomeini because of the contents of Rushdie's book "The Satanic Verses". He criticises several public figures for laying the blame for the incident on Rushdie himself. He also writes about the events following the September 11 attacks, describing how religion, particularly major religious figures, allowed matters to "deteriorate in the interval between the removal of the Taliban and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein". Hitchens discusses the prohibition on eating pigs ("porcophobia" as Hitchens calls it) in Judaism, also adopted by